What I Like About Photographs Quotes

What i like about photographs is that they capture a moment that’s gone forever, impossible to reproduce.

This is what I like about photographs. They're proof that once, even if just for a heartbeat, everything was perfect.

I don’t know if I will have the time to write any more letters, because I might be too busy trying to participate. So, if this does end up being the last letter, I just want you to know that I was in a bad place before I started high school, and you helped me. Even if you didn’t know what I was talking about, or know someone who’s gone through it, you made me not feel alone. Because I know there are people who say all these things don’t happen. And there are people who forget what it’s like to be sixteen when they turn seventeen. I know these will all be stories some day, and our pictures will become old photographs. We all become somebody’s mom or dad. But right now, these moments are not stories. This is happening. I am here, and I am looking at her. And she is so beautiful. I can see it. This one moment when you know you’re not a sad story. You are alive. And you stand up and see the lights on the buildings and everything that makes you wonder. And you’re listening to that song, and that drive with the people who you love most in this world. And in this moment, I swear, we are infinite.

Where were we?" she said. "Getting credit," I said. "What about it?" "Well, it's nice to get credit." The spokes of her rear wheel spun behind the curtain of her long skirt. She looked like a photograph from a hundred years ago. She turned her wide eyes on me. "Is it?" she said.

This is what I like about photographs. They’re proof that once, even if just for a heartbeat, everything was perfect.

A representational photograph says, 'This is what Vienna looked like.' An interpretational photograph goes one better and says, 'This is what Vienna was like. This is how I felt about it.

There are as many Africas as there are books about Africa -- and as many books about it as you could read in a leisurely lifetime. Whoever writes a new one can afford a certain complacency in the knowledge that his is a new picture agreeing with no one else's, but likely to be haugthily disagreed with by all those who believed in some other Africa. ... Being thus all things to all authors, it follows, I suppose, that Africa must be all things to all readers. Africa is mystic; it is wild; it is a sweltering inferno; it is a photographer's paradise, a hunter's Valhalla, an escapist's Utopia. It is what you will, and it withstands all interpretations. It is the last vestige of a dead world or the cradle of a shiny new one. To a lot of people, as to myself, it is just 'home.

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that "shaping" force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire. If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning. We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward; the poverty of life without dreams is too horrible to imagine.

Here’s something I bet you don’t know: every time someone writes a story about a dragon a real dragon dies. Something about seeing and being seen something about mirrors that old tune about how a photograph can take your whole soul. At the end of this poem I’m going to go out like electricity in an ice storm. I’ve made peace with it.

Journalists can sound grandiose when they talk about their profession. Some of us are adrenaline junkies; some of us are escapists; some of us do wreck our personal lives and hurt those who love us most. This work can destroy people. I have seen so many friends and colleagues become unrecognizable from trauma: short-tempered, sleepless, and alienated from friends. But after years of witnessing so much suffering in the world, we find it hard to acknowledge that lucky, free, prosperous people like us might be suffering, too. We feel more comfortable in the darkest places than we do back home, where life seems too simple and too easy. We don’t listen to that inner voice that says it is time to take a break from documenting other people’s lives and start building our own. Under it all, however, are the things that sustain us and bring us together: the privilege of witnessing things that others do not; an idealistic belief that a photograph might affect people’s souls; the thrill of creating art and contributing to the world’s database of knowledge. When I return home and rationally consider the risks, the choices are difficult. But when I am doing my work, I am alive and I am me. It’s what I do. I am sure there are other versions of happiness, but this one is mine.

I suppose you think you know what autumn looks like. Even if you live in the Los Angeles dreamed of by September’s schoolmates, you have surely seen postcards and photographs of the kind of autumn I mean. The trees go all red and blazing orange and gold, and wood fires burn at night so everything smells of crisp branches. The world rolls about delightedly in a heap of cider and candy and apples and pumpkins and cold stars rush by through wispy, ragged clouds, past a moon like a bony knee. You have, no doubt, experienced a Halloween or two. Autumn in Fairyland is all that, of course. You would never feel cheated by the colors of a Fairyland Forest or the morbidity of a Fairyland moon. And the Halloween masks! Oh, how they glitter, how they curl, how their beaks and jaws hook and barb! But to wander through autumn in Fairyland is to look into a murky pool, seeing only a hazy reflection of the Autumn Provinces’ eternal fall. And human autumn is but a cast-off photograph of that reflecting pool, half burnt and drifting through the space between us and Fairyland. And so I may tell you that the leaves began to turn red as September and her friends rushed through the suddenly cold air on their snorting, roaring high wheels, and you might believe me. But no red you have ever seen could touch the crimson bleed of the trees in that place. No oak gnarled and orange with October is half as bright as the boughs that bent over September’s head, dropping their hard, sweet acorns into her spinning spokes. But you must try as hard as you can. Squeeze your eyes closed, as tight as you can, and think of all your favorite autumns, crisp and perfect, all bound up together like a stack of cards. That is what it is like, the awful, wonderful brightness of Fairy colors. Try to smell the hard, pale wood sending up sharp, green smoke into the afternoon. To feel to mellow, golden sun on your skin, more gentle and cozier and more golden than even the light of your favorite reading nook at the close of the day.

I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny they are small, and the fountain is in France where you wrote me that last letter and I answered and never heard from you again. you used to write insane poems about ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you knew famous artists and most of them were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right, go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous because we’ never met. we got close once in New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never touched. so you went with the famous and wrote about the famous, and, of course, what you found out is that the famous are worried about their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed with them, who gives them that, and then awakens in the morning to write upper case poems about ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ told us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe it was the upper case. you were one of the best female poets and I told the publishers, editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’ magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom, but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder. your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide 3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you I would probably have been unfair to you or you to me. it was best like this.

Dear Daniel, How do you break up with your boyfriend in a way that tells him, "I don't want to sleep with you on a regular basis anymore, but please be available for late night booty calls if I run out of other options"? Lily Charlotte, NC Dear Lily, The story's so old you can't tell it anymore without everyone groaning, even your oldest friends with the last of their drinks shivering around the ice in their dirty glasses. The music playing is the same album everyone has. Those shoes, everybody has the same shoes on. It looked a little like rain so on person brought an umbrella, useless now in the starstruck clouded sky, forgotten on the way home, which is how the umbrella ended up in her place anyway. Everyone gets older on nights like this. And still it's a fresh slap in the face of everything you had going, that precarious shelf in the shallow closet that will certainly, certainly fall someday. Photographs slipping into a crack to be found by the next tenant, that one squinter third from the left laughing at something your roommate said, the coaster from that place in the city you used to live in, gone now. A letter that seemed important for reasons you can't remember, throw it out, the entry in the address book you won't erase but won't keep when you get a new phone, let it pass and don't worry about it. You don't think about them; "I haven't thought about them in forever," you would say if anybody brought it up, and nobody does." You think about them all the time. Close the book but forget to turn off the light, just sit staring in bed until you blink and you're out of it, some noise on the other side of the wall reminding you you're still here. That's it, that's everything. There's no statue in the town square with an inscription with words to live by. The actor got slapped this morning by someone she loved, slapped right across the face, but there's no trace of it on any channel no matter how late you watch. How many people--really, count them up--know where you are? How many will look after you when you don't show up? The churches and train stations are creaky and the street signs, the menus, the writing on the wall, it all feels like the wrong language. Nobody, nobody knows what you're thinking of when you lean your head against the wall. Put a sweater on when you get cold. Remind yourself, this is the night, because it is. You're free to sing what you want as you walk there, the trees rustling spookily and certainly and quietly and inimitably. Whatever shoes you want, fuck it, you're comfortable. Don't trust anyone's directions. Write what you might forget on the back of your hand, and slam down the cheap stuff and never mind the bad music from the window three floors up or what the boys shouted from the car nine years ago that keeps rattling around in your head, because you're here, you are, for the warmth of someone's wrists where the sleeve stops and the glove doesn't quite begin, and the slant of the voice on the punch line of the joke and the reflection of the moon in the water on the street as you stand still for a moment and gather your courage and take a breath before stealing away through the door. Look at it there. Take a good look. It looks like rain. Love, Daniel Handler

For most of my life, I would have automatically said that I would opt for conscientious objector status, and in general, I still would. But the spirit of the question is would I ever, and there are instances where I might. If immediate intervention would have circumvented the genocide in Rwanda or stopped the Janjaweed in Darfur, would I choose pacifism? Of course not. Scott Simon, the reporter for National Public Radio and a committed lifelong Quaker, has written that it took looking into mass graves in former Yugoslavia to convince him that force is sometimes the only option to deter our species' murderous impulses. While we're on the subject of the horrors of war, and humanity's most poisonous and least charitable attributes, let me not forget to mention Barbara Bush (that would be former First Lady and presidential mother as opposed to W's liquor-swilling, Girl Gone Wild, human ashtray of a daughter. I'm sorry, that's not fair. I've no idea if she smokes.) When the administration censored images of the flag-draped coffins of the young men and women being killed in Iraq - purportedly to respect "the privacy of the families" and not to minimize and cover up the true nature and consequences of the war - the family matriarch expressed her support for what was ultimately her son's decision by saying on Good Morning America on March 18, 2003, "Why should we hear about body bags and deaths? I mean it's not relevant. So why should I waste my beautiful mind on something like that?" Mrs. Bush is not getting any younger. When she eventually ceases to walk among us we will undoubtedly see photographs of her flag-draped coffin. Whatever obituaries that run will admiringly mention those wizened, dynastic loins of hers and praise her staunch refusal to color her hair or glamorize her image. But will they remember this particular statement of hers, this "Let them eat cake" for the twenty-first century? Unlikely, since it received far too little play and definitely insufficient outrage when she said it. So let us promise herewith to never forget her callous disregard for other parents' children while her own son was sending them to make the ultimate sacrifice, while asking of the rest of us little more than to promise to go shopping. Commit the quote to memory and say it whenever her name comes up. Remind others how she lacked even the bare minimum of human integrity, the most basic requirement of decency that says if you support a war, you should be willing, if not to join those nineteen-year-olds yourself, then at least, at the very least, to acknowledge that said war was actually going on. Stupid fucking cow.

I was born in a village in the northeast, and it wasn’t until I was quite big that I saw my first train. I climbed up and down the station bridge, quite unaware that its function was to permit people to cross from one track to another. I was convinced that the bridge had been provided to lend an exotic touch and to make the station premises a place of pleasant diversity, like some foreign playground. I remained under this delusion for quite a long time, and it was for me a very refined amusement indeed to climb up and down the bridge. I thought that it was one of the most elegant services provided by the railways. When later I discovered that the bridge was nothing more than a utilitarian device, I lost all interest in it. Again, when as a child I saw photographs of subway trains in picture books, it never occurred to me that they had been invented out of practical necessity; I could only suppose that riding underground instead of on the surface must be a novel and delightful pastime. I have been sickly ever since I was a child and have frequently been confined to bed. How often as I lay there I used to think what uninspired decorations sheets and pillow cases make. It wasn’t until I was about twenty that I realized that they actually served a practical purpose, and this revelation of human dullness stirred dark depression in me.

The desire to make art begins early. Among the very young this is encouraged (or at least indulged as harmless) but the push toward a 'serious' education soon exacts a heavy toll on dreams and fantasies....Yet for some the desire persists, and sooner or later must be addressed. And with good reason: your desire to make art -- beautiful or meaningful or emotive art -- is integral to your sense of who you are. Life and Art, once entwined, can quickly become inseparable; at age ninety Frank Lloyd Wright was still designing, Imogen Cunningham still photographing, Stravinsky still composing, Picasso still painting. But if making art gives substance to your sense of self, the corresponding fear is that you're not up to the task -- that you can't do it, or can't do it well, or can't do it again; or that you're not a real artist, or not a good artist, or have no talent, or have nothing to say. The line between the artist and his/her work is a fine one at best, and for the artist it feels (quite naturally) like there is no such line. Making art can feel dangerous and revealing. Making art is dangerous and revealing. Making art precipitates self-doubt, stirring deep waters that lay between what you know you should be, and what you fear you might be. For many people, that alone is enough to prevent their ever getting started at all -- and for those who do, trouble isn't long in coming. Doubts, in fact, soon rise in swarms: "I am not an artist -- I am a phony. I have nothing worth saying. I'm not sure what I'm doing. Other people are better than I am. I'm only a [student/physicist/mother/whatever]. I've never had a real exhibit. No one understands my work. No one likes my work. I'm no good. Yet viewed objectively, these fears obviously have less to do with art than they do with the artist. And even less to do with the individual artworks. After all, in making art you bring your highest skills to bear upon the materials and ideas you most care about. Art is a high calling -- fears are coincidental. Coincidental, sneaky and disruptive, we might add, disguising themselves variously as laziness, resistance to deadlines, irritation with materials or surroundings, distraction over the achievements of others -- indeed anything that keeps you from giving your work your best shot. What separates artists from ex-artists is that those who challenge their fears, continue; those who don't, quit. Each step in the artmaking process puts that issue to the test.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s 10 Rules for Writing: 1.Tragedies make great literature; unfathomable catastrophes (the Holocaust, 9/11) are even better – try to construct your books around them for added gravitas but, since those big issues are such bummers, make sure you do it in a way that still focuses on a quirky central character that’s somewhat like Jonathan Safran Foer. 2. You can also name your character Jonathan Safran Foer. 3. If you’re writing a non-fiction book you should still make sure that it has a strong, deep, wise, and relatable central character – someone like Jonathan Safran Foer. 4. If you reach a point in your book where you’re not sure what to do, or how to approach a certain scene, or what the hell you’re doing, just throw in a picture, or a photo, or scribbles, or blank pages, or some illegible text, or maybe even a flipbook. Don’t worry if these things don’t mean anything, that’s what postmodernism is all about. If you’re not sure what to put in, you can’t go wrong with a nice photograph of Jonathan Safran Foer. 5. If you come up with a pun, metaphor, or phrase that you think is really clever and original, don’t just use it once and throw it away, sprinkle it liberally throughout the text. One particularly good phrase that comes to mind is “Jonathan Safran Foer.” 6. Don’t worry if you seem to be saying the same thing over and over again, repetition makes the work stronger, repetition is good, it drives the point home. The more you repeat a phrase or an idea, the better it gets. You should not be afraid of repeating ideas or phrases. One particularly good phrase that comes to mind is “Jonathan Safran Foer.” 7. Other writers are not your enemies, they are your friends, so you should feel free to borrow some of their ideas, words, techniques, and symbols, and use them completely out of context. They won’t mind, they’re your friends, just like my good friend Paul Auster, with whom I am very good friends. Just make sure you don’t steal anything from Jonathan Safran Foer, it wouldn’t be nice, he is your friend. 8. Make sure you have exactly three plots in your novel, any more and it gets confusing, any less and it’s not postmodern. At least one of those plots should be in a different timeline. It often helps if you name these three plots, I often use “Jonathan,” “Safran,” and “Foer.” 9. Don’t be afraid to make bold statements in you writing, there should always be a strong lesson to be learned, such as “don’t eat animals,” or “the Holocaust was bad,” or “9/11 was really really sad,” or “the world would be a better place if everyone was just a little bit more like Jonathan Safran Foer.” 10. In the end, don’t worry if you’re unsuccessful as a writer, it probably wasn’t meant to be. Not all of us are chosen to become writers. Not all of us can be Jonathan Safran Foer.

‎'After a few seconds, I knew Tuesday was listening. He locked into my eyes, and a calm came over him that I had never seen before. Maybe the part of him that wanted love opened up. Maybe he realized, finally, that this wasn't like any rela tionship he'd had before. He had been on a treadmill, racing toward each new handler but always ending in the exact spot: alone. He didn't know I was the mission he'd been training for, but at that moment, at the very least, he realized I needed him. And maybe I realized, in my heart and in my head, that this was a two-way relationship and he needed me too. All I know for sure is that when I looked up, everybody was staring at us. Staff, dogs, veterans, everybody. Even the photographer had lowered his camera. Lu Picard told me later that we were together for five minutes, although I could have it was thirty seconds at the most. 'What was that about?' she asked, as Tuesday and I walked post, side by side. 'We're okay now.' I told her. 'We reached an understanding.

You burn to have your photograph in a tennis magazine.” “I’m afraid so.” “Why again exactly, now?” “I guess to be felt about as I feel about those players with their pictures in magazines.” “Why?” “Why? I guess to give my life some sort of meaning, Lyle.” “And how would this do this again?” “Lyle, I don’t know. I do not know. It just does. Would. Why else would I burn like this, clip secret pictures, not take risks, not sleep or pee?” “You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.” “I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?” “The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.” “Lyle, don’t they?” “LaMont, perhaps they did at first. The first photograph, the first magazine, the gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the hagiography of image, perhaps. Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.” “Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.” “LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?” “Okey-dokey.” “The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.” “Maybe I ought to be getting back.” “LaMont, the world is very old. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang’s enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal.” “Animal?” “You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.” “This is good news?” “It is the truth. To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame a feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame.” “The burning doesn’t go away?” “What fire dies when you feed it? It is not fame itself they wish to deny you here. Trust them. There is much fear in fame. Terrible and heavy fear to be pulled and held, carried. Perhaps they want only to keep it off you until you weigh enough to pull toward yourself.” “Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn’t make me feel very much better at all?” “LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.” “So I’m stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There’s no way out.” “You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.

The photographer from the magazine, Masao Kageyama, would ride along in the van that accompanied me. He’d take pictures as they drove along. It wasn’t a real race, and there weren’t any water stations, so I’d occasionally stop to get water from the van. The Greek summer is truly brutal, and I knew I’d have to be careful not to get dehydrated. “Mr. Murakami,” Mr. Kageyama said, surprised as he saw me getting ready to run, “you’re not really thinking of running the whole route, are you?” “Of course I am. That’s why I came here.” “Really? But when we do these kinds of projects most people don’t go all the way. We just take some photos, and most of them don’t finish the whole route. So you really are going to run the entire thing?” Sometimes the world baffles me. I can’t believe that people would really do things like that.

Instead, I thought about the word profile and what a weird double meaning it had. We say we’re looking at a person’s profile online, or say a newspaper is writing a profile on someone, and we assume it’s the whole them we’re seeing. But when a photographer takes a picture of a profile, you’re only seeing half the face. Like with Sparrow, whoever he was. It’s never the way you would remember seeing them. You never remember someone in profile. You remember them looking you in the eye, or talking to you. You remember an image that the subject could never see in a mirror, because you are the mirror. A profile, photographically, is perpendicular to the person you know.

It’s the difference between your wife’s passport photograph and the portraits you took when you got engaged. Both may have been created with similar technology, but what stands in that great gulf between them are the passion you have for your wife, the knowledge you have of her personality, and your willingness to use your craft, time, and energy to express that. One says, “She looks like this.” The other says, “This is who she is to me. It’s how I feel about her. See how amazing she is?

I'd like to be a light meter." "A what?" "A light meter. Like a photographer uses. Tinks had one this morning." Aidan snapped an imaginary photo of me. "I'd like to be able to measure and know for certain whether people were giving off light or taking light away." "You're strange," I said. "But I think I like that about you.

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

People spoke to foreigners with an averted gaze, and everybody seemed to know somebody who had just vanished. The rumors of what had happened to them were fantastic and bizarre though, as it turned out, they were only an understatement of the real thing. Before going to see General Videla […], I went to […] check in with Los Madres: the black-draped mothers who paraded, every week, with pictures of their missing loved ones in the Plaza Mayo. (‘Todo mi familia!’ as one elderly lady kept telling me imploringly, as she flourished their photographs. ‘Todo mi familia!’) From these and from other relatives and friends I got a line of questioning to put to the general. I would be told by him, they forewarned me, that people ‘disappeared’ all the time, either because of traffic accidents and family quarrels or, in the dire civil-war circumstances of Argentina, because of the wish to drop out of a gang and the need to avoid one’s former associates. But this was a cover story. Most of those who disappeared were openly taken away in the unmarked Ford Falcon cars of the Buenos Aires military police. I should inquire of the general what precisely had happened to Claudia Inez Grumberg, a paraplegic who was unable to move on her own but who had last been seen in the hands of his ever-vigilant armed forces [….] I possess a picture of the encounter that still makes me want to spew: there stands the killer and torturer and rape-profiteer, as if to illustrate some seminar on the banality of evil. Bony-thin and mediocre in appearance, with a scrubby moustache, he looks for all the world like a cretin impersonating a toothbrush. I am gripping his hand in a much too unctuous manner and smiling as if genuinely delighted at the introduction. Aching to expunge this humiliation, I waited while he went almost pedantically through the predicted script, waving away the rumored but doubtless regrettable dematerializations that were said to be afflicting his fellow Argentines. And then I asked him about Senorita Grumberg. He replied that if what I had said was true, then I should remember that ‘terrorism is not just killing with a bomb, but activating ideas. Maybe that’s why she’s detained.’ I expressed astonishment at this reply and, evidently thinking that I hadn’t understood him the first time, Videla enlarged on the theme. ‘We consider it a great crime to work against the Western and Christian style of life: it is not just the bomber but the ideologist who is the danger.’ Behind him, I could see one or two of his brighter staff officers looking at me with stark hostility as they realized that the general—El Presidente—had made a mistake by speaking so candidly. […] In response to a follow-up question, Videla crassly denied—‘rotondamente’: ‘roundly’ denied—holding Jacobo Timerman ‘as either a journalist or a Jew.’ While we were having this surreal exchange, here is what Timerman was being told by his taunting tormentors: Argentina has three main enemies: Karl Marx, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of society; Sigmund Freud, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of the family; and Albert Einstein, because he tried to destroy the Christian concept of time and space. […] We later discovered what happened to the majority of those who had been held and tortured in the secret prisons of the regime. According to a Navy captain named Adolfo Scilingo, who published a book of confessions, these broken victims were often destroyed as ‘evidence’ by being flown out way over the wastes of the South Atlantic and flung from airplanes into the freezing water below. Imagine the fun element when there’s the surprise bonus of a Jewish female prisoner in a wheelchair to be disposed of… we slide open the door and get ready to roll her and then it’s one, two, three… go!

What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that "shaping" force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire. If I sit still and don't do anything, the world goes on beating like a slack drum, without meaning.

My prolonged study of these photographs led me to appreciate the importance of preserving certain moments for prosperity, and as time moved forwards I also came to see what a powerful influence these framed scenes exerted over us as we went about our daily lives. To watch my uncle pose my brother a maths problem, and at the same time to see him in a picture taken thirty-two years earlier; to watch my father scanning the newspaper and trying, with a half-smile, to catch the tail of a joke rippling across the crowded room, and at that very same moment to see a picture of him to me that my grandmother had framed and frozen these memories so that we could weave them into the present.When, in the tones ordinarily preserved for discussing the founding of a nation, my grandmother spoke of my grandfather who had died so young, and pointed at the frames on the tables and the walls, it seemed that she, like me, was pulled in two direction , wanting to get on with life but also longing to capture the moment of perfection, savouring the ordinary life but still honouring the ideal. But even as I pondered these dilemmas-if you plucked a special moment from life and framed it, were you defying death, decay and the passage of time, or were you submitting to them? - I grew very bored with them.

Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach. T. Berry Brazelton. Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, all grown obsolete. Along with ‘Goodnight Moon’ and ‘Where the Wild Things Are,’ they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories. . . . The biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make. . . .I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of [my children] sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4, and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, and how they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.

Why do you choose to write about such gruesome subjects? I usually answer this with another question: Why do you assume that I have a choice? Writing is a catch-as-catch-can sort of occupation. All of us seem to come equipped with filters on the floors of our minds, and all the filters have differing sizes and meshes. What catches in my filter may run right through yours. What catches in yours may pass through mine, no sweat. All of us seem to have a built-in obligation to sift through the sludge that gets caught in our respective mind-filters, and what we find there usually develops into some sort of sideline. The accountant may also be a photographer. The astronomer may collect coins. The school-teacher may do gravestone rubbings in charcoal. The sludge caught in the mind's filter, the stuff that refuses to go through, frequently becomes each person's private obsession. In civilized society we have an unspoken agreement to call our obsessions “hobbies.” Sometimes the hobby can become a full-time job. The accountant may discover that he can make enough money to support his family taking pictures; the schoolteacher may become enough of an expert on grave rubbings to go on the lecture circuit. And there are some professions which begin as hobbies and remain hobbies even after the practitioner is able to earn his living by pursuing his hobby; but because “hobby” is such a bumpy, common-sounding little word, we also have an unspoken agreement that we will call our professional hobbies “the arts.” Painting. Sculpture. Composing. Singing. Acting. The playing of a musical instrument. Writing. Enough books have been written on these seven subjects alone to sink a fleet of luxury liners. And the only thing we seem to be able to agree upon about them is this: that those who practice these arts honestly would continue to practice them even if they were not paid for their efforts; even if their efforts were criticized or even reviled; even on pain of imprisonment or death. To me, that seems to be a pretty fair definition of obsessional behavior. It applies to the plain hobbies as well as the fancy ones we call “the arts”; gun collectors sport bumper stickers reading YOU WILL TAKE MY GUN ONLY WHEN YOU PRY MY COLD DEAD FINGERS FROM IT, and in the suburbs of Boston, housewives who discovered political activism during the busing furor often sported similar stickers reading YOU'LL TAKE ME TO PRISON BEFORE YOU TAKE MY CHILDREN OUT OF THE NEIGHBORHOOD on the back bumpers of their station wagons. Similarly, if coin collecting were outlawed tomorrow, the astronomer very likely wouldn't turn in his steel pennies and buffalo nickels; he'd wrap them carefully in plastic, sink them to the bottom of his toilet tank, and gloat over them after midnight.

The North Korean capital, Pyongyang, is a city consecrated to the worship of a father-son dynasty. (I came to think of them, with their nuclear-family implications, as 'Fat Man and Little Boy.') And a river runs through it. And on this river, the Taedong River, is moored the only American naval vessel in captivity. It was in January 1968 that the U.S.S. Pueblo strayed into North Korean waters, and was boarded and captured. One sailor was killed; the rest were held for nearly a year before being released. I looked over the spy ship, its radio antennae and surveillance equipment still intact, and found photographs of the captain and crew with their hands on their heads in gestures of abject surrender. Copies of their groveling 'confessions,' written in tremulous script, were also on show. So was a humiliating document from the United States government, admitting wrongdoing in the penetration of North Korean waters and petitioning the 'D.P.R.K.' (Democratic People's Republic of Korea) for 'lenience.' Kim Il Sung ('Fat Man') was eventually lenient about the men, but not about the ship. Madeleine Albright didn't ask to see the vessel on her visit last October, during which she described the gruesome, depopulated vistas of Pyongyang as 'beautiful.' As I got back onto the wharf, I noticed a refreshment cart, staffed by two women under a frayed umbrella. It didn't look like much—one of its three wheels was missing and a piece of brick was propping it up—but it was the only such cart I'd see. What toothsome local snacks might the ladies be offering? The choices turned out to be slices of dry bread and cups of warm water. Nor did Madeleine Albright visit the absurdly misnamed 'Demilitarized Zone,' one of the most heavily militarized strips of land on earth. Across the waist of the Korean peninsula lies a wasteland, roughly following the 38th parallel, and packed with a titanic concentration of potential violence. It is four kilometers wide (I have now looked apprehensively at it from both sides) and very near to the capital cities of both North and South. On the day I spent on the northern side, I met a group of aging Chinese veterans, all from Szechuan, touring the old battlefields and reliving a war they helped North Korea nearly win (China sacrificed perhaps a million soldiers in that campaign, including Mao Anying, son of Mao himself). Across the frontier are 37,000 United States soldiers. Their arsenal, which has included undeclared nuclear weapons, is the reason given by Washington for its refusal to sign the land-mines treaty. In August 1976, U.S. officers entered the neutral zone to trim a tree that was obscuring the view of an observation post. A posse of North Koreans came after them, and one, seizing the ax with which the trimming was to be done, hacked two U.S. servicemen to death with it. I visited the ax also; it's proudly displayed in a glass case on the North Korean side.

Do you know that I can't remember her face? Try as I may, it will not be conjured. I can tell you what she looked like; I can recite a description of her features, part by part, but I cannot evoke the whole face.' 'Don't you have a photograph?' 'Photographs!' He spat out the word. 'I'm talking about true recollection - seeing the face.

She climbed down the cliffs after tying her sweater loosely around her waist. Down below she could see nothing but jagged rocks and waves. She was creful, but I watched her feet more than the view she saw- I worried about her slipping. My mother's desire to reach those waves, touch her feet to another ocean on the other side of the country, was all she was thinking of- the pure baptismal goal of it. Whoosh and you can start over again. Or was life more like the horrible game in gym that has you running from one side of an enclosed space to another, picking up and setting down wooden blocks without end? She was thinking reach the waves, the waves, the waves, and I was watching her navigate the rocks, and when we heard her we did so together- looking up in shock. It was a baby on the beach. In among the rocks was a sandy cove, my mother now saw, and crawling across the sand on a blanket was a baby in knitted pink cap and singlet and boots. She was alone on the blanket with a stuffed white toy- my mother thought a lamb. With their backs to my mother as she descended were a group of adults-very official and frantic-looking- wearing black and navy with cool slants to their hats and boots. Then my wildlife photographer's eye saw the tripods and silver circles rimmed by wire, which, when a young man moved them left or right, bounced light off or on the baby on her blanket. My mother started laughing, but only one assistant turned to notice her up among the rocks; everyone else was too busy. This was an ad for something. I imagined, but what? New fresh infant girls to replace your own? As my mother laughed and I watched her face light up, I also saw it fall into strange lines. She saw the waves behind the girl child and how both beautiful and intoxicating they were- they could sweep up so softly and remove this gril from the beach. All the stylish people could chase after her, but she would drown in a moment- no one, not even a mother who had every nerve attuned to anticipate disaster, could have saved her if the waves leapt up, if life went on as usual and freak accidents peppered a calm shore.

But then I thought: no, what we really have here is an example of a presumably normal and sane person whose thinking has been deranged by the concept of celebrity. An example of someone who genuinely believes that because she has seen my photograph and read my novels, she knows me personally-and in fact knows better than I do what is best for my life. And it's normal! It's normal for her not only to think these bizarre thoughts privately, but to express them in public, and receive positive feedback and attention as a result. She has no idea that she is, in this small limited respect, quite literally insane, because everyone around her is also insane in exactly the same way. They really cannot tell the difference between someone they have heard of, and someone they personally know. And they believe that the feelings they have about this person they imagine me to be-intimacy, resentment, hatred, pity-are as real as the feelings they have about their own friends. It makes me wonder whether celebrity culture has sort of metastasized to fill the emptiness left by religion. Like a malignant growth where the sacred used to be

I also pepper our sessions with reports of what I’ve discovered in my daily Google-stalking: the women Boyfriend must be dating (based on elaborate stories I create from social media Likes); how fabulous his life is without me (based on his Tweets about his business trip); how he isn’t even sad about the breakup (because he photographs salads in restaurants—how can he even eat?).

If I like a photograph, if it disturbs me, I linger over it. What am I doing, during the whole times I remain with it? I look at it, I scrutinize it, as if I wanted to know more about the thing or the person it represents... I want to outline the loved face by thought, to make it into the unique field of an intense observation; I want to enlarge this face in order to see it better, to understand it better, to know its truth.

What is it about shoes? I mean, I like most kind of clothes, but a fabulous pair of shoes can just reduce me to jelly. Sometimes, when no-one else is at home, I open my wardrobe and just stare at all my pairs of shoes, like some mad collector. And once I lined them all up on my bed and took a photograph of them. Which might seem a bit weird, but I thought, I've got loads of photos of people I don't really like, so why not take one of something I love?

It sucked having a dead person in your family, and I know what he meant, about seeking solace in the old light. Three years from now, I knew, he'd find a different favorite star, one with older light to gaze upon. And when time caught up with that one, he'd love a farther star, and a farther one, because you can't let the light catch up with the present. Otherwise you'd forget. That's why I liked looking at my dad's pictures. It was the same thing, really. Photographs are just light and time.

The best thing I have always liked about photographers is that they perceive beauty in everything. Beautify everything with clicks; Sonam was that way, looking for beauty everywhere in every place, in every person, may be it was just a practice of photographers. What if all people really appreciate beauty in the world, themselves and other people, the beauty which makes them fall in love with who they truly are, when love of beauty arouses from hearts even the toughest dreams softens their way.

September 10, 1965 Dear Francesca, Enclosed are two photographs. One is the shot I took of you in the pasture at sunrise. I hope you like it as much as I do. The other is of Roseman Bridge before I removed your note tacked to it. I sit here trolling the gray areas of my mind for every detail, every moment, of our time together. I ask myself over and over, “What happened to me in Madison County, Iowa?” And I struggle to bring it together. That’s why I wrote the little piece, “Falling from Dimension Z,” I have enclosed, as a way of trying to sift through my confusion. I look down the barrel of a lens, and you’re at the end of it. I begin work on an article, and I’m writing about you. I’m not even sure how I got back here from Iowa. Somehow the old truck brought me home, yet I barely remember the miles going by. A few weeks ago, I felt self-contained, reasonably content. Maybe not profoundly happy, maybe a little lonely, but at least content. All of that has changed. It’s clear to me now that I have been moving toward you and you toward me for a long time. Though neither of us was aware of the other before we met, there was a kind of mindless certainty humming blithely along beneath our ignorance that ensured we would come together. Like two solitary birds flying the great prairies by celestial reckoning, all of these years and lifetimes we have been moving toward one another. The road is a strange place. Shuffling along, I looked up and you were there walking across the grass toward my truck on an August day. In retrospect, it seems inevitable—it could not have been any other way—a case of what I call the high probability of the improbable. So here I am walking around with another person inside of me. Though I think I put it better the day we parted when I said there is a third person we have created from the two of us. And I am stalked now by that other entity. Somehow, we must see each other again. Any place, anytime. Call me if you ever need anything or simply want to see me. I’ll be there, pronto. Let me know if you can come out here sometime—anytime. I can arrange plane fare, if that’s a problem. I’m off to southeast India next week, but I’ll be back in late October. I Love You, Robert P. S., The photo project in Madison County turned out fine. Look for it in NG next year. Or tell me if you want me to send a copy of the issue when it’s published. Francesca Johnson set her brandy glass on the wide oak windowsill and stared at an eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph of herself.

Each of our actions, our words, our attitudes is cut off from the ‘world,’ from the people who have not directly perceived it, by a medium the permeability of which is of infinite variation and remains unknown to ourselves; having learned by experience that some important utterance which we eagerly hoped would be disseminated … has found itself, often simply on account of our anxiety, immediately hidden under a bushel, how immeasurably less do we suppose that some tiny word, which we ourselves have forgotten, or else a word never uttered by us but formed on its course by the imperfect refraction of a different word, can be transported without ever halting for any obstacle to infinite distances … and succeed in diverting at our expense the banquet of the gods. What we actually recall of our conduct remains unknown to our nearest neighbor; what we have forgotten that we ever said, or indeed what we never did say, flies to provoke hilarity even in another planet, and the image that other people form of our actions and behavior is no more like that which we form of them ourselves, than is like an original drawing a spoiled copy in which, at one point, for a black line, we find an empty gap, and for a blank space an unaccountable contour. It may be, all the same, that what has not been transcribed is some non-existent feature, which we behold, merely in our purblind self-esteem, and that what seems to us added is indeed a part of ourselves, but so essential a part as to have escaped our notice. So that this strange print which seems to us to have so little resemblance to ourselves bears sometimes the same stamp of truth, scarcely flattering, indeed, but profound and useful, as a photograph taken by X-rays. Not that that is any reason why we should recognize ourselves in it. A man who is in the habit of smiling in the glass at his handsome face and stalwart figure, if you show him their radiograph, will have, face to face with that rosary of bones, labeled as being the image of himself, the same suspicion of error as the visitor to an art gallery who, on coming to the portrait of a girl, reads in his catalogue: “Dromedary resting.” Later on, this discrepancy between our portraits, according as it was our own hand that drew them or another, I was to register in the case of others than myself, living placidly in the midst of a collection of photographs which they themselves had taken while round about them grinned frightful faces, invisible to them as a rule, but plunging them in stupor if an accident were to reveal them with the warning: “This is you.

I remember so well when we sat down in the chairs in the Oval Office, and the photographers came in…and we were shaking hands, and she was smiling and making the right friendly comments,” Nixon recalled. “Then the photographers left the room. She crossed her legs, lit a cigarette and said, ‘Now, Mr. President, what are you going to do about those planes that we want and we need very much?’…Golda Meir acted like a man and wanted to be treated like a man. There is no question that she was a very strong, intelligent leader in her own right.

My point is that bias is not advertised by a glowing sign worn around jurors’ necks; we are all guilty of it, because the brain is wired for us to see what we believe, and it usually happens outside of everyone’s awareness. Affective realism decimates the ideal of the impartial juror. Want to increase the likelihood of a conviction in a murder trial? Show the jury some gruesome photographic evidence. Tip their body budgets out of balance and chances are they’ll attribute their unpleasant affect to the defendant: “I feel bad, therefore you must have done something bad. You are a bad person.” Or permit family members of the deceased to describe how the crime has hurt them, a practice known as a victim impact statement, and the jury will tend to recommend more severe punishments. Crank up the emotional impact of a victim impact statement by recording it professionally on video and adding music and narration like a dramatic film, and you’ve got the makings of a jury-swaying masterpiece.45 Affective realism intertwines with the law outside the courtroom as well. Imagine that you are enjoying a quiet evening at home when suddenly you hear loud banging outside. You look out the window and see an African American man attempting to force open the door of a nearby house. Being a dutiful citizen, you call 911, and the police arrive and arrest the perpetrator. Congratulations, you have just brought about the arrest of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as it happened on July 16, 2009. Gates was trying to force open the front door of his own home, which had become stuck while he was traveling. Affective realism strikes again. The real-life eyewitness in this incident had an affective feeling, presumably based on her concepts about crime and skin color, and made a mental inference that the man outside the window had intent to commit a crime.

Rubens discovered a peculiar thing: memory does not make films, it makes photographs. What he recalled from any of the women were at most a few mental photographs. He didn't recall their coherent motions; he visualized even their short gestures not in all their fluent fullness, but only in the rigidity of a single second. His erotic memory provided him with a small album of pornographic pictures but no pornographic film. And when I say an album of pictures, that is an exaggeration, for all he had was some seven or eight photographs. These photos were beautiful, they fascinated him, but their number was after all depressingly limited: seven, eight fragments of less than a second each, that's what remained in his memory of his entire erotic life, to which he had once decided to devote all his strength and talent. I see Rubens sitting at a table with his head supported on the palm of his hand, looking like Rodin's Thinker. What is he thinking about? If he has made peace with the idea that his life has narrowed down to sexual experiences and these again to only seven still pictures, seven photographs, he would at least like to hope that in some corner of his memory there may be concealed some eighth, ninth, or tenth photograph. That's why he is sitting with his head leaning on the palm of his hand. He is once again trying to evoke individual women and find some forgotten photograph for each one of them.

I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry. I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week. I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full. "She wants," said Jay Cee wittily, "to be everything." I said I wanted to be a poet. Then they scouted about for something for me to hold. Jay Cee suggested a book of poems, but the photographer said no, that was too obvious. It should be something that showed what inspired the poems. Finally Jay Cee unclipped the single, long-stemmed paper rose from her latest hat.

If our democracy worked as it should, we would elect wise women and men who made laws for the good of the people and enforced those laws. That, though, is not the way things work. Greedy, power–mad billionaires spend money so that politicians such as George W. Bush can buy elections. Corrupt corporations such as Enron defraud old ladies and commit crimes. And they get away with it. They get away with it because most of us are so afraid of losing the security of our nice, normal lives that we are not willing to risk anything about those lives. We are either afraid to fight or we don’t know how. Or we believe that bad things won’t happen to us. And so, in the end, too many people lose their lives anyway. In Nazi Germany, millions of men who acquiesced to Hitler’s murderous rise to power wound up marching into Russia’s icy wasteland—into the Soviet Army’s machine guns and cannon—to themselves be murdered. In America after 9–11, trusting teenagers who had joined the National Guard found themselves sent to Iraq on extended and additional tours. Our enemy killed many of them because we, citizens of the richest country in the world, did not provide them with body armor. Grieving mothers protested the wasting of their sons’ lives. Nadia McCaffrey defied Bush’s shameful ban on the filming of U.S. soldiers’ coffins returning home from Iraq. She knew, as we all did, that this tyrannical dictum of Bush dishonored our soldiers’ sacrifice. And so she invited the press to the Sacramento International Airport to photograph her son’s flag–draped coffin. Again, I am not comparing George W. Bush to Adolph Hitler, nor America to Germany’s Third Reich. What I do believe is that each of us has the duty to keep the Bushes of the world from becoming anything like Hitler—and to keep America from invading other countries with no just cause. We will never, though, be able to stop corrupt politicians and corporations from doing criminal things until we stop surrendering our power to them. The more we fear to oppose them—the more we want to retreat into the supposed safety of our nice gated communities or downtown lofts—the more powerful people will conspire to ruin our prosperity and wreck our lives.

Well,” Leigh said, because there was nothing else. She looked back at the picture of herself and Pam in the blue dresses. “We did have it easier than she did. I’m sure we did. And I should thank her for that, I guess.” Pam nodded. She looked calm, untroubled. Leigh, tapped her foot on the ottoman and glanced at her mother’s photographs. “But it felt like that was all she saw when she looked at us.” She leaned forward to get Pam’s attention. She wanted her sister to understand, to see things the way she had. “You know? I always felt like she never saw me, me as a individual. Do you know what I am saying? She gave us everything she ever wanted. But she never thought about what we wanted that it may be different. Or that we might need something that she didn’t. She never saw us separate from herself. She never saw us.” She paused, nodding in agreement with herself. That was it. She decided. She’d never put words to the feeling before, but that was it. That had been the whole trouble between them. But when she looked back at Pam, her satisfaction vanished. Her sister’s mouth was pulled tight, her eyes wide. She looked away from Leigh, saying nothing, still the loyal confidante. But Leigh already knew. She knew what she couldn’t guess before, what Pam thought of the two of them on the porch swing, Kara talking, Pam listening. Leigh didn’t have to guess anymore. She could hear the words come out of her daughter’s mouth as clearly as they’d just come out of her own.

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy" What are you thinking about? I am thinking of an early summer. I am thinking of wet hills in the rain Pouring water. Shedding it Down empty acres of oak and manzanita Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun, Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard. Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana Driving the hills crazy, A fast wind with a bit of dust in it Bruising everything and making the seed sweet. Or down in the city where the peach trees Are awkward as young horses, And there are kites caught on the wires Up above the street lamps, And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches. What are you thinking? I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer As slow getting started As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza After a lot of unusual rain California seems long in the summer. I would like to write a poem as long as California And as slow as a summer. Do you get me, Doctor? It would have to be as slow As the very tip of summer. As slow as the summer seems On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road Between Bakersfield and Hell Waiting for Santa Claus. What are you thinking now? I’m thinking that she is very much like California. When she is still her dress is like a roadmap. Highways Traveling up and down her skin Long empty highways With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them On hot summer nights. I am thinking that her body could be California And I a rich Eastern tourist Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California That I have never seen. Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady, Send them. One of each breast photographed looking Like curious national monuments, One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway Twenty-seven miles from a night’s lodging In the world’s oldest hotel. What are you thinking? I am thinking of how many times this poem Will be repeated. How many summers Will torture California Until the damned maps burn Until the mad cartographer Falls to the ground and possesses The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding. What are you thinking now? I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

Dearest Oriel, I have a Doom, but a conceited Doom. Kits, when he was here, took some photographs of me, and also a proper photographer came from St Ives to do me too, and I crumbed they would look well for future books. But they make poor Tray look just like an old peasant woman of ninety – far older and more wrinkled than Lady Vyvyan, and I nearly cried when I saw them. I know I am lined, but I had not realized how badly! And the awful expression on my face, like a murderess. Talk about being ready for St Cuthbert’s – well! The thing is, everybody these days takes photos with tiny cameras and no lighting, so I suppose one’s bad points come out worse. What a blow to one’s Silly Values! Oh, me ... And there I was, swishing about thinking I looked quite nice.

Nixon quickly laid Golda’s fears to rest. Despite reams of memoranda from his staff warning him not to succumb to the Israeli prime minister’s charms, alone with the grandmotherly woman for more than an hour and a half, Nixon couldn’t resist her. “I remember so well when we sat down in the chairs in the Oval Office, and the photographers came in…and we were shaking hands, and she was smiling and making the right friendly comments,” Nixon recalled. “Then the photographers left the room. She crossed her legs, lit a cigarette and said, ‘Now, Mr. President, what are you going to do about those planes that we want and we need very much?’…Golda Meir acted like a man and wanted to be treated like a man. There is no question that she was a very strong, intelligent leader in her own right.

In 1976, a doctoral student at the University of Nottingham in England demonstrated that randomizing letters in the middle of words had no effect on the ability of readers to understand sentences. In tihs setncene, for emalxpe, ervey scarbelmd wrod rmenias bcilasaly leibgle. Why? Because we are deeply accustomed to seeing letters arranged in certain patterns. Because the eye is in a rush, and the brain, eager to locate meaning, makes assumptions. This is true of phrases, too. An author writes “crack of dawn” or “sidelong glance” or “crystal clear” and the reader’s eye continues on, at ease with combinations of words it has encountered innumerable times before. But does the reader, or the writer, actually expend the energy to see what is cracking at dawn or what is clear about a crystal? The mind craves ease; it encourages the senses to recognize symbols, to gloss. It makes maps of our kitchen drawers and neighborhood streets; it fashions a sort of algebra out of life. And this is useful, even essential—X is the route to work, Y is the heft and feel of a nickel between your fingers. Without habit, the beauty of the world would overwhelm us. We’d pass out every time we saw—actually saw—a flower. Imagine if we only got to see a cumulonimbus cloud or Cassiopeia or a snowfall once a century: there’d be pandemonium in the streets. People would lie by the thousands in the fields on their backs. We need habit to get through a day, to get to work, to feed our children. But habit is dangerous, too. The act of seeing can quickly become unconscious and automatic. The eye sees something—gray-brown bark, say, fissured into broad, vertical plates—and the brain spits out tree trunk and the eye moves on. But did I really take the time to see the tree? I glimpse hazel hair, high cheekbones, a field of freckles, and I think Shauna. But did I take the time to see my wife? “Habitualization,” a Russian army-commissar-turned-literary-critic named Viktor Shklovsky wrote in 1917, “devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war.” What he argued is that, over time, we stop perceiving familiar things—words, friends, apartments—as they truly are. To eat a banana for the thousandth time is nothing like eating a banana for the first time. To have sex with somebody for the thousandth time is nothing like having sex with that person for the first time. The easier an experience, or the more entrenched, or the more familiar, the fainter our sensation of it becomes. This is true of chocolate and marriages and hometowns and narrative structures. Complexities wane, miracles become unremarkable, and if we’re not careful, pretty soon we’re gazing out at our lives as if through a burlap sack. In the Tom Andrews Studio I open my journal and stare out at the trunk of the umbrella pine and do my best to fight off the atrophy that comes from seeing things too frequently. I try to shape a few sentences around this tiny corner of Rome; I try to force my eye to slow down. A good journal entry—like a good song, or sketch, or photograph—ought to break up the habitual and lift away the film that forms over the eye, the finger, the tongue, the heart. A good journal entry ought be a love letter to the world. Leave home, leave the country, leave the familiar. Only then can routine experience—buying bread, eating vegetables, even saying hello—become new all over again.

Mystery is good." He drummed his fingertips on my thigh. "Maybe.Maybe not. But I'll let it go. How about this: If I were to open the top drawer of your dresser, what would I find?" "Are we back to discussing my underwear again?" "Only in graphic detail..." He flicked my sore knee, but not where the bruise was. "I keep loose change and my oldest comic books in mine. Some people have journals or photographs or awards..." "Okay,okay." I sighed. "Underwear," I said. "Two ancient swimsuits, and a magazine file." "Of...?" "Pictures I've pulled out of magazines." "Yes,thank you. I gathered that. What's in it?" I squirmed a little and contemplated lying. Travel pix, shoes, hints on getting glue off of Ultrasuede... "Mostly pictures of models with short hair," I confessed finally. "It's sort of a goal of mine." Alex reached up and wrapped a strand around his finger. "I like your hair," he said quietly, "but I think you'd look great whatever you did with it.

Trump was actively involved in the pageants. After Miss Universe Alicia Machado, a Venezuelan, gained considerable weight in 1996, Trump publicly excoriated her. He staged a photo op to show Machado exercising at a Manhattan gym. In front of about eighty reporters and photographers, Trump said, “When you win a beauty pageant, people don’t think you’re going to go from 118 to 160 in less than a year, and you really have an obligation to stay in a perfect physical state.” Machado called the photo op an ambush designed to humiliate her. “He had his triumphant entry,” she recalled, “and I got to feel like a hamster on a wheel for an hour. I was his first Miss Universe when he just bought the company. Unfortunately, this also meant that I experienced, firsthand, his rage and racism and all the misogyny a person can demonstrate.” Trump wrote years later that he did what he did to protect her from being fired: “God, what problems I had with this woman. First, she wins. Second, she gains fifty pounds. Third, I urge the committee not to fire her.” Trump

In his book, Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War, Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that immigrant communities like San Jose or Little Saigon in Orange County are examples of purposeful forgetting through the promise of capitalism: “The more wealth minorities amass, the more property they buy, the more clout they accumulate, and the more visible they become, the more other Americans will positively recognize and remember them. Belonging would substitute for longing; membership would make up for disremembering.” One literal example of this lies in the very existence of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Chinese immigrants in California had battled severe anti-Chinese sentiment in the late 1800s. In 1871, eighteen Chinese immigrants were murdered and lynched in Los Angeles. In 1877, an “anti-Coolie” mob burned and ransacked San Francisco’s Chinatown, and murdered four Chinese men. SF’s Chinatown was dealt its final blow during the 1906 earthquake, when San Francisco fire departments dedicated their resources to wealthier areas and dynamited Chinatown in order to stop the fire’s spread. When it came time to rebuild, a local businessman named Look Tin Eli hired T. Paterson Ross, a Scottish architect who had never been to China, to rebuild the neighborhood. Ross drew inspiration from centuries-old photographs of China and ancient religious motifs. Fancy restaurants were built with elaborate teak furniture and ivory carvings, complete with burlesque shows with beautiful Asian women that were later depicted in the musical Flower Drum Song. The idea was to create an exoticized “Oriental Disneyland” which would draw in tourists, elevating the image of Chinese people in America. It worked. Celebrities like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Ronald Reagan and Bing Crosby started frequenting Chinatown’s restaurants and nightclubs. People went from seeing Chinese people as coolies who stole jobs to fetishizing them as alluring, mysterious foreigners. We paid a price for this safety, though—somewhere along the way, Chinese Americans’ self-identity was colored by this fetishized view. San Francisco’s Chinatown was the only image of China I had growing up. I was surprised to learn, in my early twenties, that roofs in China were not, in fact, covered with thick green tiles and dragons. I felt betrayed—as if I was tricked into forgetting myself. Which is why Do asks his students to collect family histories from their parents, in an effort to remember. His methodology is a clever one. “I encourage them and say, look, if you tell your parents that this is an academic project, you have to do it or you’re going to fail my class—then they’re more likely to cooperate. But simultaneously, also know that there are certain things they won’t talk about. But nevertheless, you can fill in the gaps.” He’ll even teach his students to ask distanced questions such as “How many people were on your boat when you left Vietnam? How many made it?” If there were one hundred and fifty at the beginning of the journey and fifty at the end, students may never fully know the specifics of their parents’ trauma but they can infer shadows of the grief they must hold.

I stepped somewhat apprehensively into 2020, unaware of what was to happen, of course, thinking little about the newly-emerged coronavirus, but knowing myself to be at a tipping point in my life. I had come so very far over the years, the decades, from my birthplace in the United Kingdom, to Thailand, Japan and then back to Thailand to arrive at an age—how had I clocked up so many turns under the sun?—at which most people ask for nothing more than comfort, security and love, or at least loving kindness. Instead, I was slowly extricating myself, physically and emotionally, from a marriage that had, over the course of more than a decade, slowly, almost imperceptibly, deteriorated from complacency to conflict, from apathy to antagonism, from diversity to divergence as our respective outlooks on life first shifted and then conflicted. Instrumental in exacerbating this had been my decision to travel as and where I could after witnessing my mother’s devastating and terminal descent into dementia. For reasons which even now I cannot recall with any accuracy, the first destination for this reborn, more daring me was Tibet, thus initiating a new love affair, this time with the culture and majesty of the Himalayan swathe, and the awakening within me of a quest for the spiritual. I had, over the years, been a teacher, a lecturer, a consultant and an advisor, but I now wanted to inspire and release my verbal and photographic creativity, to capture the places I visited and the experiences I had in words and images—and if possible to have the wherewithal of sharing them with like-minded people.

I haven’t been disingenuous in what I’ve said describing my perception of “truth” and “reality.” Certainly, I understand what is generally meant to be the “truth,” I understand this notion, but it’s not something I trust in, OK? The only answer that feels true (I said feels, not is) is that yes, the character Minnie is me, but she is not me. She is a projection of some tumult which originates within me, but she is not me. I use elements of myself, including my likeness, for the character, perhaps as Cindy Sherman uses herself in her work, but like Sherman’s photographs, the work itself is not any more about the creator than it is about everyone. I won’t deny that Minnie does things I have done, and that things happen to her that have happened to me, but she, unlike me, having been created, is who she is and will remain so, unchanged now. I make no attempt to create “documentary.” There is a process of dissociation that takes place when I make a story, I make creative decisions in a fugue state that I could hardly describe to you, but the end result is, I hope, a story with some meaning or resonance, something created, with a beginning, a middle and an end, an encapsulation of feeling and impression, but in no way a documentary of anything other than an “emotional truth.” If I told most interviewers that my work is “true” and that it is based on real events that occurred in my life, they would more readily accept this than they do the explanation I try to give. Sadly, what they would believe feels to me like a lie and a simplification of a process that is for me as complex and vague as life itself…

We had little money but didn’t think of ourselves as poor. Our vision, if I can call it that, was not materialistic. If we had a concept about ourselves, it was egalitarian, although we would not have known what that word meant. We spoke French entirely. There was a bond between Cajuns and people of color. Cajuns didn’t travel, because they believed they lived in the best place on earth. But somehow the worst in us, or outside of us, asserted itself and prevailed and replaced everything that was good in our lives. We traded away our language, our customs, our stands of cypress, our sugarcane acreage, our identity, and our pride. Outsiders ridiculed us and thought us stupid; teachers forbade our children to speak French on the school grounds. Our barrier islands were dredged to extinction. Our coastline was cut with eight thousand miles of industrial channels, destroying the root systems of the sawgrass and the swamps. The bottom of the state continues to wash away in the flume of the Mississippi at a rate of sixteen square miles a year. Much of this we did to ourselves in the same way that a drunk like me will destroy a gift, one that is irreplaceable and extended by a divine hand. Our roadsides are littered with trash, our rain ditches layered with it, our waterways dumping grounds for automobile tires and couches and building material. While we trivialize the implications of our drive-through daiquiri windows and the seediness of our politicians and recite our self-congratulatory mantra, laissez les bons temps rouler, the southern rim of the state hovers on the edge of oblivion, a diminishing, heartbreaking strip of green lace that eventually will be available only in photographs.

The Memory Business Steven Sasson is a tall man with a lantern jaw. In 1973, he was a freshly minted graduate of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His degree in electrical engineering led to a job with Kodak’s Apparatus Division research lab, where, a few months into his employment, Sasson’s supervisor, Gareth Lloyd, approached him with a “small” request. Fairchild Semiconductor had just invented the first “charge-coupled device” (or CCD)—an easy way to move an electronic charge around a transistor—and Kodak needed to know if these devices could be used for imaging.4 Could they ever. By 1975, working with a small team of talented technicians, Sasson used CCDs to create the world’s first digital still camera and digital recording device. Looking, as Fast Company once explained, “like a ’70s Polaroid crossed with a Speak-and-Spell,”5 the camera was the size of a toaster, weighed in at 8.5 pounds, had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel, and took up to thirty black-and-white digital images—a number chosen because it fell between twenty-four and thirty-six and was thus in alignment with the exposures available in Kodak’s roll film. It also stored shots on the only permanent storage device available back then—a cassette tape. Still, it was an astounding achievement and an incredible learning experience. Portrait of Steven Sasson with first digital camera, 2009 Source: Harvey Wang, From Darkroom to Daylight “When you demonstrate such a system,” Sasson later said, “that is, taking pictures without film and showing them on an electronic screen without printing them on paper, inside a company like Kodak in 1976, you have to get ready for a lot of questions. I thought people would ask me questions about the technology: How’d you do this? How’d you make that work? I didn’t get any of that. They asked me when it was going to be ready for prime time? When is it going to be realistic to use this? Why would anybody want to look at their pictures on an electronic screen?”6 In 1996, twenty years after this meeting took place, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap. They were effectively a category monopoly. In the United States, they controlled 90 percent of the film market and 85 percent of the camera market.7 But they had forgotten their business model. Kodak had started out in the chemistry and paper goods business, for sure, but they came to dominance by being in the convenience business. Even that doesn’t go far enough. There is still the question of what exactly Kodak was making more convenient. Was it just photography? Not even close. Photography was simply the medium of expression—but what was being expressed? The “Kodak Moment,” of course—our desire to document our lives, to capture the fleeting, to record the ephemeral. Kodak was in the business of recording memories. And what made recording memories more convenient than a digital camera? But that wasn’t how the Kodak Corporation of the late twentieth century saw it. They thought that the digital camera would undercut their chemical business and photographic paper business, essentially forcing the company into competing against itself. So they buried the technology. Nor did the executives understand how a low-resolution 0.01 megapixel image camera could hop on an exponential growth curve and eventually provide high-resolution images. So they ignored it. Instead of using their weighty position to corner the market, they were instead cornered by the market.

It must be a shock to see us so old,” Hannah said. “I’m afraid I couldn’t climb a tree or shoot a marble if my life depended on it. Neither could Andrew, but I doubt he’ll admit it.” “If I put my mind to it,” Andrew said, “I could beat Drew with one hand tied behind my back. He was never any match for me.” Hannah raised her eyebrows. “It seems to me he outplayed you once.” “Pshaw. What’s one game?” If Aunt Blythe hadn’t come back just then, I’d have argued, maybe even challenged Andrew to a rematch, but instead, I smiled and leaned my head against Hannah’s shoulder, happy to feel her arm around me. This close, she still smelled like rose water. Turning the pages of the album, Hannah showed us pictures of Mama and Papa, Theo, herself--and Andrew. “These are my favorites.” She pointed to the photographs John had taken of us in the Model T. We were all smiling except Theo. He sat beside me, scowling into the camera, still angry about Mrs. Armiger and the music lessons. “We wanted Theo to come with us today,” Hannah said, “but he’s living down in Florida with his third wife--a lady half his age, I might add.” Andrew nudged me. “He sends his best, said he hopes to see you again someday.” I glanced at Aunt Blythe but she was staring at the photograph. “The resemblance is incredible. If I didn’t know better, I’d swear it was Drew.” Andrew chuckled. “Take a good look at me now. This is how the poor boy will look when he’s ninety-six.” I studied his rosy face, his white hair and mustache. His back was bent, but his eyes sparkled with mischief. Going to his side, I put my arms around him. “You’re not so bad,” I said. Dropping my voice to a whisper, I added, “I wouldn’t be surprised if you could still beat me in a game of ringer.

My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history. I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad, which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list. But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk. The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield. This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory.

lay there fresh and raw from having been carved open to bring her granddaughter into the world—the past ran me down. I had a vision like the kind people describe when they’re near death. For one brief second, it was as if a curtain had been lifted. I saw a long line of people, faceless in the distance, familiar as they got closer: my great-grandparents, my grandparents, my parents. I was at the front of this row of human dominoes, my infant in my arms, and as my forefathers and -mothers toppled behind me, they pushed the next generation into motion. There was no escape; their collective weight would crush me and my baby. I had started out as an egg inside Malabar, just as she had begun as an egg inside Vivian, and so on, each of our fates charted from the depths of our mothers. What little I knew about my grandparents and great-grandparents had been constructed around a sturdy fact or two, embellished perhaps by a shy smile in a grainy photograph or an underlined sentence in a book or letter. The specifics of their lives would remain unknown to me, as mine would be to the baby I held. But our collective history would shape my daughter, and there was something noxious in our matrilineal line. Malabar was the only mother I had, but she was not the mother I wanted to be. Here was my choice: I could continue down the well-trod path upon which I’d been running for so very long and pass along this inheritance like a baton, as blithely as I did my light hair and fair skin. My daughter could do her best to outrun it. She would grow up to be beautiful and smart and agile, as I used to be, as her grandparents were, as her great-grandparents were before them. Or I could slow down, catch my breath, and look mindfully for a new path. There had to be another way and I owed it to my daughter to find it.

But she had learned about love through books, knew enough of it to recognize its absence in her life. Everywhere she looked, she was blinded by other forms of love, as if God were taunting her. From her bedroom window, she’d watch mothers pushing strollers, or children hanging from their father’s shoulders, or lovers holding hands. At doctors’ offices, she’d flip through magazines to find families smiling wildly, couples embracing, even women photographed alone, their bright faces shining with self-love. When she’d watch soap operas with her grandmother, love was the anchor, the glue that seemingly held the whole world together. And when she flipped through American channels when her grandparents weren’t looking, again love was the center of every show, while she, Deya, was left dangling on her own, longing for something other than her sisters to hold on to. As much as she loved them, it never felt like enough. But what did love even mean? Love was Isra staring dully out the window, refusing to look at her; love was Adam barely home; love was Fareeda’s endless attempts to marry her off, to rid herself of a burden; love was a family who never visited, not even on holidays. And maybe that was her problem. Maybe that’s why she always felt disconnected from her classmates, why she couldn’t see the world the way they did, couldn’t believe in their version of love. It was because they had mothers and fathers who wanted them, because they were coddled in a blanket of familial love, because they had never celebrated a birthday alone. It was because they had cried in someone’s arms after a bad day, had known the comforts of the words “I love you” growing up. It was because they’d been loved in their lives that they believed in love, saw it surely for themselves in their futures, even in places it clearly wasn’t.

Pat and I smiled to see a small evening bag with a short handle hooked over her left elbow. We wondered why she would carry a handbag in her own home. What would she possibly need from it? I was longing to walk over to Her Majesty, the Queen, and tell her, mother to mother, “Your Majesty, we’ve known Lady Diana quite well for the past year and a half. We’d like you to know what a truly lovely young woman your son is about to marry.” A sincere and uncontroversial prewedding remark. Unfortunately, this was not only the groom’s mother but also Her Majesty, the Queen of England. Protocol prevented our approaching her, since we had not been personally introduced. I toyed briefly with the idea of walking up to her anyway and pretending that, as an American, I didn’t know the rules. But I was afraid of a chilling rebuff and did not want to embarrass Diana, who had been kind enough to invite us. Pat did not encourage me to plunge ahead. In fact, this time he exclaimed, “Have you lost your mind?” Maybe I should have taken a chance. Too timid again! Our next glimpse of the royal family was Prince Philip, socializing a room or two away from the queen and surrounded by attractive women. He was a bit shorter than he appears in photographs, but quite handsome with a dignified presence and a regal, controlled charm. Pat was impressed by how flawlessly Prince Philip played his role as host, speaking graciously to people in small groups, then moving smoothly on to the next group, unhurried and polished. I thought he had an intimidating, wouldn’t “suffer fools gladly” air—not a person with whom one could easily make small talk, although his close friends seemed relaxed with him. It was easy to believe that he had been a stern and domineering father to Prince Charles. The Prince of Wales had seemed much warmer and more approachable.

So long as you input the appropriate parameters, the star could be a model for our sun. Think about it. It’s always useful to have the sun in your computer memory. It’s the biggest presence that’s close to us in the cosmos, but we could take more advantage of it. The model may have many more discoveries lying in wait.” Rey Diaz said, “One previous use of the sun is what brought humanity to the brink, and brought you and me to this place.” “But new discoveries might bring humanity back. So today, I’ve invited you here to watch the sunrise.” The rising sun was now just peeking its head over the horizon. The desert in front of them came into focus like a developing photograph, and Rey Diaz could see that this place, once blasted by the fires of hell, was now covered in sparse undergrowth. “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds,” Allen exclaimed. “What?” Rey Diaz whipped his head around, as if someone had shot him from behind. “Oppenheimer said that when he watched the first nuclear explosion. I think it’s a quote from the Bhagavad Gita.” The wheel in the east expanded rapidly, casting light across the Earth like a golden web. The same sun was there on that morning when Ye Wenjie had tuned the Red Shore antenna, and even before that, the same sun had shone upon the dust settling after the first bomb blast. Australopithecus a million years ago and the dinosaurs a hundred million years ago had turned their dull eyes upon this very sun, and even earlier than that, the hazy light that penetrated the surface of the primeval ocean and was felt by the first living cell was emitted by this same sun. Allen went on, “And then a man called Bainbridge followed up Oppenheimer’s statement with something completely nonpoetic: ‘Now we are all sons of bitches.’” “What are you talking about?” Rey Diaz said. Watching the rising sun, his breathing became ragged. “I’m thanking you, Mr. Rey Diaz, because from now on we’re not sons of bitches.

If anything- learn from me. Try to do the virtuous things I did and not the mistakes I made. Though it is up to you to decide what was great or immoral, it is what you feel and believe is morally right in your mind.' 'Yes, it would be right in saying- I never really establish any thought into what was going to happen to me someday and the others that are part of my surroundings.' 'However, life goes on, and the existence of what was stands for nothing but- a memory of what you can and cannot have. If you are someone like me, but all I ever wanted to have is someone that appreciates me.' 'Everybody around here would say life is free, yet or is it?' 'Like, do I even want it?' 'No- not anymore!' 'The existence of life…! Is what I mean.' 'This belief is what I do not want, to have anymore.' 'There must be a way out of all this misery, suffering, pain, agony, and distress, that I relish in the day today?' 'They say dying, departing, and falling is easy, as well as lasting, and living is difficult, uncertain, ambiguous, and unpredictable.' 'While with a wild carless heart and reduction of insight I am going to find out!' 'I presume life is all about what you want, need, love, desire, respect, and love.' 'Furthermore, existing in life comes down to what you cannot have in it. All I have to say is don't let anyone or anything pin you down and make you less than who you are. Always be who you were meant to be, regardless of what they say… because who in the hell are, they!' 'This is a warning to my story, I will only say this once, this is my life, and others I have loved and lost, and it is graphic at times.' 'Just like looking into a book of Sh-h, of deep dark girlie secrets, photographs in the mind like black and white still frames of the past developed, or like a painting of time last just at the moment- a picture with my words of how I will be remembered, the story will come to be perceived sharply and with much clarity.

May I ask you a question? If you have to hold your breath too long, what is it that makes you desperate to breathe again?” “I’m running out of oxygen, I guess.” “That’s the interesting fact. It isn’t the absence of oxygen. It’s the presence of carbon dioxide. Kind of the same thing, but not exactly. The point is, you could suck up any kind of gas, and as long as it wasn’t carbon dioxide, your brain would be happy. You could have a chest full of nitrogen, no oxygen at all, about to kill you stone dead, and your lungs would say, hey man, we’re cool, no carbon dioxide here, no need for us to start pumping again until we see some. Which they never will, because you’ll never breathe again. Because you’ll never need to. Because you have no carbon dioxide. And so on. So those folks started sniffing nitrogen, but you have to go to the welding shop and the cylinders are too heavy to lift, so then they tried helium from the balloon store, but you needed masks and tubes, and the whole thing still looks weird, so in the end most folks won’t be satisfied with anything less than the old-fashioned bottle of pills and the glass of scotch. Exactly like it used to be. Except it can’t be anymore. Those pills were most likely either Nembutal or Seconal, and both of those substances are tightly controlled now. There’s no way to get them. Except illegally, of course, way down where no one can see you. There are sources. The holy grail. Most of the offers are scams, naturally. Powdered Nembutal from China, and so on. Dissolve in water or fruit juice. Maybe eight or nine hundred bucks for a lethal dose. Some poor desperate soul takes the cash to MoneyGram and sends it off, and then waits at home, anxious and tormented, and never sees any powdered Nembutal from China, because there never was any. The powder in the on-line photograph was talc, and the prescription bottle was for something else entirely. Which I felt was a new low, in the end. They’re preying on the last hopes of suicidal people.

In February, after not getting to see the boys for weeks and weeks, completely beside myself with grief, I went to plead to see them. Kevin wouldn't let me in. I begged him. Jayden James was five months old and Sean Preston was seventeen months old. I imagined their not knowing where their mother was, wondering why she didn't want to be with them. I wanted to get a battering ram to get to them. I didn't know what to do. The paparazzi watched it all happen. I can't describe the humiliation I felt. I was concerned. I was out being chased, like always, by these men waiting for me to do something they could photograph. And so that night I gave them some material. I went into a hair salon, and I took the clippers, and I shaved off all my hair. Everyone thought it was hilarious. Look how crazy she is! Even my parents acted embarrassed by me. But nobody seemed to understand that I was simply out of my mind with grief. My children had been taken away from me. With my head shaved, everyone was scared of me, even my mom. No one would talk to me anymore because I was too ugly. My long hair was a big part of what people liked-I knew that. I knew a lot of guys thought long hair was hot. Shaving my head was a way of saying to the world: Fuck you. You want me to be pretty for you? Fuck you. You want me to be good for you? Fuck you. You want me to be your dream girl? Fuck you. I'd been the good girl for years. I'd smiled politely while TV show hosts leered at my breasts, while American parents said I was destroying their children by wearing a crop top, while executives patted my hand condescendingly and second-guessed my career choices even though I'd sold millions of records, while my family acted like I was evil. And I was tired of it. At the end of the day, I didn't care. All I wanted to do was see my boys. It made me sick thinking about the hours, the days, the weeks I missed with them. My most special moments in life were taking naps with my children, That's the closest I've ever felt to God-taking naps with me precious babies, smelling their hair, holding their tiny hands.

We said that if you don't quench those flames at once, they will spread all over the world; you thought we were maniacs. At present we have the mania of trying to tell you about the killing, by hot steam, mass-electrocution and live burial of the total Jewish population of Europe. So far three million have died. It is the greatest mass-killing in recorded history; and it goes on daily, hourly, as regularly as the ticking of your watch. I have photographs before me on the desk while I am writing this, and that accounts for my emotion and bitterness. People died to smuggle them out of Poland; they thought it was worth while. The facts have been published in pamphlets, White Books, newspapers, magazines and what not. But the other day I met one of the best-known American journalists over here. He told me that in the course of some recent public opinion survey nine out of ten average American citizens, when asked whether they believed that the Nazis commit atrocities, answered that it was all propaganda lies, and that they didn't believe a word of it. As to this country, I have been lecturing now for three years to the troops and their attitude is the same. They don't believe in concentration camps, they don't believe in the starved children of Greece, in the shot hostages of France, in the mass-graves of Poland; they have never heard of Lidice, Treblinka or Belzec; you can convince them for an hour, then they shake themselves, their mental self-defence begins to work and in a week the shrug of incredulity has returned like a reflex temporarily weakened by a shock. Clearly all this is becoming a mania with me and my like. Clearly we must suffer from some morbid obsession, whereas the others are healthy and normal. But the characteristic symptom of maniacs is that they lose contact with reality and live in a phantasy world. So, perhaps, it is the other way round: perhaps it is we, the screamers, who react in a sound and healthy way to the reality which surrounds us, whereas you are the neurotics who totter about in a screened phantasy world because you lack the faculty to face the facts. Were it not so, this war would have been avoided, and those murdered within sight of your day-dreaming eyes would still be alive.

He and Powell would be celebrating their twentieth wedding anniversary a few days later, and he admitted that at times he had not been as appreciative of her as she deserved. “I’m very lucky, because you just don’t know what you’re getting into when you get married,” he said. “You have an intuitive feeling about things. I couldn’t have done better, because not only is Laurene smart and beautiful, she’s turned out to be a really good person.” For a moment he teared up. He talked about his other girlfriends, particularly Tina Redse, but said he ended up in the right place. He also reflected on how selfish and demanding he could be. “Laurene had to deal with that, and also with me being sick,” he said. “I know that living with me is not a bowl of cherries.” Among his selfish traits was that he tended not to remember anniversaries or birthdays. But in this case, he decided to plan a surprise. They had gotten married at the Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite, and he decided to take Powell back there on their anniversary. But when Jobs called, the place was fully booked. So he had the hotel approach the people who had reserved the suite where he and Powell had stayed and ask if they would relinquish it. “I offered to pay for another weekend,” Jobs recalled, “and the man was very nice and said, ‘Twenty years, please take it, it’s yours.’” He found the photographs of the wedding, taken by a friend, and had large prints made on thick paper boards and placed in an elegant box. Scrolling through his iPhone, he found the note that he had composed to be included in the box and read it aloud: "We didn’t know much about each other twenty years ago. We were guided by our intuition; you swept me off my feet. It was snowing when we got married at the Ahwahnee. Years passed, kids came, good times, hard times, but never bad times. Our love and respect has endured and grown. We’ve been through so much together and here we are right back where we started 20 years ago—older, wiser—with wrinkles on our faces and hearts. We now know many of life’s joys, sufferings, secrets and wonders and we’re still here together. My feet have never returned to the ground."  By the end of the recitation he was crying uncontrollably. When he composed himself, he noted that he had also made a set of the pictures for each of his kids. “I thought they might like to see that I was young once.

The photographer was taking pictures with a small pocket camera but the sergeant sent him back to the car for his big Bertillon camera. Grave Digger and Coffin Ed left the cellar to look around. The apartment was only one room wide but four storeys high. The front was flush with the sidewalk, and the front entrance elevated by two recessed steps. The alleyway at the side slanted down from the sidewalk sufficiently to drop the level of the door six feet below the ground-floor level. The cellar, which could only be entered by the door at the side, was directly below the ground-floor rooms. There were no apartments. Each of the four floors had three bedrooms opening on to the public hall, and to the rear was a kitchen and a bath and a separate toilet to serve each floor. There were three tenants on each floor, their doors secured by hasps and staples to be padlocked when they were absent, bolts and chains and floor locks and angle bars to protect them from intruders when they were present. The doors were pitted and scarred either because of lost keys or attempted burglary, indicating a continuous warfare between the residents and enemies from without, rapists, robbers, homicidal husbands and lovers, or the landlord after his rent. The walls were covered with obscene graffiti, mammoth sexual organs, vulgar limericks, opened legs, telephone numbers, outright boasting, insidious suggestions, and impertinent or pertinent comments about various tenants’ love habits, their mothers and fathers, the legitimacy of their children. “And people live here,” Grave Digger said, his eyes sad. “That’s what it was made for.” “Like maggots in rotten meat.” “It’s rotten enough.” Twelve mailboxes were nailed to the wall in the front hall. Narrow stairs climbed to the top floor. The ground-floor hallway ran through a small back courtyard where four overflowing garbage cans leaned against the wall. “Anybody can come in here day or night,” Grave Digger said. “Good for the whores but hard on the children.” “I wouldn’t want to live here if I had any enemies,” Coffin Ed said. “I’d be scared to go to the john.” “Yeah, but you’d have central heating.” “Personally, I’d rather live in the cellar. It’s private with its own private entrance and I could control the heat.” “But you’d have to put out the garbage cans,” Grave Digger said. “Whoever occupied that whore’s crib ain’t been putting out any garbage cans.” “Well, let’s wake up the brothers on the ground floor.” “If they ain’t already awake.

Your womb can’t never bear fruit.” Miss Ethel Fordham told her that. Without sorrow or alarm, she had passed along the news as though she’d examined a Burpee seedling overcome by marauding rabbits. Cee didn’t know then what to feel about that news, no more than what she felt about Dr. Beau. Anger wasn’t available to her—she had been so stupid, so eager to please. As usual she blamed being dumb on her lack of schooling, but that excuse fell apart the second she thought about the skilled women who had cared for her, healed her. Some of them had to have Bible verses read to them because they could not decipher print themselves, so they had sharpened the skills of the illiterate: perfect memory, photographic minds, keen senses of smell and hearing. And they knew how to repair what an educated bandit doctor had plundered. If not schooling, then what? Branded early as an unlovable, barely tolerated “gutter child” by Lenore, the only one whose opinion mattered to her parents, exactly like what Miss Ethel said, she had agreed with the label and believed herself worthless. Ida never said, “You my child. I dote on you. You wasn’t born in no gutter. You born into my arms. Come on over here and let me give you a hug.” If not her mother, somebody somewhere should have said those words and meant them. Frank alone valued her. While his devotion shielded her, it did not strengthen her. Should it have? Why was that his job and not her own? Cee didn’t know any soft, silly women. Not Thelma, or Sarah, or Ida, and certainly not the women who had healed her. Even Mrs. K., who let the boys play nasty with her, did hair and slapped anybody who messed with her, in or outside her hairdressing kitchen. So it was just herself. In this world with these people she wanted to be the person who would never again need rescue. Not from Lenore through the lies of the Rat, not from Dr. Beau through the courage of Sarah and her brother. Sun-smacked or not, she wanted to be the one who rescued her own self. Did she have a mind, or not? Wishing would not make it so, nor would blame, but thinking might. If she did not respect herself, why should anybody else? Okay. She would never have children to care about and give her the status of motherhood. Okay. She didn’t have and probably would never have a mate. Why should that matter? Love? Please. Protection? Yeah, sure. Golden eggs? Don’t make me laugh. Okay. She was penniless. But not for long. She would have to invent a way to earn a living. What else?

After your email about the Late Bronze Age collapse, I became very intrigued by the idea that writing systems could be ‘lost’. In fact I wasn’t really sure what that even meant, so I had to look it up, and I ended up reading a lot about something called Linear B. Do you know all about this already? Basically, around the year 1900, a team of British excavators in Crete found a cache of ancient clay tablets in a terracotta bathtub. The tablets were inscribed with a syllabic script of unknown language and appeared to date from around 1400 BCE. Throughout the early part of the twentieth century, classical scholars and linguists tried to decipher the markings, known as Linear B, with no success. Although the script was organised like writing, no one could work out what language it transcribed. Most academics hypothesised it was a lost language of the Minoan culture on Crete, with no remaining descendants in the modern world. In 1936, at the age of eighty-five, the archaeologist Arthur Evans gave a lecture in London about the tablets, and in attendance at the lecture was a fourteen-year-old schoolboy named Michael Ventris. Before the Second World War broke out, a new cache of tablets was found and photographed – this time on the Greek mainland. Still, no attempts to translate the script or identify its language were successful. Michael Ventris had grown up in the meantime and trained as an architect, and during the war he was conscripted to serve in the RAF. He hadn’t received any formal qualifications in linguistics or classical languages, but he’d never forgotten Arthur Evans’s lecture that day about Linear B. After the war, Ventris returned to England and started to compare the photographs of the newly discovered tablets from the Greek mainland with the inscriptions on the old Cretan tablets. He noticed that certain symbols on the tablets from Crete were not replicated on any of the samples from Pylos. He guessed that those particular symbols might represent place names on the island. Working from there, he figured out how to decipher the script – revealing that Linear B was in fact an early written form of ancient Greek. Ventris’s work not only demonstrated that Greek was the language of the Mycenaean culture, but also provided evidence of written Greek which predated the earliest-known examples by hundreds of years. After the discovery, Ventris and the classical scholar and linguist John Chadwick wrote a book together on the translation of the script, entitled ‘Documents in Mycenaean Greek’. Weeks before the publication of the book in 1956, Ventris crashed his car into a parked truck and died. He was thirty-four

He wanted somebody to give him a chance of asserting himself. He wanted it so urgently that he fidgeted in his chair, looked at this person, then at that person, tried to break into their talk, opened his mouth and shut it again. They were talking about the fishing industry. Why did no one ask him his opinion? What did they know about the fishing industry? Lily Briscoe knew all that. Sitting opposite him, could she not see, as in an X-ray photograph, the ribs and thigh bones of the young man's desire to impress himself, lying dark in the mist of his flesh--that thin mist which convention had laid over his burning desire to break into the conversation? But, she thought, screwing up her Chinese eyes, and remembering how he sneered at women, "can't paint, can't write," why should I help him to relieve himself? There is a code of behaviour, she knew, whose seventh article (it may be) says that on occasions of this sort it behoves the woman, whatever her own occupation might be, to go to the help of the young man opposite so that he may expose and relieve the thigh bones, the ribs, of his vanity, of his urgent desire to assert himself; as indeed it is their duty, she reflected, in her old maidenly fairness, to help us, suppose the Tube97 were to burst into flames. Then, she thought, I should certainly expect Mr. Tansley to get me out. But how would it be, she thought, if neither of us did either of these things? So she sat there 96 Cheated or frustrated himself. 97 The London subway. 64 smiling. "You're not planning to go to the Lighthouse, are you, Lily," said Mrs. Ramsay. "Remember poor Mr. Langley; he had been round the world dozens of times, but he told me he never suffered as he did when my husband took him there. Are you a good sailor, Mr. Tansley?" she asked. Mr. Tansley raised a hammer: swung it high in air; but realising, as it descended, that he could not smite that butterfly with such an instrument as this, said only that he had never been sick in his life. But in that one sentence lay compact, like gunpowder, that his grandfather was a fisherman; his father a chemist; that he had worked his way up entirely himself; that he was proud of it; that he was Charles Tansley--a fact that nobody there seemed to realise; but one of these days every single person would know it. He scowled ahead of him. He could almost pity these mild cultivated people, who would be blown sky high, like bales of wool and barrels of apples, one of these days by the gunpowder that was in him. "Will you take me, Mr. Tansley?" said Lily, quickly, kindly, for, of course, if Mrs. Ramsay said to her, as in effect she did, "I am drowning, my dear, in seas of fire. Unless you apply some balm to the anguish of this hour and say something nice to that young man there, life will run upon the rocks--indeed I hear the grating and the growling at this minute. My nerves are taut as fiddle strings. Another touch and they will snap"--when Mrs. Ramsay said all this, as the glance in her eyes said it, of course for the hundred and fiftieth time Lily Briscoe had to renounce the experiment--what happens if one is not nice to that young man there--and be nice.

the ten thousand things To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be enlightened by the ten thousand things. – Eihei Dogen If one is very fortunate indeed, one comes upon – or is found by – the teachings that match one’s disposition and the teachers or mentors whose expression strikes to the heart while teasing the knots from the mind. The Miriam Louisa character came with a tendency towards contrariness and scepticism, which is probably why she gravitated to teachers who displayed like qualities. It was always evident to me that the ‘blink’ required in order to meet life in its naked suchness was not something to be gained in time. Rather, it was clear that it was something to do with understanding what sabotages this direct engagement. So my teachers were those who deconstructed the spiritual search – and with it the seeker – inviting one to “see for oneself.” I realised early on that I wouldn’t find any help within traditional spiritual institutions since their version of awakening is usually a project in time. Anyway, I’m not a joiner by nature. I set out on my via negativa at an early age, trying on all kinds of philosophies and practices with enthusiasm and casting them aside –neti neti – equally enthusiastically. Chögyam Trungpa wised me up to “spiritual materialism” in the 70s; Alan Watts followed on, pointing out that whatever is being experienced is none other than ‘IT’ – the unarguable aliveness that one IS. By then I was perfectly primed for the questions put by Jiddu Krishnamurti – “Is there a thinker separate from thought?” “Is there an observer separate from the observed?” “Can consciousness be separated from its content?” It was while teaching at Brockwood Park that I also had the good fortune to engage with David Bohm in formal dialogues as well as private conversations. (About which I have written elsewhere.) Krishnamurti and Bohm were seminal teachers for me; I also loved the unique style of deconstruction offered by Nisargadatta Maharaj. As it happened though, it took just one tiny paragraph from Wei Wu Wei to land in my brain at exactly the right time for the irreversible ‘blink’ to occur. I mention this rather august lineage because it explains why the writing of Robert Saltzman strikes not just a chord but an entire symphonic movement for me. We are peers; we were probably reading the same books by Watts and Krishnamurti at the same time during the 70s and 80s. Reading his book, The Ten Thousand Things, is, for me, like feeling my way across a tapestry exquisitely woven from the threads of my own life. I’m not sure that I can adequately express my wonderment and appreciation… The candor, lucidity and lack of jargon in Robert’s writing are deeply refreshing. I also relish his way with words. He knows how to write. He also knows how to take astonishingly fine photographs, and these are featured throughout the book. It’s been said that this book will become a classic, which is a pretty good achievement for someone who isn’t claiming to be a teacher and has nothing to gain by its sale. (The book sells for the production price.) He is not peddling enlightenment. He is simply sharing how it feels to be free from all the spiritual fantasies that obscure our seamless engagement with this miraculous thing called life, right now.

to look at Louisa, stroked her cheek, and was rewarded by a dazzling smile. She had been surprised by how light-skinned the child was. Her features were much more like Eva’s than Bill’s. A small turned-up nose, big hazel eyes, and long dark eyelashes. Her golden-brown hair protruded from under the deep peak of her bonnet in a cascade of ringlets. “Do you think she’d come to me?” Cathy asked. “You can try.” Eva handed her over. “She’s got so heavy, she’s making my arms ache!” She gave a nervous laugh as she took the parcel from Cathy and peered at the postmark. “What’s that, Mam?” David craned his neck and gave a short rasping cough. “Is it sweets?” “No, my love.” Eva and Cathy exchanged glances. “It’s just something Auntie Cathy’s brought from the old house. Are you going to show Mikey your flags?” The boy dug eagerly in his pocket, and before long he and Michael were walking ahead, deep in conversation about the paper flags Eva had bought for them to decorate sand castles. Louisa didn’t cry when Eva handed her over. She seemed fascinated by Cathy’s hair, and as they walked along, Cathy amused her by singing “Old MacDonald.” The beach was only a short walk from the station, and it wasn’t long before the boys were filling their buckets with sand. “I hardly dare open it,” Eva said, fingering the string on the parcel. “I know. I was desperate to open it myself.” Cathy looked at her. “I hope you haven’t built up your hopes, too much, Eva. I’m so worried it might be . . . you know.” Eva nodded quickly. “I thought of that too.” She untied the string, her fingers trembling. The paper fell away to reveal a box with the words “Benson’s Baby Wear” written across it in gold italic script. Eva lifted the lid. Inside was an exquisite pink lace dress with matching bootees and a hat. The label said, “Age 2–3 Years.” Beneath it was a handwritten note:   Dear Eva, This is a little something for our baby girl from her daddy. I don’t know the exact date of her birthday, but I wanted you to know that I haven’t forgotten. I hope things are going well for you and your husband. Please thank him from me for what he’s doing for our daughter: he’s a fine man and I don’t blame you for wanting to start over with him. I’m back in the army now, traveling around. I’m due to be posted overseas soon, but I don’t know where yet. I’ll write and let you know when I get my new address. It would be terrific if I could have a photograph of her in this little dress, if your husband doesn’t mind. Best wishes to you all, Bill   For several seconds they sat staring at the piece of paper. When Eva spoke, her voice was tight with emotion. “Cathy, he thinks I chose to stay with Eddie!” Cathy nodded, her mind reeling. “Eddie showed me the letter he sent. Bill wouldn’t have known you were in Wales, would he? He would have assumed you and Eddie had already been reunited—that he’d written with your consent on behalf of you both.” She was afraid to look at Eva. “What are you going to do?” Eva’s face had gone very pale. “I don’t know.” She glanced at David, who was jabbing a Welsh flag into a sand castle. “He said he was going to be posted overseas. Suppose they send him to Britain?” Cathy bit her lip. “It could be anywhere, couldn’t it? It could be the other side of the world.” She could see what was going through Eva’s mind. “You think if he came here, you and he could be together without . . .” Her eyes went to the boys. Eva gave a quick, almost imperceptible nod, as if she was afraid someone might see her. “What about Eddie?” “I don’t know!” The tone of her voice made David look up. She put on a smile, which disappeared the

Reader's Digest (Reader's Digest USA) - Clip This Article on Location 56 | Added on Friday, May 16, 2014 12:06:55 AM Words of Lasting Interest Looking Out for The Lonely One teacher’s strategy to stop violence at its root BY GLENNON DOYLE MELTON  FROM MOMASTERY.COM PHOTOGRAPH BY DAN WINTERS A few weeks ago, I went into my son Chase’s class for tutoring. I’d e-mailed Chase’s teacher one evening and said, “Chase keeps telling me that this stuff you’re sending home is math—but I’m not sure I believe him. Help, please.” She e-mailed right back and said, “No problem! I can tutor Chase after school anytime.” And I said, “No, not him. Me. He gets it. Help me.” And that’s how I ended up standing at a chalkboard in an empty fifth-grade classroom while Chase’s teacher sat behind me, using a soothing voice to try to help me understand the “new way we teach long division.” Luckily for me, I didn’t have to unlearn much because I’d never really understood the “old way we taught long division.” It took me a solid hour to complete one problem, but I could tell that Chase’s teacher liked me anyway. She used to work with NASA, so obviously we have a whole lot in common. Afterward, we sat for a few minutes and talked about teaching children and what a sacred trust and responsibility it is. We agreed that subjects like math and reading are not the most important things that are learned in a classroom. We talked about shaping little hearts to become contributors to a larger community—and we discussed our mutual dream that those communities might be made up of individuals who are kind and brave above all. And then she told me this. Every Friday afternoon, she asks her students to take out a piece of paper and write down the names of four children with whom they’d like to sit the following week. The children know that these requests may or may not be honored. She also asks the students to nominate one student who they believe has been an exceptional classroom citizen that week. All ballots are privately submitted to her. And every single Friday afternoon, after the students go home, she takes out those slips of paper, places them in front of her, and studies them. She looks for patterns. Who is not getting requested by anyone else? Who can’t think of anyone to request? Who never gets noticed enough to be nominated? Who had a million friends last week and none this week? You see, Chase’s teacher is not looking for a new seating chart or “exceptional citizens.” Chase’s teacher is looking for lonely children. She’s looking for children who are struggling to connect with other children. She’s identifying the little ones who are falling through the cracks of the class’s social life. She is discovering whose gifts are going unnoticed by their peers. And she’s pinning down—right away—who’s being bullied and who is doing the bullying. As a teacher, parent, and lover of all children, I think this is the most brilliant Love Ninja strategy I have ever encountered. It’s like taking an X-ray of a classroom to see beneath the surface of things and into the hearts of students. It is like mining for gold—the gold being those children who need a little help, who need adults to step in and teach them how to make friends, how to ask others to play, how to join a group, or how to share their gifts. And it’s a bully deterrent because every teacher knows that bullying usually happens outside her eyeshot and that often kids being bullied are too intimidated to share. But, as she said, the truth comes out on those safe, private, little sheets of paper. As Chase’s teacher explained this simple, ingenious idea, I stared at her with my mouth hanging open. “How long have you been using this system?” I said. Ever since Columbine, she said. Every single Friday afternoon since Columbine. Good Lord. This brilliant woman watched Columbine knowing that all violence begins with disconnection. All

I thought my life with Kelli could be balanced, mitigated,. That Irene had just been doing it all wrong these years. I' thought we could hang out like normal sisters, run errands, go for lattes with Jessica Hendy, and every now and then go off and have a little temper tantrum if Kelli go on my nerves--leave her in the car, assume she'd be fine. I'd assumed I could indulge myself if need be, that there could be some kind of fulfillment beyond my sister's care--that I didn't have to give myself over to it completely. But here's what I needed to understand--what Irene understood. Either you were all in with Kelli, or you were not. But if you were, Kelli had to become your joy. Kelli would be where you went for meaning. Kelli was what it was all about. And Irene was right about this too-- it was like faith. It was exactly like faith in that you had to stop futzing around and let it take you over. No more hemming and hawing. No more trying to have it both ways. And once you put your petty shit aside --your petty ego and your petty needs and your petty ambitions--that was when at last the world opened up. The world that was Kelli. It was a small world, a circumscribed world but it was your world and you did what you could to make it more beautiful. You focused on hygiene, nourishing meals, a pleasing home that always smelled good. That was your achievement and more important that was you. Once you accept that, you were--and this was strange to think, but the moment I thought it, I realized I put my finger on the savagely beating heart of my mother's philosophy--free. When I was a kid, my mother had a lavishly illustrated encyclopedia of saints she would sometimes flip through with me, and I remember how she always made a point of skipping over Saint Teresa of Avila . She didn't want to talk about the illustration that went with it. It was a photograph of the sculpture The Ecstasy of Saint Teresa, and it was pretty obvious to me even as a child why my mother disapproved. It was a sexy sculpture. The smirking angel prepares to pierce Teresa's heart with his holy spear, and boy oh boy is Saint Teresa ready. Her eyes are closed, her lips are parted, and somehow everything about her marble body, swathed in marble clothing looks to be in motion. Saint Teresa is writhing. She's writhing because that is what it is to be a Catholic Saint. This is your fulfillment. The giving over. The letting go. The disappearance. This is what it takes

My Atlas pinged behind me. And again. And again. “You’re popular this morning,” Darcy commented, eyeing it with interest. I grunted in response. “Caleb’s just trying to get into my pants again.” She snorted a laugh. “How hard are you going to make him work for it?” “He took part in the whole throwing us in a pit business. So I’m thinking I’m done with him,” I said dismissively. “Yeah, you totally should be,” she agreed. “But that look in your eye says you’re not.” “That’s just the part of my brain which is blinded by his hotness. I refuse to listen to her because she’s a slut. The sensible part of my brain says hell no and I’ll be keeping company with her and her chastity belt from now on.” “Okay,” Darcy said in a way which told me she wasn’t totally convinced but there wasn’t much I could do about that. My track record spoke for itself. The Atlas pinged again. And again. “At least let’s see how hard he’s grovelling,” she said with a wicked smile. I laughed and moved to grab my Atlas from the bed. Caleb: That’s so cold, Tory. I know you felt things too... the noises you were making in response to them are kinda hard to deny ;) Caleb: Do you want me to beg? Do you like the idea of getting me on my knees for you? Caleb: Are you ignoring me now? Can’t we just agree to disagree about the whole throne issue and take out our frustrations over the situation on each other? I promise, I’m super frustrated over it and it will take a lot of work to make me feel any better about it... Caleb: You wanna see how frustrated I am...? I really need help working through this... The last message contained a photograph which Caleb had taken of himself in a mirror after getting out of the shower. His blonde curls were damp and looked darker than usual and every inch of his exposed, muscular body glistened with fat drops of moisture. The picture cut off at his waist and his navy eyes blazed with an intensity which made me swallow a lump in my throat. Caleb: Want to come over and see the rest? Darcy released a breath of laughter. “Well he certainly knows what he wants.” My gaze raked over the picture of his tight abs glistening with water and I groaned. “Why does he have to be such an asshole?” I complained. “Well if he wasn’t, you probably wouldn’t like him at all,” she reasoned and I couldn’t help but laugh at that. “That is a tragically accurate assessment,” I agreed. I decided to leave Caleb hanging and closed down the private messages with a smile tugging at the corner of my mouth. (tory)

I set a fast pace back towards the House and their footsteps followed close behind me, punctuated with hissed fragments of conversation as they tried to figure out what to do. As we closed in on the glass building, the boy declared that he was going to seek out Darcy and left us, his feet hitting the path at a thumping pace as he ran. I ignored them both and kept going all the way back to the House, taking the stairs two at a time before striding through the common room. I received several curious glances as we passed but most people had headed to their rooms already and the look I threw the others was enough to stop them from taking photographs or asking questions. I made it to my bedroom door before Sofia caught up to me again and she was even brave enough to grab my arm to halt me. “What?” I asked, lacing my voice with a bit of threat. Sofia blanched at my tone but didn’t back down and I found myself equally surprised and impressed by the devotion of this nothing little Fae to the girl in my arms. “Why are you taking her to your room?” she demanded. “I’ve got her bag right here with her key and-” “And while she’s in this state she could lose control again and burn the whole House down,” I replied. “I’ll have to stay with her tonight until she sleeps off the alcohol you watched her consume.” There was more than a hint of accusation in my tone but the girl didn’t even flinch this time. “And that’s all you’re going to do?” Sofia demanded. “You’re not going to play some trick on her or hurt her or...” She didn’t finish that accusation but her gaze flickered to the point where my hand was gripping Roxy’s bare thigh as I held her. “I’m not a fucking rapist,” I snapped. “I can have any girl I want in my bed any night of the week, why would I want to molest an unconscious one who hates me?” Sofia backed off instantly, seeming satisfied by whatever she’d seen in my eyes as her shoulders sagged a little. “Okay, I didn’t mean to imply...just...look after her,” she said, frowning at Roxy again with concern as she passed me her bag and backed up. I made to turn away from her then an idea occurred to me. “Wait…Sofia, right?” I asked, trying to sound vaguely friendly. It wasn’t something I attempted often and the frown she gave me said I was terrible at it. “Yes…” “I er, have this… cousin. Third cousin actually, who just emerged as a Pegasus…” “Good for her. Why are you telling me this?” she asked suspiciously. “It’s a him. He’s called…Phillip.” “Phillip?” She looked at me like no one in the world was actually called Phillip and I had to admit I’d never met one. Dammit. Why did I pick that fucking name? “Yeah. Well, as you can imagine in a family of pure blooded Dragons, Phillip isn’t coping so well with the shame of-” “Shame of what?” she asked, a clear challenge in her eyes for me to dare to finish that sentence. And in hindsight implying her Order was shameful probably wasn’t the best way to get her to help me. I shifted Roxy in my arms and sighed, wondering if I should just abandon this idea. But this girl had impressed me tonight despite her weakness and I didn’t really have anyone else to ask so I barrelled on. “I’ll level with you. Me calling your Order shameful is about the closest to a compliment he’d get from a member of my family on the subject. He’s been locked in his house, hidden away from the world, his father has actually considered killing him to conceal his true nature. He’s…alone. And he could really use someone of his Order to talk to…” My throat felt tight, I didn’t know if this was a terrible idea but Xavier had sounded so broken on the phone earlier, so desperate, I just wanted to try and help him. And maybe having another Pegasus to talk to would help him see some good in what he was. (Darius POV)

Two targets in particular seemed to interest [Ariel] Sharon’s army. One was the PLO Research Center. There were no guns at the PLO Research Center, no ammunition and no fighters. But there was something more dangerous—books about Palestine, old records and land deeds belonging to Palestinian families, photographs about Arab life in Palestine, historical archives about the Arab life in Palestine and, most important, maps—maps of pre-1948 Palestine with every Arab village on it before the state of Israel came into being and erased many of them. The Research Center was like an ark containing the Palestinians’ heritage—some of their credentials as a nation. In a certain sense, this is what Sharon most wanted to take home from Beirut. You could read it in the graffiti the Israeli boys left behind on the Research Center walls: [/block]Palestinians? What’s that?[block] And [/block]Palestinians, fuck you[block], and [/block]Arafat, I will hump your mother[block]. (The PLO later forced Israel to return the entire archive as part of a November 1983 prisoner exchange.)

What is it about shoes? I mean, I like most kinds of clothes, but a good pair of shoes can just reduce me to jelly. Sometimes, when Suze isn't at home, I open my wardrobe and just stare at all my pairs of shoes, like some mad collector. And once I lined them all up on my bed and took a photograph of them. Which might seem a bit weird—but I thought, I've got loads of photos of people I don't really like, so why not take one of something I really love?

Hallucinations relate to the higher cognitive functions of the brain. I was reading about someone at Columbia who asked volunteers to differentiate between houses and faces. Signals in the frontal cortex became active whenever subjects expected to see a face, irrespective of what the actual stimulus was. They would look at a house and "see" a face. It's called, you know Predictive coding. The brain has an expectation of what it will see, then compares this with information from the eyes. When this goes tits up, hallucinations occur. Our eyes don't present to our brains exact photographs of the things we see. They are more like sketches and impressions chattering along the optic nerve for the brain to interpret. That's what optical illusions are about. The brain's software is perfectly capable of simulating a vision in this way

For a fleeting moment, as Sujin passes me the photograph and I hold this flimsy, curling image in my hands, I understand what it would be like to think only about tomorrow, instead of just today.

LEVEL THREE VIOLATION SERIOUSNESS SENTENCE PRINCIPAL’S COMMENTS DITCHING ELVIN HISTORY According to a report from the gnomes, Keefe was found hiding in the Level Four wing during afternoon session. 3 out of 10 Warning issued. It’s the first day of sessions and Keefe is already causing trouble—and he can argue that his photographic memory should exempt him from “boring lectures that repeat what’s in the textbook” all he wants! Elvin History is a vital session, and I would’ve given him a week of detention if I could, but none of the Mentors are prepared to be supervising punishments yet. So, I let Keefe off with a warning (reminding him about expulsion!). I’m sure he’ll give everyone plenty of reasons to assign detention soon. This is going to be a very long year.… —Dame Alina VIOLATION SERIOUSNESS SENTENCE PRINCIPAL’S COMMENTS DISRESPECT FOR ACADEMY PROPERTY According to a report from Lady Galvin, Keefe took it upon himself to turn his alchemy table into solid silver. 5 out of 10 One week of detention assigned. Apparently Lady Galvin asked Keefe to impress her, and this is what happened. Clearly this is not what she meant. Though, I suppose it is rather impressive—not that I would give Keefe the satisfaction of knowing that! —Dame Alina VIOLATION SERIOUSNESS SENTENCE PRINCIPAL’S COMMENTS DITCHING PHYSICAL EDUCATION According to a report from the gnomes, Keefe was found hiding in his PE locker during session. 3 out of 10 One week of detention assigned. It’s highly likely that Keefe has used this hiding place before, since his absence could easily be overlooked in the chaos of the group session. Clearly procedures need to be implemented to ensure this behavior is prevented. —Dame Alina VIOLATION SERIOUSNESS SENTENCE PRINCIPAL’S

Suppose you ask me what is the content of Van Gogh’s famous painting of the yellow chair. What exactly does it mean? you ask: what am I supposed to understand, about this chair, or about the world, from looking at this picture? I might reply: it’s a chair, that’s all. But in that case what’s so special about the picture? Wouldn’t a photograph of a chair do just as well? Why travel all these miles to see a picture of a chair? I am likely to argue that this painting is saying something special about this particular chair, and also about the world as seen through the image of this chair. I might try to put my thoughts and feelings into words. ‘It is an invitation to see the life that spreads from people into all their products, the way in which life radiates from the meanest things, so that nothing is at rest, all is becoming.’ But couldn’t he have written that message on the bottom of the canvas? Why does he need a chair to communicate a thought like that? I am likely to respond that my words are only a gesture; that the real meaning of the painting is bound up with, inseparable from, the image—that it resides in the very shapes and colours of the chair, is inseparable from Van Gogh’s distinctive style, and cannot be translated completely into another idiom.

He says the bite marks on the torso aren’t consistent with sobek teeth. This person was already dead when they were dumped into the Istros. The sobek must have seen an easy meal and hauled it down to its lair to eat later.” She swallowed the dryness in her mouth and again looked at the body. A dryad female. Her chest cavity had been ripped open, heart and internal organs removed, and bite marks peppered— “These wounds look like the ones you got from the kristallos. And the mer’s lab figured this body was probably five days old, judging by the level of decay.” “The night we were attacked.” Bryce studied the analysis. “There was clear venom in the wounds. Tharion says he could feel it inside the corpse even before the mer did tests on it.” Most of those in the House of Many Waters could sense what flowed in someone’s body—illnesses and weaknesses and, apparently, venom. “But when they tested it …” She blew out a breath. “It negated magic.” It had to be the kristallos. Bryce cringed, reading on, “He looked into records of all unidentified bodies the mer found in the past couple years. They found two with identical wounds and this clear venom right around the time of …” She swallowed. “Around when Danika and the pack died. A dryad and a fox shifter male. Both reported missing. This month, they’ve found five with these marks and the venom. All reported missing, but a few weeks after the fact.” “So they’re people who might not have had many close friends or family,” Hunt said. “Maybe.” Bryce again studied the photograph. Made herself look at the wounds. Silence fell, interrupted only by the distant sounds of Lehabah’s show downstairs. She said quietly, “That’s not the creature that killed Danika.” Hunt ran a hand through his hair. “There might have been multiple kristallos—” “No,” she insisted, setting down the papers. “The kristallos isn’t what killed Danika.” Hunt’s brow furrowed. “You were on the scene, though. You saw it.” “I saw it in the hall, not in the apartment. Danika, the pack, and the other three recent victims were in piles.” She could barely stand to say it, to think about it again.

I think the world..the world continues just goes on doing what it does whether I take a picture or not. My art--it's about choosing when I release the shutter. It's not about setting up a scene and making a picture of it. It's about being somewhere at the exact right moment and deciding it's a moment when no one else might think it's anything. He nods. "I like that.

Chapter 2: The Blinders of the Senses: Awakening from the Sensory Dream Close your eyes and imagine standing in a garden. The air is fragrant with the scent of flowers, and the sun's warmth kisses your skin. You hear the rustle of leaves, the chirping of birds, and the distant hum of life. This sensory symphony envelops you, defining your experience of the world around you. But what if I told you that this symphony is both a blessing and a limitation? Welcome to the chapter where we pull back the curtain on the senses—the windows through which we perceive reality. These senses are our gateways to the world, allowing us to touch, taste, hear, see, and smell. They are our connection to the external, the bridge that links us to the physical universe. However, in their splendor lies a trap—a trap that keeps us tethered to the surface of existence. Picture this: you're in a theater, engrossed in a captivating movie. The screen and the story before you are so compelling that you forget you're sitting in a theater, watching a mere projection. In the same way, our senses project a vivid reality that captivates us, making us forget that they're just a means of perception, not the ultimate truth. Our senses act as both guides and misguides. They offer us a glimpse into the world, but they also distort reality. They're like a paintbrush in the hands of an artist, creating a beautiful but partial picture. We become so focused on this picture that we overlook the canvas on which it's painted—the canvas of consciousness. Consider the blind spots in your eyes. These are spots where you literally cannot see, yet your brain fills in the gaps seamlessly, creating a complete image. Similarly, our senses have "blind spots" when it comes to the inner world of thoughts, emotions, and consciousness. They excel at perceiving the external, but they struggle to illuminate the internal. Herein lies the paradox: while our senses are our windows to the world, they can also be our blinders, keeping us from seeing the whole picture. Just as a map provides information about the terrain but not the essence of a place, our senses provide data about the world but not the essence of our being. So, how do we escape this sensory dream and peer beyond the blinders? The answer lies in a shift of focus. We must turn our attention inwards, away from the dazzling spectacle of the external world. It's here, in the quietude of introspection, that we can begin to untangle the threads of our consciousness from the threads of sensation. In the coming pages, we'll delve into the paradox of perception and introspection. We'll journey through the ways our senses illuminate the external and yet leave us in the dark about the internal. And most importantly, we'll explore the profound power of looking beyond the surface, awakening to a reality that transcends the sensory landscape. So, get ready to peel back the layers of perception, to unveil the subtle dance between our senses and our consciousness. As we journey through this chapter, remember: just as a photograph captures a moment in time, our senses capture a moment in reality. But to grasp the essence of existence, we must go beyond the snapshot and embrace the living, breathing symphony of

Do you know what I like best about photographs?” “What?” I said. “They stop time.

The reason behind Israel’s engagement with Lebanon was justified at the time as based on national security grounds, with other nations admiring the Jewish state’s actions and wanting to learn from them, but there was something more existential at work. In his 1998 book on the Middle East, From Beirut to Jerusalem, the New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman gave an anecdote from 1982 about the real, less acknowledged mission of Israeli forces: Two targets in particular seemed to interest [Ariel] Sharon’s army. One was the PLO Research Center. There were no guns at the PLO Research Center, no ammunition and no fighters. But there was something more dangerous—books about Palestine, old records and land deeds belonging to Palestinian families, photographs about Arab life in Palestine, historical archives about the Arab life in Palestine and, most important, maps—maps of pre-1948 Palestine with every Arab village on it before the state of Israel came into being and erased many of them. The Research Center was like an ark containing the Palestinians’ heritage—some of their credentials as a nation. In a certain sense, this is what Sharon most wanted to take home from Beirut. You could read it in the graffiti the Israeli boys left behind on the Research Center walls: [/block]Palestinians? What’s that?[block] And [/block]Palestinians, fuck you[block], and [/block]Arafat, I will hump your mother[block]. (The PLO later forced Israel to return the entire archive as part of a November 1983 prisoner exchange.)56 It is not hard to see why this attitude was and remains so appealing to some governments. It is a desire to militarily destroy an opponent but also erase its history and ability to remember what has been lost. When surveillance technology is added to the mix, tested on unwilling subjects, it’s even harder to successfully resist.

I’m not starting another cycle of violence.” “It’s already started!” “I don’t care.” His voice is firm and final. “I have two children, Seb. I hope to have more. I missed out on nine years with Simone. I want to live every second I have left by her side. If anything had gone differently at that wedding . . . Simone would be getting a phone call instead of her husband home on a plane. I won’t do that to her, or to Henry and Serena. My daughter doesn’t even know me yet, Seb. I won’t have her grow up with just a photograph for a father.” “And what about the rest of us?” Dante looks at me with his black eyes so like our father’s. “I love you, Sebastian. I always will. But Simone and my children are my family now. I have to put them first.” I can’t believe he’s actually leaving. Not now, when we need him the most.

or trepidation, like they wanted to run away as fast as they could once the photo was taken. But Manfred Lange appeared happy to be photographed. His occupation was listed as art historian, and his date of birth as 29 June 1871. All consistent with what Anna knew about him. She flipped the little cardboard folder of his work permit over. Underneath was a membership card to the NSDAP, the Nazi Party. Again, his unapologetic face stared out at her. Member number 149578. So he had been a party member. Anna twinged a little. Had he told her he had been a party member? People with important jobs usually had to be, and it didn’t necessarily mean they were true believers, or even sympathizers. Still, it bothered her. She scanned the room trying not to appear furtive but failing. She quickly flipped pages to see if she could find his Fragebogen, the questionnaire the Americans would have made him complete. But it wasn’t there, of course, because these were the Germans’ files, not the Americans’. Deeply uncomfortable, she flipped back to the party membership card. The date of issue was 20 April 1933. Hitler’s birthday. Manfred Lange had been what the Germans called a March Violet—a late bloomer. March Violets were those who joined the party right after Hitler had seized full authority in March of 1933. Many with elite jobs and who considered themselves to have standing in society, rushed to join the party in order to be on the right side of the power grab. Probably that’s what Manfred Lange had done, too, like millions of others. She closed the folder indicating she was ready to go. She wanted to be out of the building and far away. “Find anything we should know about?” Bender asked, as he held the door for her. “No,” she lied. “Okay. I’ll take your word for it,” he said, climbing into the driver’s seat. The air had turned colder and the sky was socked in with dense clouds. “Looks like we’re in the clear for now. At least with the folks working for us.” He shot her a look. “Should you have let me see Herr Lange’s information?” Anna retaliated to deflect any further line of questioning. He smiled as he started the engine. “Probably not,” he said, “but I can’t help it. I’m so nosy.” Six “Where were you? I couldn’t find you at all yesterday.” Cooper was flustered and irritated but a smile appeared when Anna looked up at him from her desk. Things had piled up while she was out with Bender, so she had come in early to catch up. Anna honestly couldn’t remember if Manfred Lange had mentioned being a party member; she could only recall that he was very against the Nazis’ attitude toward art and free speech to the point where the memories had upset him. She hated that these misgivings lived on and probably would forever. One day, Amalia would ask her what she had done in the war. “I went with Bender to Darmstadt. I thought you knew about that,” she said. “He told me he had checked with you.” “That’s right. Of course. Was it a successful trip?” He sat down in the chair next to her table, intent on something. “I think so. He asked me to help him translate some paperwork. He was checking on some personnel? I didn’t find anything.” “Sounds like good news. For us, anyway. We already had to fire some people when their past caught up with them.” “Because they were party members?” “Or worse. Makes sense, but we had to let some very qualified people go. And with all these government types breathing down our necks, we can’t afford a single screw up. Washington is just waiting for something to go wrong so they can scrap this whole operation.” His face sank back into the shadows it had carried for the past weeks. He leaned forward and dropped his face into his hands. Anna felt sorry for him. “That won’t happen,” she said. “You will make sure of it.” She placed a hand on his shoulder. Without looking at her, Cooper took her hand in his and held it in place, his

I took a black and white photograph, which I also posted on Instagram. Her New Balance shoes and her feet crossed, hanging as she sat atop the pile of aluminum chairs, against the backdrop of the many legs of the chairs shining in the street lights in contrast to her dark shoes and leggings, were so captivating. There was a lightness in the way she sat there with her crossed legs dangling, as if she was perched on a cloud and it was the most natural thing as she was my angel. I was still unsure if she really existed or if I had only made her up with Pinto cat one night. It was all like a lucid dream. I was so glad for us and for us becoming rich soon too. I was so glad I could provide her with a future in Europe. I was so glad we would be rich and happy and we would be able to make all our dreams come true and travel the world freely together. I can show her Italy and Hungary and Europe. We can pick where do we want to live or make family. I knew all my life, all my work had led to this girl, this moment, and this future. Ours. She started to rap in Spanish in the Rioplatense dialect as I started to record her. „Loco, loco…” - she was so cute, it sounded like she had learned it on the streets of Buenos Aires, skipping school. She was amazing - so young, so true, so natural and pure and cute. I couldn't get enough of her. I wanted to make kids with her. With only her. Nobody else. By the wall of the church and the bar tables, there were a bunch of metal mobile railings with the Ajuntamiento de Barcelona logo in the middle of each of them. I told Martina to squat down to the level of the Ajuntamiento sign, and before I could finish my sentence, she was already doing it. She posed with the mobile railings, making a funny, cool and happy face while squeezing the Ajuntamiento logo between two of her fingers and pointing at it with her other hand, as if we were mocking the authorities of the Ajuntamiento. She was reading my mind. Like she knew magic. She was such a good girl. She was so pretty, smart and sexy. She was smiling, biting her lower lip, excited, turned on, and in love, I thought, looking like a bunny, or like Whitney Houston on the Brazilian live concert video, so I began to call her “Bunny”. I showed her how Whitney was smiling the same way. I was so blind to see the connection. (“The Cocaine Queen”) I was so much in love with her, so under her spell, I just really wanted her to be the One, I guess. I explained to her that the Camorra was one of my costumers and they had a club close by too and they were taking away other people's coffeeshops, menacing their lives and their families'. I explained to her that we were going to do all demolition and remodeling without any permit, without telling a word to anyone. I told her that we would lie to the residents of the building above us about what we were going to do there for months and months. I told her that she must keep it as our secret. She was nodding happily and she seemed happy that I trusted her. I explained everything to her, I told her about Rachel and Tom and I signing the founding document at Amina's office at the beginning of the same year, 2013. She seemed to understand the weight of all I told her and the reasons why I told her about it all, so she would know, so she wouldn't make a mistake saying the wrong thing in the wrong place at the wrong time. I asked her to pay attention to her surroundings in Barcelona from then on, as there were a lot of criminals, and she was a very pretty girl - not only my girlfriend. She seemed to take it as a privilege to be my girlfriend, and she seemed eternally happy, as was I. I told her that she was the only person I fully trusted. I wanted to send the video of Martina rapping on WhatsApp to Adam, but Martina told me I shouldn't because it was late and, at the end, Adam was my boss. “Yeah but he is not really my boss, in Spain, I am the boss.

Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. Lunch with Diana. A big day--a massive, humongous day, in fact. I got there ten minutes early, feeling decidedly nervous. The Kensington Palace front door was opened by her beaming butler. He walked me up the stairs, chatting cheerfully about the weather and my journey, as if a tabloid editor prowling around Diana’s home was a perfectly normal occurrence. He said that the “Boss” was running a bit late, joking that “she’ll be furious you are here first!” and invited me to have a drink. “What does she have?” I asked. “Water, usually,” he replied, “but wouldn’t you rather have a nice glass of wine? She won’t mind in the slightest.” I readily agreed, if only to calm my racing heartbeat. He then left me alone in the suitably regal sitting room. Diana had a perfectly normal piano covered in perfectly normal family snaps. It’s just that this family was the most photographed on the planet. Lots of pictures of her boys, the young heirs, perhaps the men who will kill off, or secure, the very future of the monarchy. To us, they were just soap opera stars, semi-real figments of tabloid headlines and the occasional palace balcony wave. But here they were, her boys, in picture frames, like any other adored sons. Just sitting in her private room was fascinating. Her magazines lay on the table, from Vogue to Hello, as well as her newspapers--the Daily Mail at the top of the pile, obviously, if distressingly. After I had spent ten minutes on my own, she swept in, gushing: “I’m so sorry to have kept you, Piers. I hope Paul has been looking after you all right.” And then came what was surely one of the most needless requests of all time: “Would you mind awfully if William joins us for lunch? He’s on an exeat from Eton, and I just thought that given you are a bit younger than most editors, it might be good for both of you to get to know each other.” “I’m sorry, but that would be terribly inconvenient,” I replied sternly. Diana blushed slightly and started a stuttering “Yes, of course, I’m so sorry…” apology, when I burst out laughing. “Yes, ma’am, I think I can stretch to allowing the future king to join us for lunch.” The absurdity of this conversation held no apparent bounds.

Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. “What’s been the most upsetting thing you’ve had to read about yourself?” “Well, those pictures the other day of my supposed cellulite upset me a lot actually. It really hurt me. It was too painful, too personal. It’s my body everyone was talking about, not just my face. I felt invaded because they put the cameras deliberately onto my legs.” Diana’s relationship with the paparazzi was obviously complex. She professed to hate them: “I know most of the paparazzi and their number plates. They think I am stupid but I know where they are. I’ve had ten years practice. I would support an antistalking bill tomorrow.” Then she took me to the window and started showing me the various media cars, vans, and motorbikes lurking outside. But when I asked why she doesn’t go out of one of the ten other more discreet exits, she exposed her contrary side: “I want to go out the front like anyone else. Why should I change my life for them?” “Because it would make your life easier?” I said. William was equally upset by the constant prying lenses: “Why do they have to chase my mother around so much? It’s unfair on her.” I was torn between genuine concern for the young man protecting his mum so gallantly, and a sense of foreboding for him that one day it would be him, not his mother, who would be chased just as aggressively. How do you explain to a thirteen-year-old boy that he sells papers and therefor he’s a valuable commodity to photographers and editors like me?

Piers Morgan Piers Morgan is a British journalist best known for his editorial work for the Daily Mirror from 1995 through 2004. He is also a successful author and television personality whose recent credits include a recurring role as a judge on NBC’s America’s Got Talent. A controversial member of the tabloid press during Diana’s lifetime, Piers Morgan established a uniquely close relationship with the Princess during the 1990s. I mentioned I’d been in contact with her mother. “Oh crikey, that sounds dangerous!” “She’s a feisty woman, isn’t she?” William giggled. “Granny’s great fun after a few gin and tonics.” “Sh, William,” Diana said, giggling too. “My mother’s been a tremendous source of support to me. She never talks publicly; she’s just there for me.” “And what about William’s other granny?” “I have enormous respect for the Queen; she has been so supportive, you know. People don’t see that side of her, but I do all the time. She’s an amazing person.” “Has she been good over the divorce?” “Yes, very. I just want it over now so I can get on with my life. I’m worried about the attacks I will get afterward.” “What attacks?” “I just worry that people will try and knock me down once I am out on my own.” This seemed unduly paranoid. People adored her. I asked William how he was enjoying Eton. “Oh, it’s great, thanks.” “Do you think the press bother you much?” “Not the British press, actually. Though the European media can be quite annoying. They sit on the riverbank watching me rowing with their cameras, waiting for me to fall in! There are photographers everywhere if I go out. Normally loads of Japanese tourists taking pictures. All saying “Where’s Prince William?’ when I’m standing right next to them.” “How are the other boys with you?” “Very nice. Though a boy was expelled this week for taking ecstasy and snuff. Drugs are everywhere, and I think they’re stupid. I never get tempted.” “Does matron take any?” laughed Diana. “No, Mummy, it gives her hallucinations.” “What, like imagining you’re going to be king?” I said. They both giggled again. “Is it true you’ve got Pamela Anderson posters on your bedroom wall?” “No! And not Cindy Crawford, either. They did both come to tea at the palace, though, and were very nice.” William had been photographed the previous week at a party at the Hammersmith Palais, where he was mobbed by young girls. I asked him if he’d had fun. “Everyone in the press said I was snogging these girls, but I wasn’t,” he insisted. Diana laughed. “One said you stuck your tongue down her throat, William. Did you?” “No, I did not. Stop it, Mummy, please. It’s embarrassing.” He’d gone puce. It was a very funny exchange, with a flushed William finally insisting: “I won’t go to any more public parties; it was crazy. People wouldn’t leave me alone.” Diana laughed again. “All the girls love a nice prince.” I turned to more serious matters. “Do you think Charles will become king one day?” “I think he thinks he will,” replied Diana, “but I think he would be happier living in Tuscany or Provence, to be honest.” “And how are you these days--someone told me you’ve stopped seeing therapists?” “I have, yes. I stopped when I realized they needed more therapy than I did. I feel stronger now, but I am under so much pressure all the time. People don’t know what it’s like to be in the public eye, they really don’t.

Let’s have a bet, then. If I’m right, you kiss me,” he says. “And if I’m right?” “Name it.” It’s like taking candy from a baby. Mr. Macho Guy’s ego is about to be taken down a notch, and I’m all too happy to be the one to do it. “If I win you take me and the class project seriously,” I tell him. “No teasing me, no making ridiculous comments.” “Deal. I’d feel terrible if I didn’t tell you I have a photographic memory.” “Alex, I’d feel terrible if I didn’t tell you I copied the info straight from the book.” I look at the research I’d done, then flip open to the corresponding page in my chem book. “Without looking, what does it need to be cooled at?” I ask. Alex is a guy who thrives on challenges. But this time the tough guy is going to lose. He closes his own book and stares at me, his jaw set. “Twenty degrees. And it needs to be dissolved at one hundred degrees, not seventy,” he answers confidently. I scan the page, then my notes. Then back at the page again. I can’t be wrong. Which page did I--“Oh, yeah. One hundred degrees.” I look up at him in complete shock. “You’re right.” “You gonna kiss me now, or later?” “Right now,” I say, which I can tell shocks him because his hands go still. At home, my life is dictated by my mom and dad. At school, it’s different. I need to keep it that way, because if I have no control in every aspect of my life I might as well be a mannequin. “Really?” he asks. “Yeah.” I take one of his hands in mine. I’d never be this bold if we had an audience, and am thankful for the privacy of the nonfiction titles surrounding us. His breathing slows as I sit up on my knees and lean into him. I’m ignoring the fact that his fingers are long and rough and that I’ve never actually touched him before. I’m nervous. I shouldn’t be, though. I’m the one in control this time. I can feel him restraining himself. He’s letting me make the move, which is a good thing. I’m afraid of what this boy would do if he let loose. I place his hand against my cheek so it cups my face and I hear him groan. I want to smile because his reaction proves I have the power. He’s unmoving as our eyes meet. Time stops again. Then I turn my head into his hand and kiss the inside of his palm. “There, I kissed you,” I say, giving him back his hand and ending the game. Mr. Latino with the big ego got bested by a ditzy, blond bimbo.

On the way home we blast the radio and roll down the windows and sing at the top of our lungs. The night air tastes like starlight. I haven’t had a drop to drink and don’t know what being drunk feels like, but right now I swear I’m tipsy. The edges of the moment are blurred like an old photograph. Just enough that I can’t quite see Aaron’s expression, and I force his words into the music box in my brain, slam the lid, turn the key, and forget about them.

Stop talking. Now.” Deanna’s head fell back and she started laughing. It was a full-bodied belly laugh that spread over him like a breeze on a hot day. The sound was so sweet that it almost made up for how big of a disgusting pervert he felt like right now. While she was still chuckling, she touched his arm. “Don’t feel bad. How old were you then?” “It was senior year, so seventeen,” Lucky answered, still feeling gross. “See? You were a teenager, too. It’s fine. Really.” She continued giggling, and he had to admit that the sound made him so happy that he didn’t even care that it was at his expense. “It still feels wrong.” His shoulders shook as a chill ran through him, and it wasn’t the good kind. It was the grossed-out kind. “I think it’s hilarious,” she said, clearly enjoying seeing him squirm. “I’m so glad I can amuse you,” he said flatly. “Well, I think it’s only fair since I seemed to have offered hours of amusement for you—” Without even thinking, he reached over the seat and started tickling her. She wiggled and laughed, begging him to stop. He did, but only because a call came in. When he saw the picture on his console’s display, he knew he had to answer it. Pressing the answer button, he extended his patent greeting to his publicist. “Hello, beautiful.” “Why can’t you just play nice with others, especially the press?” Jessie Sloan-Courtland asked in her usual no nonsense tone. Jessie wasn’t one for niceties. She was all business, all the time. Deciding to ignore her rhetorical question and her dislike for small talk, he pushed on undeterred. “I’ve been good. How about you?” “Lucky. You can’t treat the press like that.” Jessie seemed to have the same game plan as he did. This conversation was going to happen, so he figured he might as well just get it over with. “I wasn’t there for them. I was there for the kids.” “It doesn’t matter. They were there, and whether you like it or not, you have a responsibility—” “I had a responsibility to visit the kids and their families. I had a responsibility to protect the people I brought with me. And I lived up to my responsibilities.” “I’m not going to argue with you. You’re supposed to be cleaning up your act. We agreed. And your image is your responsibility. When you elbow photographers in the nose, you open yourself up for lawsuits, and that is not something sponsors think is appealing. You know what’s on the line with this bout. Don’t screw it up.” “Yes, Mom,” he answered—his normal response for when Jessie was right. “You know, you’re not nearly as cute as you think you are,” she said, sounding less than impressed. “Awww, you think I’m cute. Does Zach know? I don’t want to come betw—” “Goodbye, Lucky.” “Bye, beautiful.” When the call disconnected, Lucky felt a little twinge of guilt that Jessie had even had to make that call. He knew better. “Wow. She’s awesome.” Unlike Jessie, Deanna did sound impressed. “Yeah. She is pretty awesome,” he agreed. “And so beautiful.” Deanna was still looking at Jessie’s picture on the console. He didn’t want her to get the wrong idea just because he’d called her beautiful. “Her husband sure thinks so. He’s actually a friend of mine. Have you heard of Zach Courtland?” Deanna was quiet for a beat. Then she snapped her fingers. “Was he the one in the Calvin Klein ads?” “That’s him.” “Wow. She’s married to him? He’s…hot.” Well, this conversation had taken a turn Lucky didn’t like. Not one little bit.

There was a framed photograph hung on the wall in front of me, and when I said your name I saw you in the picture. Well, I saw your back, and your ling, bright ponytail fluttering. The image is black and white, and you're running, and you cast a number of shadows that cluster about you like a bouquet. There's a figure running a little ahead of you and at first that figure seems to be a shadow too, except that it casts a backward glance that establishes an entirely separate personality. The figure's features are wooden, but mobile-some sort of sprite moves within, not gently, but convulsively. A beauty that rattles you until you're in tears, that was my introduction to Rowan Wayland. You and the puppet-I decided it was a puppet- were leaping through an open door, and in the corner of that distant room was a cupboard, fallen onto its side There was a sign on the cupboard door. (I tilted my head: The sign read TOYS.) It's a photo in which lines abruptly draw back from each other and the ceilings and floors spin off in different directions, but for all the world that's pictured doesn't seem to be ending. You were both running in place, you blurred around the edges, and the puppet hardly blurred at all, and the puppet was looking back, not at you, but at me. It felt like the two of you were running for your lives, for fear I'd take them Or you could've been racing eaxh other home. TOYS, the sign reads, but signs aren't guarantees. Either way I wanted to go too, and wished the puppet would hold out its hand to me, or beckon me, or do something more than return my gaze with that strange tolerance

Do you want to be a professor too?” He shrugs. “Maybe one day. I’d like to travel more first though, work on dig sites in places like Greece or Central America. Ancient civilizations are buried everywhere. It’s, like, no matter where you walk, you never know what could be under your feet. I want a job that lets me see all the things I want to see before I get stuck behind a desk.” “I know what you mean. I can’t wait to see the world and document it, photojournalist style.” An image of the two of us traveling together pops into my mind: him digging up the world and me taking pictures of it. I squash those butterflies too. “Yeah?” he asks, his smile finally revealing teeth. “I can see you doing that, like for National Geographic or something.” “You haven’t even seen any of my pictures,” I scoff. “ Besides, can you imagine how competitive a job that would be? Those photographers are incredible. They have years of experience under their belts. I’m not even eighteen years old yet.” “Doesn’t matter. You’ve got time,” he says. “You know what someone said to me once? Figure out what you love doing, then figure out how to make money doing it.” I turn the thought over in my head. “I like that.” He smiles, plunging his hands into his pockets. “So tell me about you. Who is Pippa, in the broad scheme of things?” He winks. I return the smile. “Well, I’m an only child, born and raised in Chicago--” “Ah, Chicago. That’s the accent.” “I told you before, I don’t have an accent.” “To your ears you don’t.” He laughs. “But it’s definitely there to the rest of us.” “Is that a bad thing?” “No,” he says. “It’s cute.” Oh, I might die. A boy used the word “cute.” And when describing something about me. I can’t look at him.

One could say rice is almost as important as water. Yet like the taste of water, my deep reverence for rice is ineffable. I understand why Bryan doesn't get it. I can explain and explain the cultural significance of rice until he concedes its importance, but he'll never be more than a tourist. He'll never be more than a voyeur, an audience. He wasn't there when my mother stirred rice flour and water into glue to affix old photographs to the pages of a scrapbook. He wasn't there then she showed me how it's done and proclaimed what wonders live inside a single grain of rice. He wasn't there when she mixed that same slurry into chili paste for the kimchi or tamed peeling wallpaper with it. He wasn't there when she used it to fix a punctured paper screen. Rice taught me imagination. Rice taught me wonder and nostalgia. But he wasn't there.

I was curious to find out more about the handsome Italian Count, so I pressed Andy for information. I began, "Are you going to do some modeling for him?" My Valet smiled and answered, "Don’t you want me to?" "Yes, of course! It will be interesting to see how a professional fashion photographer works. After all, if we are going to model for Aziz and if I’m to be his apprentice, we have to know what we are getting ourselves into, don’t we?" I asked, testing the waters, to see how he would take my remark. The waiter came to take our order. I continued, "Call him as soon as we return to the hotel and arrange a meeting; I’d like to get to know him better." Andy gave me a sly grin and said, "I believe you are more interested in being with him than you are in finding out more about modeling and photography, correct?" He poked at the tip of my nose. I smiled craftily and answered, "How did you know?" "I saw your longing eyes checking every part of him when we were talking. You are dying to see what he is made of, in bed, aren't you?" he said teasingly.

Where is everyone?” Cat asked, looking around the deserted ship. “Shore leave,” he said laconically. “What about us?” “If it’s urgent, we’ll just have to swim.” Cat yawned and stretched languidly, feeling boneless from Travis’s loving and a long, wonderful nap. “Swim? Ha. I’d go down like a brick. Looks like you’re stuck with me.” Travis tilted her face up and kissed her swiftly. “Remember that, witch. You’re mine.” Her eyes widened into misty silver pools. She looked up at him through dense lashes that glinted red and gold. He smiled. “You really are a pirate, aren’t you?” Cat muttered. “Where you’re concerned, yes.” The sensual rasp in Travis’s voice sent echoes of ecstasy shimmering through her. His smile was rakish and utterly male, reminding her of what it was like to have him deep inside her. It was all Cat could do not to simply stand and stare at her lover. In the slanting afternoon light his eyes had a jewel-like purity of color. His skin was taught, deeply bronzed, and his beard was spun from dark gold. Beneath his faded black T-shirt and casual shorts, his body radiated ease and power. “Don’t move,” Cat ordered, heading back to the cabin. “Where are you going?” “Don’t move!” She raced below deck, grabbed the two camera cases she used most often, and ran back on deck. While Travis watched her with a lazy, sexy gleam in his eyes, she pulled out a camera and a small telephoto lens. When she retreated a few feet back along the deck, he moved as though to follow. “No,” she said. “Stay right where you are. You’re perfect.” “Cat,” he said, amusement curling in his voice, “what are you doing?” “Taking pictures of an off-duty buccaneer.” The motor drive surged quickly, pulling frame after frame of film through the camera. “You’re supposed to be taking pictures of the Wind Warrior,” Travis pointed out. “I am. You’re part of the ship. The most important part. Creator, owner, soul.” She caught the sudden intensity of his expression, an elemental recognition of her words. The motor drive whirred in response to her command. After a few more frames she lowered the camera and walked back to him. “Get used to looking into a camera lens.” Cat warned Travis. “I’ve been itching to photograph you since the first time I looked into those gorgeous, sea-colored eyes of yours.” Laughing softly, he snaked one arm around her and pulled her snugly against his side.

Cat worked tirelessly, absorbed in the subtle changes of light and texture and composition. She darted around Travis like a fire, taking photos of the captain and his ship from various angles. Travis didn’t interfere or require her conversation. He could sense the excitement of creation flooding through her as clearly as he felt it in himself when elusive details of hull design would condense in his mind. Smiling, he watched his lover, enjoying her intense concentration on her work. She handled cameras and lenses with the same total familiarity he handled wind and sail. When her determination to catch the sunlight on the rigging made her forget he was alive, he sat cross-legged on the deck and began splicing rope, not at all upset at being ignored. When Cat realized that Travis wasn’t nearby anymore, she lowered her camera and looked around for him. She found him halfway back on the deck, sitting in a pool of sunlight. His head was bent over some task. Sun glinted over his tawny hair like a miser running fingers through gold. Her heart hesitated, then beat with redoubled strength. She set aside her camera and went to Travis. Without a word she took the rope out of his hands and started pulling off his T-shirt. “What are you doing?” he asked, surprised. “Taking off your shirt.” He blinked, then relaxed beneath Cat’s hands with a pirate’s smile of anticipation. She smiled in return, the serene smile of a sorceress, and threw his T-shirt aside. Then she put rope back into the hands that were reaching for her and picked up her camera once more. “Come back here and finish what you started,” Travis said. “I’m finished. “What about my pants?” “They make a nice contrast with the deck.” “Well, damn.” Disappointed, Travis made a face at the camera, then resumed splicing rope. Cat photographed him as he worked, seated like a god in the center of a golden cataract of light. He watched her with intense, blue-green eyes, measuring her progress around him while she climbed the rigging and the sailing in search of a perfect angle. At one point she miscalculated. He came to his feet in a single motion and snatched her off her perch before she could fall. She laughed and let herself slide down his body, her hands savoring his supple, sun-warmed skin.

- Who told you you could take photographs? I said something about the historic blues neighborhood. She rolled her eyes and turned away. - Is this your business, ma'am? - What if it is? Is it a music store? - It is a community bookstore. And it's closed. And it's not for you. - I'm just interested in local history. this was called the Black Mecca, did you know that? - Local history. Have mercy. Only two reasons people like you come down here. The blues or taking pictures of ruins. We're fascinating to you, long as we're safely dead. - Look, I had nothing to do with whatever happened to your neighborhood. I'm not the one to blame. - You for real? Get the hell out of here. People live here. - I just have some questions. - I am not obliged to be your goddamn cultural tour guide. I walked away hurriedly. - That's right. Go on. Hipster asshole!

Someday Tatiana must tell Alexander how glad she is that her sister Dasha did not die without once feeling what it was like to love. Alexander. Here he is, before he was Tatiana’s, at the age of twenty, getting his medal of valor for bringing back Yuri Stepanov during the 1940 Winter War. Alexander is in his dress Soviet uniform, snug against his body, his stance at-ease and his hand up to his temple in teasing salute. There is a gleaming smile on his face, his eyes are carefree, his whole man-self full of breathtaking, aching youth. And yet, the war was on, and his men had already died and frozen and starved... and his mother and father were gone... and he was far away from home, and getting farther and farther, and every day was his last—one way or another, every day was his last. And yet, he smiles, he shines, he is happy. Anthony is gone so long that his daughters say something must have happened to him. But then he appears. Like his father, he has learned well the poker face and outwardly remains imperturbable. Just as a man should be, thinks Tatiana. A man doesn’t get to be on the President’s National Security Council without steeling himself to some of life’s little adversities. A man doesn’t go through what Anthony went through without steeling himself to some of life’s little adversities. In this hand Anthony carries two faded photographs, flattened by the pages of the book, grayed by the passing years. The kitchen falls quiet, even Rachel and Rebecca are breathless in anticipation. “Let’s see...” they murmur, gingerly picking up the fragile, sepia pictures with their long fingers. Tatiana is far away from them. “Do you want to see them with us, Grammy? Grandpa?” “We know them well,” Tatiana says, her voice catching on something. “You kids go ahead.” The grandchildren, the daughter, the son, the guests circle their heads, gaping. “Washington, look! Just look at them! What did we tell you?” Shura and Tania, 23 and 18, just married. In full bloom, on the steps of the church near Lazarevo, he in his Red Army dress uniform, she in her white dress with red roses, roses that are black in the monochrome photo. She is standing next to him, holding his arm. He is looking into the camera, a wide grin on his face. She is gazing up at him, her small body pressed into him, her light hair at her shoulders, her arms bare, her mouth slightly parted. “Grammy!” Rebecca exclaims. “I’m positively blushing. Look at the way you’re coming the spoon on Grandpa!” She turns to Alexander from the island. “Grandpa, did you catch the way she is looking at you?” “Once or twice,” replies Alexander. The other colorless photo. Tania and Shura, 18 and 23. He lifts her in the air, his arms wrapped around her body, her arms wrapped around his neck, their fresh faces tilted, their enraptured lips in a breathless open kiss. Her feet are off the ground. “Wow, Grammy,” murmurs Rebecca. “Wow, Grandpa.” Tatiana is busily wiping the granite island. “You want to know what my Washington said about you two?” Rebecca says, not looking away from the photograph. “He called you an adjacent Fibonacci pair!” She giggles. “Isn’t that sexy?” Tatiana shakes her head, despite herself glancing at Washington with reluctant affection. “Just what we need, another math expert. I don’t know what you all think math will give you.” And Janie comes over to her father who is sitting at the kitchen table, holding her baby son, bends over Alexander, leans over him, kisses him, her arm around him, and murmurs into his ear, “Daddy, I’ve figured out what I’m going to call my baby. It’s so simple.” “Fibonacci?” She laughs. “Why, Shannon, of course. Shannon.” The

Because I was so involved with Barbara [Stanwyck], I was off-limits for other women, which was something of a problem for the studio. They wanted to promote the image of a carefree young stud—never my style—so I had publicity dates with young actresses around town like Lori Nelson or Debra Paget. This was a relic of the days when the studio system was in its prime. The studio would arrange for two young stars-in-waiting to go out to dinner and a dance and assign a photographer to accompany them. The result would be placed in a fan magazine. It was a totally artificial story documenting a nonexistent relationship, but it served to keep the names of young talents in front of the public. As far as I was concerned, it was part of the job, and usually pleasant enough. When reporters would ask me about my romantic life, which they did incessantly, I had to say things like, "If I go out with one woman a few times, it's considered a romance. If I date a lot of girls, I'm a Casanova. It's one of those 'heads-you-win-tails-I-lose' deals. I don't think it's anybody's business what I do." The last sentence contained my true feelings.

Gil handed Henny one of the cushions and a one-pound coffee can from under the seat. Henny was very suspicious. “What’s this for?” he asked. “Why are you giving me this stuff?” “The cushion is for your sitter,” Gil said, “and the can is for the water.” “What water?” said Henny. He didn’t look too good. “Well, there’s bound to be a little extra water with the three of us sitting here,” said Gil. “And your friend hasn’t done much rowing. He splashes a bit over the side.” Henny glared at me. “Quit it,” he said. “Just quit splashing water into the boat.” I tried to be smooth. By the time we got out into the river, I was doing better. “Two steps forward, one step backward,” said Gil. “We aren’t making much progress against this current.” “I’ll go out a little farther,” I said. “Maybe the current won’t be so strong out there.” I felt very good about things. My rowing was getting better. We were closer to the bowl. The crew was busy and in high spirits. Gil was reading from The Journals of Lewis and Clark. Henny was searching his photographic memory for loose information. “Says here that one time, the expedition had nothing to eat but bear fat and candles,” said Gil. “Now that’s real interesting.” Henny sighed. “Sometimes they ate buffalo humps, and wolf meat, and a root called Wappato. Wappato is supposed to taste like potatoes. Boy, am I hungry. Did anybody bring a snack?” “There might be a few crackers under your seat,” said Gil. “Then again, there might not be.” “There is a box of Wheat Thins,” said Henny after he rummaged around under the seat. “It is soggy, dirty, crushed, and unfit for human consumption.” “I never eat them,” said Gil. “I feed them to the kingfishers. But if you’re really hungry, they’re better than candles.” Henny waved the box in the air. “Is anything going to go right on this trip?” he said. A sea gull swooped down and almost got the box. The crew was starting to feel the hardships. Desperation and hunger had set in. I figured the people from my island would look to the turtle for an answer to this situation, so I tried to do the same. The only thing I could come up with was that the armor on a turtle was much better protection than an old rowboat.

The sensation I was feeling on the clifftop was some sort of reverberation in the air itself.… The whale had submerged and I was still feeling something. The strange rhythm seemed now to be coming from behind me, from the land, so I turned to look across the gorge … where my heart stopped.… Standing there in the shade of the tree was an elephant … staring out to sea!… A female with a left tusk broken off near the base.… I knew who she was, who she had to be. I recognized her from a color photograph put out by the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry under the title “The Last Remaining Knysna Elephant.” This was the Matriarch herself.… She was here because she no longer had anyone to talk to in the forest. She was standing here on the edge of the ocean because it was the next, nearest, and most powerful source of infrasound. The underrumble of the surf would have been well within her range, a soothing balm for an animal used to being surrounded by low and comforting frequencies, by the lifesounds of a herd, and now this was the next-best thing. My heart went out to her. The whole idea of this grandmother of many being alone for the first time in her life was tragic, conjuring up the vision of countless other old and lonely souls. But just as I was about to be consumed by helpless sorrow, something even more extraordinary took place.… The throbbing was back in the air. I could feel it, and I began to understand why. The blue whale was on the surface again, pointed inshore, resting, her blowhole clearly visible. The Matriarch was here for the whale! The largest animal in the ocean and the largest living land animal were no more than a hundred yards apart, and I was convinced that they were communicating! In infrasound, in concert, sharing big brains and long lives, understanding the pain of high investment in a few precious offspring, aware of the importance and the pleasure of complex sociality, these rare and lovely great ladies were commiserating over the back fence of this rocky Cape shore, woman to woman, matriarch to matriarch, almost the last of their kind. I turned, blinking away the tears, and left them to it. This was no place for a mere man.… Early afternoon. They were coming to this place, to this tall grass, all along. They will feed here for a while and then, because there’s no water right here, go down to where those egrets are. There’s water there. After they’ve had a good drink, they might make a big loop and come back here again later to feed some more. It will be a one-family-at-a-time choice as the adults decide when to drink and bathe. When elephants are finally ready to make a significant move, everyone points in the same direction. But they do wait until the matriarch decides. “I’ve seen families cued up waiting for half an hour,” comments Vicki, “waiting for the matriarch to signal, ‘Okay.’” And now they go. Makelele, eleven years old, walks with a deep limp. Five years ago he showed up with a broken right rear leg. It must have been agony, and it’s healed at a horrible angle, almost as if his knee faces backward, shaping that leg like the hock on a horse. Yet he is here, surviving with a little help from his friends. “He’s slow,” Vicki acknowledges. “It’s remarkable that he’s managing, but his family seems to wait for him.” Another Amboseli elephant, named Tito, broke a leg when he was a year old, probably from falling into a garbage pit.

Photos Cherish who you are now If you have been sorting and discarding things in the order I recommend, you have likely stumbled across photographs in many different places, perhaps stuck between books on a shelf, lying in a desk drawer, or hidden in a box of odds and ends. While many may already have been in albums, I’m sure you found the odd photo or two enclosed with a letter or still encased in the envelope from the photo shop. (I don’t know why so many people leave photos in these envelopes.) Because photos tend to emerge from the most unexpected places when we are sorting other categories, it is much more efficient to put them in a designated spot every time you find one and deal with them all at the very end. There is a good reason to leave photos for last. If you start sorting photos before you have honed your intuitive sense of what brings you joy, the whole process will spin out of control and come to a halt. In contrast, once you have followed the correct order for tidying (i.e., clothes, books, papers, komono, sentimental items), sorting will proceed smoothly, and you will be amazed by your capacity to choose on the basis of what gives you pleasure. There is only one way to sort photos, and you should keep in mind that it takes a little time. The correct method is to remove all your photos from their albums and look at them one by one. Those who protest that this is far too much work are people who have never truly sorted photos. Photographs exist only to show a specific event or time. For this reason, they must be looked at one by one. When you do this, you will be surprised at how clearly you can tell the difference between those that touch your heart and those that don’t. As always, only keep the ones that inspire joy. With this method, you will keep only about five per day of a special trip, but this will be so representative of that time that they bring back the rest vividly. Really important things are not that great in number. Unexciting photos of scenery that you can’t even place belong in the garbage. The meaning of a photo lies in the excitement and joy you feel when taking it. In many cases, the prints developed afterward have already outlived their purpose. Sometimes people keep a mass of photos in a big box with the intention of enjoying them someday in their old age. I can tell you now that “someday” never comes. I can’t count how many boxes of unsorted photographs I have seen that were left by someone who has passed away. A typical conversation with my clients goes something like this: “What’s in that box?” “Photos.” “Then you can leave them to sort at the end.” “Oh, but they aren’t mine. They belonged to my grandfather.” Every time I have this conversation it makes me sad. I can’t help thinking that the lives of the deceased would have been that much richer if the space occupied by that box had been free when the person was alive. Besides, we shouldn’t still be sorting photos when we reach old age. If you, too, are leaving this task for when you grow old, don’t wait. Do it now. You will enjoy the photos far more when you are old if they are already in an album than if you have to move and sort through a heavy boxful of them.

By some quirk of fate, I had been chosen—along with five others—as a candidate to be the next equerry to the Princess of Wales. I knew little about what an equerry actually did, but I did not greatly care. I already knew I wanted to do the job. Two years on loan to the royal household would surely be good for promotion, and even if it was not, it had to be better than slaving in the Ministry of Defense, which was the most likely alternative. I wondered what it would be like to work in a palace. Through friends and relatives I had an idea it was not all red carpets and footmen. Running the royal family must involve a lot of hard work for somebody, I realized, but not, surely, for the type of tiny cog that was all I expected to be. In the wardroom of the frigate, alongside in Loch Ewe, news of the signal summoning me to London for an interview had been greeted with predictable ribaldry and a swift expectation that I therefore owed everybody several free drinks. Doug, our quiet American on loan from the U.S. Navy, spoke for many. He observed me in skeptical silence for several minutes. Then he took a long pull at his beer, blew out his mustache, and said, “Let me get this straight. You are going to work for Princess Di?” I had to admit it sounded improbable. Anyway, I had not even been selected yet. I did not honestly think I would be. “Might work for her, Doug. Only might. There’re probably several smooth Army buggers ahead of me in the line. I’m just there to make it look democratic.” The First Lieutenant, thinking of duty rosters, was more practical. “Whatever about that, you’ve wangled a week ashore. Lucky bastard!” Everyone agreed with him, so I bought more drinks. While these were being poured, my eye fell on the portraits hanging on the bulkhead. There were the regulation official photographs of the Queen and Prince Philip, and there, surprisingly, was a distinctly nonregulation picture of the Princess of Wales, cut from an old magazine and lovingly framed by an officer long since appointed elsewhere. The picture had been hung so that it lay between the formality of the official portraits and the misty eroticism of some art prints we had never quite got around to throwing away. The symbolic link did not require the services of one of the notoriously sex-obsessed naval psychologists for interpretation. As she looked down at us in our off-duty moments the Princess represented youth, femininity, and a glamour beyond our gray steel world. She embodied the innocent vulnerability we were in extremis employed to defend. Also, being royal, she commanded the tribal loyalty our profession had valued above all else for more than a thousand years, since the days of King Alfred. In addition, as a matter of simple fact, this tasty-looking bird was our future Queen. Later, when that day in Loch Ewe felt like a relic from another lifetime, I often marveled at the Princess’s effect on military people. That unabashed loyalty symbolized by Arethusa’s portrait was typical of reactions in messhalls and barracks worldwide. Sometimes the men gave the impression that they would have died for her not because it was their duty, but because they wanted to. She really seemed worth it.

In the meantime, Pat was enjoying his first solo conversation with Diana. Previously, he’d seen her only twice at our flat in London in 1980 and again at the prewedding ball in 1981. Pat had been waiting on the palace driveway by our car. Diana’s butler had come out and asked, “Are you Mr. Robertson?” Then he graciously said, “Please come inside.” Pat expected to be shown into the entrance hall to wait more comfortably. He was pleasantly surprised to be led upstairs into Diana’s elegant drawing room. There, Diana’s butler gave him coffee and the newspaper to read while Diana and I finished our tete-a-tete. Pat was caught unawares when Diana breezed in to see him. Pat is six feet three inches tall, but he was struck by Diana’s height and by her natural good looks and vitality. He stood up, saying “Gosh, I don’t know what to call you.” Diana, unassuming and direct as always, replied, “Diana’s just fine.” They sat down together and had a short visit. Pat recalls that they talked about children, hers and ours, and our travel plans for Wales and Scotland. He couldn’t get over how unaffected and natural she was. He was thrilled finally to visit with the wonderful Diana I’d been talking about for years. Pat asked if we’d taken any photographs yet. Diana said, “Yes, but would you like to take another one outside in the garden?” I had finished my coffee and the children had returned from their tour, so we all walked downstairs and out onto the front courtyard and lawn. With my camera, Pat took a picture of Diana standing with the children and me. Then Diana asked one of her staff, who was standing nearby, to use my camera so that Pat could be in a photograph. Then with hugs and good wishes all around, we returned to our car and drove slowly from Kensington Palace. I hated to leave Diana, not knowing when, or even if, we’d see her again.

When we got close to the airport, the reality of the public reaction to Steve’s death began to sink in. Members of the media were everywhere. We drove straight through the gates to pull up right next to the charter plane. The last thing I felt like doing at that moment was to talk to anyone about what had happened. I just wanted to get to Steve. As I walked toward the plane, I turned back to thank the police who had helped us. The tears in their eyes shocked me out of my own personal cocoon of grief. This wasn’t just a job for them. They genuinely felt for us, and suffered Steve’s loss. So many other people loved him too, I thought. All during the endless, three-hour plane ride to Maroochydore, I kept flashing back to our fourteen years of adventures together. My mind kept focusing on another plane ride, so similar to this one, when Bindi and I had to fly from the United States back to Australia after Steve’s mum had died. Part of me wished we could have flown forever, never landing, never facing what we were about to. I concentrated on Bindi and Robert, getting them fed and making sure they were comfortable. But the thought of that last sad flight stayed there in the back of my mind. The plane landed at Maroochydore in the dark. We taxied in between hangars, out of public view. I think it was raining, but perhaps it wasn’t, maybe I was just sad. As I came down the steps of the plane, Frank, Joy, and Wes stood there. We all hugged one another. Wes sobbed. We managed to help one another to the hangar, where we all piled into two vehicles for the half-hour drive back to the zoo. I turned on the DVD in the backseat for the kids. I desperately needed a moment without having to explain what was going on. I wanted to talk to Wes, Joy, and Frank. At some point during the ride, Wes reached back and closed the DVD player. The light from the player was giving the press the opportunity to film and photograph us in the car. This was a time to be private and on our own. How clever of Wes to consider that, I thought, right in the middle of everything. “Wes,” I said, “what are we going to do now?

When Bindi, Robert, and I got home on the evening of Steve’s death, we encountered a strange scene that we ourselves had created. The plan had been that Steve would get back from his Ocean’s Deadlist film shoot before we got back from Tasmania. So we’d left the house with a funny surprise for him. We got large plush toys and arranged them in a grouping to look like the family. We sat one that represented me on the sofa, a teddy bear about her size for Bindi, and a plush orangutan for Robert. We dressed the smaller toys in the kids’ clothes, and the big doll in my clothes. I went to the zoo photographer and got close-up photographs of our faces that we taped onto the heads of the dolls. We posed them as if we were having dinner, and I wrote a note for Steve. “Surprise,” the note said. “We didn’t go to Tasmania! We are here waiting for you and we love you and miss you so much! We will see you soon. Love, Terri, Bindi, and Robert.” The surprise was meant for Steve when he returned and we weren’t there. Instead the dolls silently waited for us, our plush-toy doubles, ghostly reminders of a happier life. Wes, Joy, and Frank came into the house with me and the kids. We never entertained, we never had anyone over, and now suddenly our living room seemed full. Unaccustomed to company, Robert greeted each one at the door. “Take your shoes off before you come in,” he said seriously. I looked over at him. He was clearly bewildered but trying so hard to be a little man. We had to make arrangements to bring Steve home. I tried to keep things as private as possible. One of Steve’s former classmates at school ran the funeral home in Caloundra that would be handling the arrangements. He had known the Irwin family for years, and I recall thinking how hard this was going to be for him as well. Bindi approached me. “I want to say good-bye to Daddy,” she said. “You are welcome to, honey,” I said. “But you need to remember when Daddy said good-bye to his mother, that last image of her haunted him while he was awake and asleep for the rest of his life.” I suggested that perhaps Bindi would like to remember her daddy as she last saw him, standing on top of the truck next to that outback airstrip, waving good-bye with both arms and holding the note that she had given him. Bindi agreed, and I knew it was the right decision, a small step in the right direction. I knew the one thing that I had wanted to do all along was to get to Steve. I felt an urgency to continue on from the zoo and travel up to the Cape to be with him. But I knew what Steve would have said. His concern would have been getting the kids settled and in bed, not getting all tangled up in the media turmoil. Our guests decided on their own to get going and let us get on with our night. I gave the kids a bath and fixed them something to eat. I got Robert settled in bed and stayed with him until he fell asleep. Bindi looked worried. Usually I curled up with Robert in the evening, while Steve curled up with Bindi. “Don’t worry,” I said to her. “Robert’s already asleep. You can sleep in my bed with me.” Little Bindi soon dropped off to sleep, but I lay awake. It felt as though I had died and was starting over with a new life. I mentally reviewed my years as a child growing up in Oregon, as an adult running my own business, then meeting Steve, becoming his wife and the mother of our children. Now, at age forty-two, I was starting again.

Ironically enough, when we returned to the zoo, the Dr. Dolittle cameo almost came true. We had to transfer a big female crocodile named Toolakea to another enclosure. Steve geared up for the move as he always did. “Don’t think about catching Toolakea,” he instructed his crew, me included, before we ever got near to the enclosure. “If you’re concentrating on catching her, she’ll know it. We’ll never get a top-jaw rope on. Crocs know when they’re being hunted.” For millions of years, wild animals have evolved to use every sense to tune into the world around them. Steve understood that their survival depended on it. So as I approached the enclosure, I thought of mowing the lawn, or doing the croc show, or picking hibiscus flowers to feed the lizards. Anything but catching Toolakea. It went like clockwork. Steve top-jaw-roped Toolakea, and we all jumped her. He decided that since she was only a little more than nine feet long, we would be able to just lift her over the fence and carry her to her other enclosure. Steve never built his enclosures with gates. He knew that sooner or later, someone could make a mistake and not latch a gate properly. We had to be masters at fence jumping. He picked up Toolakea around her shoulders with her neck held firmly against his upper arm. This would protect his face if she started struggling. The rest of us backed him up and helped to lift Toolakea over the fence. All of a sudden she exploded, twisting and writhing in everyone’s arms. “Down, down, down,” Steve shouted. That was our signal to pin the crocodile again before picking her up. Not everyone reacted quickly enough. As Steve moved to the ground, the people on the tail were still standing up. That afforded Toolakea the opportunity to twist her head around and grab hold of Steve’s thigh. The big female croc sank her teeth deep into his flesh. I never realized it until later. Steve didn’t flinch. He settled the crocodile on the ground, keeping her eyes covered to quiet her down. We lifted her again. This time she cleared the fence easily. I noticed the blood trickling down Steve’s leg. We got to the other enclosure before I asked what had happened, and he showed me. There were a dozen tears in the fabric of his khaki shorts. A half dozen of Toolakea’s teeth had gotten through to his flesh, putting a number of puncture holes in his upper thigh. As usual, Steve didn’t bother with the wound. He cleaned it out and carried on, but even after his leg had healed, he couldn’t feel the temperature accurately on his leg. Once, about a month after the incident, I got a drink out of the fridge and rested it on his thigh. “I can feel something there,” he said. “Hot or cold?” I quizzed. “I don’t know,” he said. The croc-torn khaki shorts he wore that day made an amazing souvenir for a lucky sponsor of the zoo. People who donated a certain amount of money to our conservation efforts received a bonus in return: one of Steve’s uniforms and a photograph of him in it. Steve was very proud to include his khakis with teeth holes in them as the gift for a generous supporter.

I've a great sense of privacy. WRiters have to have an angle. If you say less than what you m ight tell your husband or your doctor, then You're 'mysterious'...Basically, I don't like the one-sided talk about myself. I don't enjoy the process of cross-examination: I find it absolutely sapping, I've been made mistrustful by being burned." -Audrey Hepburn Audrey Hepburn, A Photographic Celebration

I've a great sense of privacy. Writers have to have an angle. If you say less than what you might tell your husband or your doctor, then you're 'mysterious'...Basically, I don't like the one-sided talk about myself. I don't enjoy the process of cross-examination: I find it absolutely sapping, I've been made mistrustful by being burned." -Audrey Hepburn

So here we are, a pack of Homo sapiens thinking that we know whether a person is female or male. Now that I’ve spent a few years researching and talking with people who fall under the transgender umbrella, I am confident saying that male/ female is not the only way to describe gender. The people I’ve come to know and love in the course of writing and photographing this book have helped me better understand the fluidity of gender and sex. This lesson for me also reinforces what I’ve been writing about for years: once we get to know individuals who may be different from ourselves, it is less likely we will be wary of them. And maybe, just maybe, we will learn a little more about ourselves.

Let's have a bet, then. If I'm right, you kiss me," he says. "And if I'm right?" "Name it." It's like taking candy from a baby. Mr. Macho Guy's ego is about to be taken down a notch, and I'm all too happy to be the one to do it. "If I win you take me and the class project seriously," I tell him. "No teasing me, no making ridiculous comments." "Deal. I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you I have a photographic memory." "Alex, I'd feel terrible if I didn't tell you I copied the info straight from the book." I look at the research I'd done, then flip open to the corresponding page in my chem book. "Without looking, what does it need to be cooled at?" I ask. Alex is a guy who thrives on challenges. But this time the tough guy is going to lose. He closes his own book and stares at me, his jaw set. "Twenty degrees. And it needs to be dissolved at one hundred degrees, not seventy," he answers confidently. I scan the page, then my notes. Then back at the page again. I can't be wrong. Which page did I- "Oh, yeah. One hundred degrees." I look up at him in complete shock. "You're right." "You gonna kiss me now, or later?" "Right now," I say, which I can tell shocks him because his hands go still. At home, my life is dictated by my mom and dad. At school, it's different. I need to keep it that way, because if I have no control in every aspect of my life I might as well be a mannequin. "Really?" he asks. "Yeah." I take one of his hands in mine. I'd never be this bold if we had an audience, and am thankful for the privacy of the nonfiction titles surrounding us. His breathing slows as I sit up on my knees and lean into him. I'm ignoring the fact that his fingers are long and rough and that I've never actually touched him before. I'm nervous. I shouldn't be, though. I'm the one in control this time. I can feel him restraining himself. He's letting me make the move, which is a good thing. I'm afraid of what this boy would do if he let loose. I place his hand against my cheek so it cups my face and I hear him groan. I want to smile because his reaction proves I have the power. He's unmoving as our eyes meet. Time stops again. Then I turn my head into his hand and kiss the inside of his palm. "There, I kissed you," I say, giving him back his hand and ending the game. Mr. Latino with the big ego got bested by a ditzy, blond bimbo.

I thought back on the sit-ins, the protestors with their stoic faces, the ones I'd once scorned for hurling their bodies at the worst things in life. Perhaps they had known something terrible about the world. Perhaps they so willingly parted with the security and sanctity of the black body because neither security nor sanctity existed in the first place. And all those old photographs from the 1960s, all those films I beheld of black people prostrate before clubs and dogs, were not simply shameful, indeed were not shameful at all – they were just true. We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world.

You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.' 'I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?' 'The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.' 'Lyle don't they?' ... 'LaMont, perhaps they did at first. The first photograph, the first magazine, the gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the hagiography of image, perhaps. Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.' 'Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.' 'LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?' 'Okey-dokey.' 'The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.' "maybe I ought to be getting back.' 'LaMont, the world is very old. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Change: namely Micheal Change's enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMong-Chu. No such animal.' 'Animal?' 'You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.' 'The burning doesn't go away?' 'What fire dies when you feed it?' ... 'Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn't make me feel very much better at all?' "LaMont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage' 'So I'm stuck in the cage from either side Fame or tortured envy of fame. There's no way out.' 'You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage. And I believe I see a drop on your temple, right ... there ....' Etc.

...even though I can't remember being scared. I can't remember anything about our twenty days at Baneberry Hall. What I do recall is colored by what's in the Book. Instead of memories, I have excerpts. It's like looking at a photograph of a photograph. The framing is off. The colors are dulled. The image is slightly dark. Murky. That's the perfect word to describe our time at Baneberry Hall.

I- Karly takes their fingers in me when I masturbate, just thought you would like to know. Jenny and boy, we-we’s she takes them all, sometimes she has two going in the same whole, two boys in there rubbing their crap seem guy to me even if it’s a three-way. Maybe… all of this is not what I wanted to be remembered for. I guess what I am saying is, I wanted to be remembered for how I have- ‘Fallen to You!’ However, before I kicked the bucket… I did think of Ray, or anyone- or another boy. No one is other than my selfish self. The clueless girl I was, living for the now, and not the happily ever after! Hell no…! I did not think about that. I did not think about all the dangerous, shocking, and even offensive things I have done with my friends. I did not even think about my family, like if they would even care about me being or not being around. Nope, I was too busy sucking off chill dogs and running around silly doing honorable things. I did not even think about my adorable girly bedroom, and how the sun shined silky waves of light, in the window. Besides, how it woke me up as my days started. I did not think about the soft and cozy things in that room either, or the selfie photograph of me, and Ray kissing sitting on my night table. I did not think about how you can smell the rain rolling in on a spring day, as the window was open, or feel the chill in the air as I stood by it in the middle of December. ‘Oh, let the sun beat down on my face, and let the sounds caress my ears, I have been blind!’ I do not think about all the smells and feelings of food and family coming from down the steps or in the home at all. I completely ignored everything and it all just to be the cool girl. Instead, I thought of Jenny and Maddie back in the third grade how we used to play kickball and miss in our gym class. I also thought about that girl that no one liked too that no one wanted on the team including me. I think her name was Madilyn, I remember this because I was the last one to pick, and she looked so sad and I did not say anything as she sat crying in the grass picking yellow dandelions the whole class. I was such an ass for my friends. I guess that guilt gets you at some point. I member how they and I said she was too weird and disgusting to play with us, and that she could not see what she was doing, because of her blue-eyed four- eyes. Meaning her glass on the fragile flushed face. I guess I get to be friends with these girls because they were what I wanted to be. I was not always friends with them I remember from second grade and back. Yes, I was just like her before, I joined their team. I would have done anything to be one of them, which is what I did. ‘Look at the little freak over there sitting’ Jenny said, and we all giggled. ‘Let’s kick our balls in her face, so she runs off crying for her mommy again like before.’ And that is what we all did; the goal was to break her glass of her face. ‘Like she is not even going to try to move said Maddie.’ BAM smack one! BAM smack two…! Me- direct hit- BAM! Furthermore, she goes running away just the way we wanted! Jenny always found a way of making us snicker at the dumbest crap, like that. I- we- never forget that girl’s face! Red with pain, and dripping with her tears, dandelions in hand that she picked for us. Just so, we would like her! That all faded away from me. Just like the furry white ball of seeds that blows away as she rains inside. I can’t believe that is what, I remembered! This was more my beforehand death instant when I was theoretic Madilyn meant to be having some kind of vast revelation about my past. My moment froze like in time to the recollections of the slight of nail polish, and the squeak of my white dollar store flats as I walked on the waxed high school floor. The tightness of my skinny blue jeans, with one of my lacey junior’s nine-dollar Walmart thongs.

Your pictures ensure that they have some happy memories, even if they're manufactured from photographs and not actual memories. It's really the only thing that lasts forever from any wedding." "Well, that's true, I guess." He turned those inquisitive brown eyes my way. "Does it make me a jerk, though, that I don't really care about the ones I shoot?" "Ha! There's the Griffin I know. What exactly do you mean?" "Like, all I can think about when I'm working weddings with Val is how wasteful they are. The amount of time and money spent by the clients we both work for is insane. So much so that the focus is often lost on what the wedding is really about---the couple.

When you're taking shots in neutral, indifferent places like this, you should match the mood, and take equally neutral and indifferent pictures. [...] First of all, you've got very little to choose from in the way of subjects. You've got think, what are you going to take? In other districts of the city, I almost automatically set out to look of things that have "the smell of humanity" about them.

On one side were the survival skills he was acquiring; on the other, a list of things that he was forced to endure—running, cold, wet, lack of sleep, etc. Then he added a series of arguments in each column. On the pain side, he noted, “What is a Ranger in the life of writer-photographer?” After lunch, he saw his commanding officer and walked up and told him he was leaving. “I don’t go along with the principle of hardship for its own sake,” he said. Just like that, he was gone. What Brand worried about most was the phone call to tell his mother he had quit.

was the idea of that?” she asked angrily. “Do you think the child will read better if you break her silly heart? Tell her you missed him and get on with it.” Basta lowered his head like a boy caught doing wrong by his mother. “I did tell her, well … almost,” he growled. “Cockerell’s a terrible shot. Your father didn’t suffer so much as a scratch.” Meggie closed her eyes with relief. She felt warm and wonderful. Everything was all right, or at least what wasn’t all right soon would be. Happiness made her bold. “There’s something else,” she said. Why should she be afraid? They needed her. She was the only one who could read their wretched Shadow out of the book for them; no one else could do it—except Mo, and they hadn’t caught him yet. They would never catch him now, ever. “What is it?” The Magpie smoothed her sternly pinned-up hair. What had she looked like when she was Meggie’s age? Had her lips been so mean even then? “I will read only if I can see Dustfinger again. Before he …” She did not end the sentence. “What for?” Because I want to tell him we’re going to try to save him and because I think my mother is with him, thought Meggie, but naturally she did not say so out loud. “I want to tell him I’m sorry,” she replied instead. “After all, he helped us.” Mortola’s mouth twisted mockingly. “How touching!” she said. I only want to see her once, close-up, thought Meggie. Perhaps it isn’t her after all. Perhaps … “Suppose I say no?” The Magpie was watching her like a cat playing with a young and inexperienced mouse. But Meggie had been expecting that question. “Then I will bite my tongue!” she said. “I will bite it so hard that it swells right up and I won’t be able to read aloud this evening.” The Magpie leaned back in her chair and laughed. “Hear that, Basta? The child is no fool!” Basta only grunted. But Mortola studied Meggie, almost benevolently. “I’ll tell you something: Yes, you can have your silly little wish. But about this evening: Before you read, I want you to have a good look at my photographs.” Meggie glanced around. “Look at them closely. Do you see all those faces? Every one of those people made an enemy of Capricorn, and none of them was ever heard from again. The houses you see in the photographs are no longer standing either, not one of them,

I was in deadly earnest about developing my talent, and carousing had no lure for me. I applied myself assiduously to the work in hand, and as I proceeded I became more and more convinced that graphic art was my road to recognition. Painting interested me no less, but I thought of it as having no influence. If one painted a portrait, or a landscape, or whatever, for a rich man to own in his private gallery, what was the use? On the other hand, a cartoon could be reproduced by simple mechanical processes and easily made accessible to hundreds of thousands. I wanted a large audience. . . The prevailing art of that period embraced a thorough, almost photographic, lens-like observance of detail. Gerome, Messonier, Cabanel, Vibert, and Bougeaureau were in the forefront of the artworld then, because they were accurate, precise draftsmen.

An Almost Made Up Poem I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny they are small, and the fountain is in France where you wrote me that last letter and I answered and never heard from you again. You used to write insane poems about ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you knew famous artists and most of them were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right, go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous because we’ never met. We got close once in New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never touched. So you went with the famous and wrote about the famous, and, of course, what you found out is that the famous are worried about their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed with them, who gives them that, and then awakens in the morning to write upper case poems about ANGELS AND GOD. We know God is dead, they’ told us, but listening to you I wasn’t sure. Maybe it was the upper case. You were one of the best female poets and I told the publishers and editors: “Her, print her, she’ mad but she’ magic. There’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom, but that didn’ happen. Your letters got sadder. Your lovers betrayed you. Kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. It didn’ help. You said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never heard again. A friend wrote me of your suicide 3 or 4 months after it happened. If I had met you I would probably have been unfair to you or you to me. It was best like this.

I sometimes tell my students to do a writing exercise that’s just something on their desk. An object they’ve had with them for a while, a photograph, a stone from the ocean, a shell. I tell them just to explore it, interrogate it, just turn it over in your head and see what might happen. And the most amazing thing happens: they really find they love those objects, and can write about them for a long time. That they carried that black stone home from a day with their father just weeks before he died, that the small elephant was a gift from a friend on a day of heartbreak. We start talking about those objects and soon it feels like our whole life is full of small stories to be grateful for. So many small things we pass all the time without holding them up to the light.

I had a nervous breakdown when I was 17 or 18, when I had to go and work with [model and actor] Marky Mark and [photographer] Herb Ritts. It didn't feel like me at all. I felt really bad about straddling this buff guy [to appear in a Calvin Klein ad]. I didn't like it. I couldn't get out of bed for two weeks. I thought I was going to die. I went to the doctor, and he said, "I'll give you some Valium," and Francesca Sorrenti, thank God, said, "You're not taking that." It was just anxiety. Nobody takes care of you mentally. There's a massive pressure to do what you have to do.” Kate Moss, to James Fox, "The Riddle of Kate Moss," December 2012

Has anyone considered that this might be the act of a local Cambodian commander who has just taken it into his own hands to halt any ship that comes by?” Heads swiveled to look. Who on earth was talking? It was David Hume Kennerly, the twenty-eight-year-old White House photographer. White House photographers, who attend nearly every presidential meeting, are supposed to be flies on the wall. They snap and don’t speak—but not this time. What was the photographer doing injecting his views into a top secret NSC meeting? The people in the Cabinet Room were among the most powerful in the world. No outsider would dare interrupt them, particularly as they debated U.S. military action. The absolute chutzpah of this young man was stunning. And then he went on. “Has anyone stopped to think that he might not have gotten his orders from Phnom Penh?” Kennerly asked. “If that’s what has happened, you know, you can blow the whole place away and it’s not gonna make any difference. Everyone here has been talking about Cambodia as if it were a traditional government, like France. We have trouble with France, we just pick up the telephone and call. We know who to talk to. But I was in Cambodia just two weeks ago, and it’s not that kind of government at all. We don’t even know who the leadership is. Has anyone considered that?

Hammond frowned. “But then the dinosaurs wouldn’t be real.” “But they’re not real now,” Wu said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There isn’t any reality here.” He shrugged helplessly. He could see he wasn’t getting through. Hammond had never been interested in technical details, and the essence of the argument was technical. How could he explain to Hammond about the reality of DNA dropouts, the patches, the gaps in the sequence that Wu had been obliged to fill in, making the best guesses he could, but still, making guesses. The DNA of the dinosaurs was like old photographs that had been retouched, basically the same as the original but in some places repaired and clarified, and as a result—

A couple of weeks after Mia’s bone graft surgery in January 2014, she received a letter from Congressman Trent Franks of Arizona on official United States congressional letterhead. Mia was so excited about the letter that she stood on the fireplace hearth (the living room stage) and proceeded to read it to the entire family. In the letter, Congressman Franks told Mia that he, too, was born with a cleft lip and palate and underwent many surgeries as a child. He told her he understood how she felt and told her not to get discouraged because he recognized how she is helping so many people. He invited her to Washington, DC, to receive an award from Congress for service to her community. As soon as she had finished reading it to us, she exclaimed, “Can we go?” Knowing how Jase puts little value on earthly awards and how he likes to travel even less, I responded with a phrase that most parents can understand and appreciate: “We’ll see.” Mia immediately ran upstairs and tacked the letter to her bulletin board, full of hope and optimism. How could Jase say no to this? Oh, she knew her daddy well. He couldn’t, and he didn’t. That summer, Mia, Jase, Reed, Cole, and I spent a few days together visiting monuments and historical sites in Washington before meeting Congressman Franks on July 8 in his office on Capitol Hill. Mia’s favorite monument was the Lincoln Memorial because she had learned about it in school, so it was cool to see it “for real.” It was really crowded there, and people were taking pictures of us while we were trying to read about the monument and take photographs ourselves. Getting Jase out of there took a while because of so many fans wanting pictures--he’s very accommodating. That’s why it surprised me that this was Mia’s favorite site. I’m glad she remembers the impact of the monument and didn’t allow the circus of activity from the fans to put a damper on her experience. Congressman Franks presented Mia with a Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition for “outstanding and invaluable service to the community” at a press conference held at the foot of the Capitol steps. Both he and Mia made speeches that day to numerous cameras and reporters. Hearing my ten-year-old daughter speak about her condition and how she hopes people will look to God to help them get through their own problems was an unbelievably proud moment for me, Jase, and her brothers. After the press conference, Congressman Franks took us into the House chamber where Congress was voting on a new bill. He took Mia down to the floor, introduced her to some of his colleagues, and let her push his voting button for him. When some of the other members of Congress saw this, they also asked her to push their voting buttons for them. Of course, Mia wasn’t going to push any buttons without quizzing these representatives about what exactly she was voting for. She needed to know what was in the bill before she pushed the buttons. Once she realized she agreed with the bill and saw that some members were voting “no,” she commented, “That’s just rude.” Mia was thrilled with the experience and told us all how she helped make history. Little does she know just how much history she has made and continues to make.

the magazine’s reporter encountered Steve manning the Apple Computer booth at a computer fair. “I wish we’d had these personal machines when I was growing up,” Jobs tells him, before continuing on for a total of 224 words: “People have been hearing all sorts of things about computers during the past ten years through the media. Supposedly computers have been controlling various aspects of their lives. Yet, in spite of that, most adults have no idea what a computer really is, or what it can or can’t do. Now, for the first time, people can actually buy a computer for the price of a good stereo, interact with it, and find out all about it. It’s analogous to taking apart 1955 Chevys. Or consider the camera. There are thousands of people across the country taking photography courses. They’ll never be professional photographers. They just want to understand what the photographic process is all about. Same with computers. We started a little personal-computer manufacturing company in a garage in Los Altos in 1976. Now we’re the largest personal-computer company in the world. We make what we think of as the Rolls-Royce of personal computers. It’s a domesticated computer. People expect blinking lights, but what they find is that it looks like a portable typewriter, which, connected to a suitable readout screen, is able to display in color. There’s a feedback it gives to people who use it, and the enthusiasm of the users is tremendous. We’re always asked what it can do, and it can do a lot of things, but in my opinion the real thing it is doing right now is to teach people how to program the computer.” Before moving on to a booth where a bunch of kids were playing a computer game called Space Voyager, the reporter asks if Steve “would mind telling us his age. ‘Twenty-two,’ Mr. Jobs said.” Speaking off-the-cuff to a passing journalist from a decidedly nontechie publication, Steve finds so many ways to demystify for the average person the insanely geeky device that he and Woz had created.

the magazine’s reporter encountered Steve manning the Apple Computer booth at a computer fair. “I wish we’d had these personal machines when I was growing up,” Jobs tells him, before continuing on for a total of 224 words: “People have been hearing all sorts of things about computers during the past ten years through the media. Supposedly computers have been controlling various aspects of their lives. Yet, in spite of that, most adults have no idea what a computer really is, or what it can or can’t do. Now, for the first time, people can actually buy a computer for the price of a good stereo, interact with it, and find out all about it. It’s analogous to taking apart 1955 Chevys. Or consider the camera. There are thousands of people across the country taking photography courses. They’ll never be professional photographers. They just want to understand what the photographic process is all about. Same with computers. We started a little personal-computer manufacturing company in a garage in Los Altos in 1976. Now we’re the largest personal-computer company in the world. We make what we think of as the Rolls-Royce of personal computers. It’s a domesticated computer. People expect blinking lights, but what they find is that it looks like a portable typewriter, which, connected to a suitable readout screen, is able to display in color. There’s a feedback it gives to people who use it, and the enthusiasm of the users is tremendous. We’re always asked what it can do, and it can do a lot of things, but in my opinion the real thing it is doing right now is to teach people how to program the computer.

It is of course only through imagery, through metaphor and symbol, that we can imagine the new world that God intends to make. That is right and proper. All our language about the future, as I have said, is like a set of signposts pointing into a bright mist. The signpost doesn’t provide a photograph of what we will find when we arrive but offers instead a true indication of the direction we should be traveling in. What

Compared to other emotions (joy, sadness, anger), there is a lot of physical evidence that love is actually a concept closer to hormone activity than emotion. Biologically, love is a powerful neurotic condition. Desire to love is accompanied by sexual desire, but it is similar to hunger and thirst for hormonal reasons. When you fall in love, the brain releases several chemicals: pheromone, dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin, oxytocin, vasopressin, and so on. Just by hugging a loved one or simply looking at a photograph of a boyfriend, the hormone oxytocin is released in the body and acts as an analgesic for headaches. What is interesting is that if you break up, the symptoms you experience are similar to the withdrawal symptoms of drug addicts. In some cases, withdrawal from the demonstration may release a chemical that weakens the heart in the body. Biochemically, phenylethylamine , which secretes in the brain's limbic system, acts as a stimulant, a kind of natural amphetamine. The phrase love is a drug is no longer a metaphor but an explanatory note in this scene. But it takes 2 seconds to look at the opponent and take the so-called saying at first sight. In just two seconds, phenylethylamine is secreted and becomes full, stimulating the brain, making the opponent look barefaced. If you can make your opponent secrete phenylethylamine, this is the birth of XXX, a grossly outbreak of creatures. However, the secretion of phenylethylamine has a shelf life and generally does not exceed 2 years. [10] After that period, I will get back to my mind. From this time on, love has passed through the stages of chemistry and sociology. But a new fact has been announced. It is said that there are quite a couple who secrete this phenylethylamine throughout life. (...) In this case, however, it is not the same as the whole life, but the period when it is secreted like other normal couples, and the time when the secretion is diminished repeatedly. However, the cycle of this pattern is similar to the two people, so it is a good fit for a lifetime. If you think about it a little differently, you will come back bump bang for a while and then fall back to each other. On the contrary, the broken couples still have one secretion, and the other side breaks into the resting period, and the secretion side considers that the other's love has cooled, Perhaps the main pattern that a man and a woman make and break is confessing - fellowship - Confession feels that the opponent is obsessed with the pattern of departure - separation, It may be that the action of the opponent, who started the pause more quickly and began to climax at the apex of the secretion at that point, is regarded as an obsession. However, it is difficult to justify the feeling of love as a simple hormonal change. It is not possible to reveal what kind of change is happening in any situation, even if it is revealed that what kind of hormone change occurs when feeling love, and it is impossible to tell. Just as you do not secrete phenylethylamine, which is one of the most common types of phenylethylamine you encounter on the roadside, you can not say that this research has 'revealed the principles of love' and 'why you fall in love'. The latter is influenced by individual values, experience and situation, first impressions, and the conditions of the opponent.

This magnificent city that I only knew from photographs had been devastated. The infamous submarine bunkers had been bombed, and the bunkers that survived were later dynamited. I could understand this, but why civilian houses had also been leveled and set afire by incendiary bombs was beyond me. Each British Lancaster bomber delivered up to 8,000 pounds of bomb loads each night, with as many as 1,000 bombers over the target on a given night. During these raids, this great port city was set alight like a Roman candle! American B-17 and B 24 bombers also came during the daytime. Operation Gomorrah was conducted day and night causing a howling noise as the Feuersturm firestorm sucked the air out of the city to feed itself. With surface temperatures reaching 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, asphalt streets actually melted, leaving people trapped in the black molten gunk. Winds of 150 miles per hour fanned flames that reached an altitude of over 15,000 feet! I lost an aunt, who was a beautiful young woman in her twenties, along with her husband and baby. Her older sister also perished in the flames. They all now lie buried in a mass gravesite, which I visited in the Ohlsdorf Cemetery. The stories I heard from people who could still talk about them, without totally choking up, were unbelievable. It was said that over 50 miles of street frontage were set ablaze and totally reduced to ashes during the raids, and another 133 miles were severely damaged. An estimated 1,500 people were killed on the first night of the raids and many more were wounded. Those who survived were suddenly homeless and without possessions. The total casualties were estimated at approximately 45,000 people. At the end of it, Hitler refused to come to the city and sent Hermann Göring instead! This was never forgotten or forgiven by das volk, the people. What is it with us? Why do we as human beings have to experience war after war? It seems that we never learn and so perhaps we will have to witness even worse in the future.

This story created a sensation when it was first told. It appeared in the papers and many big Physicists and Natural Philosophers were, at least so they thought, able to explain the phenomenon. I shall narrate the event and also tell the reader what explanation was given, and let him draw his own conclusions. This was what happened. A friend of mine, a clerk in the same office as myself, was an amateur photographer; let us call him Jones. Jones had a half plate Sanderson camera with a Ross lens and a Thornton Picard behind lens shutter, with pneumatic release. The plate in question was a Wrattens ordinary, developed with Ilford Pyro Soda developer prepared at home. All these particulars I give for the benefit of the more technical reader. Mr. Smith, another clerk in our office, invited Mr. Jones to take a likeness of his wife and sister-in-law. This sister-in-law was the wife of Mr. Smith's elder brother, who was also a Government servant, then on leave. The idea of the photograph was of the sister-in-law. Jones was a keen photographer himself. He had photographed every body in the office including the peons and sweepers, and had even supplied every sitter of his with copies of his handiwork. So he most willingly consented, and anxiously waited for the Sunday on which the photograph was to be taken. Early on Sunday morning, Jones went to the Smiths'. The arrangement of light in the verandah was such that a photograph could only be taken after midday; and so he stayed there to breakfast. At about one in the afternoon all arrangements were complete and the two ladies, Mrs. Smiths, were made to sit in two cane chairs and after long and careful focussing, and moving the camera about for an hour, Jones was satisfied at last and an exposure was made. Mr. Jones was sure that the plate was all right; and so, a second plate was not exposed although in the usual course of things this should have been done. He wrapped up his things and went home promising to develop the plate the same night and bring a copy of the photograph the next day to the office. The next day, which was a Monday, Jones came to the office very early, and I was the first person to meet him. "Well, Mr. Photographer," I asked "what success?" "I got the picture all right," said Jones, unwrapping an unmounted picture and handing it over to me "most funny, don't you think so?" "No, I don't ... I think it is all right, at any rate I did not expect anything better from you ...", I said. "No," said Jones "the funny thing is that only two ladies sat ..." "Quite right," I said "the third stood in the middle." "There was no third lady at all there ...", said Jones. "Then you imagined she was there, and there we find her ..." "I tell you, there were only two ladies there when I exposed" insisted Jones. He was looking awfully worried. "Do you want me to believe that there were only two persons when the plate was exposed and three when it was developed?" I asked. "That is exactly what has happened," said Jones. "Then it must be the most wonderful developer you used, or was it that this was the second exposure given to the same plate?" "The developer is the one which I have been using for the last three years, and the plate, the one I charged on Saturday night out of a new box that I had purchased only on Saturday afternoon." A number of other clerks had come up in the meantime, and were taking great interest in the picture and in Jones' statement. It is only right that a description of the picture be given here for the benefit of the reader. I wish I could reproduce the original picture too, but that for certain reasons is impossible. When the plate was actually exposed there were only two ladies, both of whom were sitting in cane chairs. When the plate was developed it was found that there was in the picture a figure, that of a lady, standing in the middle. She wore a broad-edged dhoti (the reader should not forget that all the characters are Indians), only the upper half of her

it is a shame that so many beautiful places have become immensely popular within the past 3-4 years...they are being plastered all over the internet making people want to go and see them, especially photographers...and its a further shame that so many photographers only want to take pictures, with the goal to share to their social media sites and get likes, sponsors, and money...ironically how before that, like just 4 years ago, you seldom saw many images of unknown places, and most people had no clue where these spots where...now these special places are becoming less unique as they get more and more coverage and exposure, becoming less and less mystical to the art-world... it is also a further shame how many of these photographers only care about themselves and getting their picture at any cost, including the cost of damaging their natural surroundings with their ignorance...and my god, the stuff i have seen them do and leave behind in their wake is appalling...and more and more all the reason for why i will not disclose anymore the places where i go now that are unknown treasures which i have been discovering, so these new photo sites do not ever have to become overrun like so many other beautiful places have regrettably become, all due to inconsiderate and selfish people with their selfish cameras and cellphones, and selfish actions, those annoying people out there who are merely like pesky fleas to a very beautiful location, sucking the blood and life out of it slowly... i feel partially to blame, as i used to always give people locations of my photo comps, so many of the places not many knew about and were rarely visited, let alone photographed...there were spots i photographed over 5 years ago, and now many of these sites are overrun with greed and stupidity, getting trashed, tagged, and overrun. i know i am not directly to blame, but i was part of the problem even though i was only trying to help out other courteous photographers, but in the process of doing just that, the door opened to the ugly people looking to use others and use places for their own greedy intentions...i would even give them the gps to within 5 feet of the spot if they asked me...i was always so open and as helpful as i could be...also gave out all my camera settings and told how i went about creating my impressions with my equipment and thoughts about the composition... now look what has happened...i am not to blame, but i do carry much of the responsibility as word got out to these previously secluded locations...so now, i want no part of it anymore. and even-though now i often get called selfish and mean for not disclosing my locations, i must do what i feel is necessary to protect what i love and the places i love.

Miss Knight.” She paused, her hand on the doorknob. She didn’t turn to face him, merely waited for him to say whatever was left to say. “I would prefer someone older. Someone less like you.” Now what the hell did that mean? Someone less like her? “You know,” he said lamely when she turned to face him quizzically. To his credit he looked as confused as she felt. “Nope. Don’t have a clue.” Her voice was so icy that her words practically froze as they left her lips. “Someone with more experience. With less personality.” “What?” “You talk too much,” he said pointedly. “Your attitude is too familiar and too sarcastic.” She opened her mouth to say something, and he held up a finger to stop her. “And that was before everything that happened in Tokyo. You’re completely irreverent and have a bizarre sense of humor. I also have no wish to hear about reality television shows, pop music, manicures, Brangelina, Star Trek, or anything that’s trending on Twitter—not even secondhand through whispered telephone conversations when my assistant thinks I’m not paying attention.” Well, he’d certainly been a lot more attentive during those half hours in the mornings than she’d given him credit for. But one thing struck her as odd. “Star Trek?” she repeated. She loved the new movies but hardly ever publicly discussed them. “You’re constantly talking about how sick you are of the Cardassians,” he elaborated uncomfortably. Her eyes widened and she stifled a laugh. “Different kind of Kardashian,” she corrected. It would be hopeless to explain it to a man who clearly had no interest in pop culture—even while every model or actress he was publicly photographed with inserted him into the very scene he was so scornful of. Quite frankly, she was impressed that he even knew about the Cardassians in Star Trek, which attested to a level of geekdom that she would never have suspected of him. “So you’re looking for the anti-me?” “It shouldn’t be so hard to find the complete opposite of you. You are quite . . .” His brow lowered as he tried to find the correct word. “Singular.” “Thank you,” she said, ridiculously flattered until a closer glance at his straight face told her that it hadn’t been a compliment. Her fledgling smile died, and she once again—as she often did in his presence—fought the urge to roll her eyes. “Okay, so you’re looking for an old, boring, and competent assistant,” she itemized, and his lips thinned but he said nothing. “I’ll get on that right away, sir.

Mom sends me another text with pictures of cakes she found on Pinterest for a gender reveal party. “How do you feel about having a gender reveal party?” Iask. “What is that?” Archer gets up to make a pot of coffee. “Basically a party announcing if the baby is a boy or girl. You don’t tell anyone until the end, and you pop a balloon with pink or blue confetti in it or something.” “And it’s a thing people donow?” “Yeah. If you have a halfway decent Instagram following and you don’t do one, people will wonder what’s wrong withyou.” Archer chuckles. “I don’t really care either way. Any excuse to have a party is good in my book. Do you want to haveone?” “I know they’re a little lame, but yeah.” I bite my lip, looking at the photos my mom sent. I haven’t told anyone besides my family and Marissa about the baby. I’m a modern woman with a successful job, and shouldn’t worry about people judging me over having a baby when I’m not married. But I do, just abit. “Then let’s doit.” Archer’s words make me smile. “My mom is going to go crazy over this. She wants to know where to have the party?” It’s a simple question, but I know it raises the same concerns to Archer too. He turns on the coffee maker and comes back to the table. “If you’re going to take impressive Instagram pictures, your parents’ farm has the perfect setting.” “I’m glad you have your priorities in check.” He nods. “I gotcha, babe. We’ll make sure to have everything posed perfectly. I’ll even take pictures of all my food before I eat it. Actually, we could invest in some of that realistic-looking fake food. I hear it photographs better.” I look at Archer, a big smile on my face. He makes it so easy tofall. “Good idea. Anything for the likes.” “Exactly. The number of likes is a direct correlation to how loved this baby is. We really have to step itup.

I have just read back over this diary. In March I would never have believed that so much time could go by totally without progress. I have become desperate. My passion has taken over my consciousness. Hours of every day are devoted to Laura, to what has become fastidious concern over every detail of my dress and appearance, to the endless daydreaming, and to the search for ways to interest her in things that we might do together. Her image is everywhere I look. Everything I think of, no matter how remote, leads me back to thinking of her. The first thing I see when I wake up in the morning is her face, and she is in my thoughts whether or not she is in my presence. I have become determined to do something about this, but I do not know what to do. Other things scarcely exist for me anymore. I forgot to pick up the photographs I had ordered, and they were almost sent back to Paris. I am incapacitated. I like Laura, she is nice, but this extraordinary reaction of mine is entirely inappropriate. I have a kind of sinking feeling almost all the time and I welcome problems serious enough to distract me from this idiocy. My major feeling is not wanting to work on my dissertation, despite the approaching deadline. My stomach aches, and I feel sunk, depressed. If I could only be absolutely sure that she is not interested in me, I would have nothing to build hopes on, but when she is at all nice to me, I suffer.

Oh yeah?” He eyed my ragged leather bag with new interest. “Is that what you got there — cameras? Who you work for?” “Playboy,” I said. He laughed. “Well goddam! What are you gonna take pictures of — nekkid horses? Haw! I guess you’ll be workin’ pretty hard when they run the Kentucky Oaks. That’s a race jut for fillies.” He was laughing wildly. “Hell yes! And they’ll all be nekkid too!” I shook my head and said nothing; just stared at him for a moment, trying to look grim. “There’s going to be trouble,” I said. “My assignment is to take pictures of the riot.” “What riot?” I hesitated, twirling the ice in my drink. “At the track. On Derby Day. The Black Panthers.” I stared at him again. “Don’t you read the newspapers?” The grin on his face had collapsed. “What the hell are you talkin about?” “Well … maybe I shouldn’t be telling you … ” I shrugged. “But hell, everybody seems to know. The cops and the National Guard have been getting ready for six weeks. They have 20,000 troops on alert at Fort Knox. They warned us — all the press and photographers — to wear helmets and special vests like flak jackets. We were told to expect shooting … ” “No!” he shouted; his hands flew up and hovered momentarily between us, as if to ward off the words he was hearing. Then he hacked his fist on the bar. “Those sons of bitches! God Almighty! The Kentucky Derby!” He kept shaking his head. “No! Jesus! That’s almost too bad to believe!” Now he seemed to be jagging on the stool, and when he looked up his eyes were misty. “Why? Why here? Don’t they respect anything?” I shrugged again. “It’s not just the Panthers. The FBI says busloads of white crazies are coming in from all over the country — to mix with the crowd and attack all at once, from every direction. They’ll be dressed like everybody else. You know — coats and ties and all that. But when the trouble starts … well, that’s why the cops are so worried.” He sat for a moment, looking hurt and confused and not quite able to digest all this terrible news. Then he cried out: “Oh … Jesus! What in the name of God is happening in this country? Where can you get away from it?” “Not here,” I said, picking up my bag. “Thanks for the drink … and good luck.

She developed another strange fxation. I couldn’t tell whether it was real or her way of needling me. She wanted to know the religion and the caste of every doctor, nurse and cleaner who looked after MOTHER MARY COMES TO ME her. She kept up a running commentary: He’s not a real Syrian Christian. He’s from the fsherman caste. She’s a Chowathi. Those men are all Parayas . . . (Parayas are considered to be the bottom rung of the ladder of all the Dalit castes in Kerala.) I couldn’t believe it. I couldn’t understand it. It was completely unlike her, and it so enraged me that I found it hard to be around her. She sounded like the people from our childhood who would whisper about my brother and me not being blue- blooded Syrian Christians. Their whispering made her protect us fercely. But sometimes she would relay the insults to us: ‘Do you know what they call you? Address illathu pillaru   – “the children without an address”.’ It probably hurt her more than it hurt us because we were too young to understand what it meant. The slur had less to do with our having no paternal home, no address, than it did with our having no father, no dynast with a proper family name and a rubber, cofee or spice estate for my brother to inherit. After all, who knew who our father was? Certainly not us, except for the photographs in the grey album, which we examined closely whenever we got a chance. So, address illathu pillaru could, at best, be taken to mean ‘those little hybrid mongrels’ and, at worst, ‘those little bastards’.

Besides being a writer, I experienced seven other careers/jobs along the years: photographer, model, fashion stylist, DJ, design shop assistant, waitress, cook, retoucher. I learned to work with film and cameras that were thrice my age. I learned to work with my curiosity to make people dance and laugh. I learned to work with my body to sell clothes and convey emotions. I learned everything I could about mid-century modern design and I can still tell one piece from another and recognize a fake today. Sometimes I forget about this past decade, where I did all these things for a living. Then I see pictures and I remember that I did them all with love. I had a lot of fun. And I gained a lot of skills

Suddenly, from behind the frosted glass of an adjacent room, a colleague appears. He's senior in rank, a captain. The captain holds out his hand for the passport and then starts brusquely looking through it. Yulia gives me a wry smile, as if to say, here we go. "Alexei Anatolievich, please come with me," the captain says. The expression on our lawyer's face reflects what she is thinking about the failure of our cunning plan. She is standing literally centimeters away, but already on the far side of the barrier that symbolizes the state border. She tries to open it and come back in, but it is obviously locked and can only be opened by pressing a button in the border guard's cubicle. "Why do you want me to go with you?" I ask. "We need to establish certain details." "Well, what's the problem with establishing them here?" "You need to come with me." Do you take me for a complete fool? I think. If you've decided to arrest me, bring out your cops, of whom you doubtless have a squad at the ready. They want to avoid a photograph of the police taking me away. "I don't have to go anywhere with you," I say. "Here is my lawyer. I insist you establish your details or whatever it is in her presence." We bicker some more, and I can see the pain in the captain's eyes. He is under instructions to get me to walk through that adjacent door-with no photos of policemen-but he is clearly not going to be able to deliver. He mutters something into his handset, and six policemen magically appear. Olga begins attacking the barrier even more energetically, demanding to be let back in. Just in case, I move Yulia, who is standing between me and the police, behind my back. Heaven knows what they may have in mind. The altercation continues, now with a police major, and by now I am on autopilot. This routine of "Come with me," "No," "Come," "No, I don't have to. Here is my lawyer," "No, come with me" is something I know so well I could repeat it in my sleep. What is important right now is to think strategically. I have a single-use mobile phone in my pocket (I feel it). Kira has the backpack with the laptop. I give the suitcase to Yulia; it is unlikely she will be detained too. That seems to be everything. I am ready. I say goodbye to Yulia, kissing her on the cheek. The standard dialogue has already reached the stage of "If you refuse to comply with the instructions of police officers, forcible action will be taken." There is no point in refusing to go with them and be dragged off by the arms and legs like at protest rallies. What if all they are planning to do is hand me a summons to appear in court? In fifteen minutes the whole confrontation would look pretty silly. I kiss Yulia again and go on my way, accompanied by an escort of police.

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You burn to have your photograph in a magazine.' 'I'm afraid so.' 'Why again exactly, now?' 'I guess to be felt about as I feel about those players with their pictures in magazines.' 'Why?' 'Why? I guess to give my life some sort of kind of meaning, Lyle.' 'And how would this do this again?' 'Lyle, I don't know. I do not know. It just does. Would. Why else would I burn like this, clip secret pictures, not take risks, not sleep or pee?' 'You feel these men with their photographs in magazines care deeply about having their photographs in magazines. Derive immense meaning.' 'I do. They must. I would. Else why would I burn like this to feel as they feel?' 'The meaning they feel, you mean. From the fame.' 'Lyle, don't they ?' Lyle sucks his cheeks. It's not like he's condescending or stringing you along. He's thinking as hard as you. It's like he's you in the top of a clean pond. It's part of the attention. One side of his cheeks almost caves in, thinking. 'LaMont, perhaps they did at first. The first photograph, the first magazine, the gratified surge, the seeing themselves as others see them, the hagiography of image, perhaps. Perhaps the first time: enjoyment. After that, do you trust me, trust me: they do not feel what you burn for. After the first surge, they care only that their photographs seem awkward or unflattering, or untrue, or that their privacy, this thing you burn to escape, what they call their privacy is being violated. Something changes. After the first photograph has been in a magazine, the famous men do not enjoy their photographs in magazines so much as they fear that their photographs will cease to appear in magazines. They are trapped, just as you are.' 'Is this supposed to be good news? This is awful news.' 'LaMont, are you willing to listen to a Remark about what is true?' 'Okey-dokey.' 'The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you.' 'Maybe I ought to be getting back.' 'LaMont, the world is very old. You have been snared by something untrue. You are deluded. But this is good news. You have been snared by the delusion that envy has a reciprocal. You assume that there is a flip-side to your painful envy of Michael Chang: namely Michael Chang's enjoyable feeling of being-envied-by-LaMont-Chu. No such animal.' 'Animal?' 'You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.' 'This is good news?' 'It is the truth. To be envied, admired, is not a feeling. Nor is fame a feeling. There are feelings associated with fame, but few of them are any more enjoyable than the feelings associated with envy of fame.' 'The burning doesn't go away?' 'What fire dies when you feed it? It is not fame itself they wish to deny you here. Trust them. There is much fear in fame. Terrible and heavy fear to be pulled and held, carried. Perhaps they want only to keep it off you until you weigh enough to pull it toward yourself.' 'Would I sound ungrateful if I said this doesn't make me feel very much better at all?' 'La-Mont, the truth is that the world is incredibly, incredibly, unbelievably old. You suffer with the stunted desire caused by one of its oldest lies. Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage.' 'So I'm stuck in the cage from either side. Fame or tortured envy of fame. There's no way out.' 'You might consider how escape from a cage must surely require, foremost, awareness of the fact of the cage.

Best Architects in Noida: My Real Story of Finding Someone Who Actually Listens I'm sitting in my living room right now, having my morning chai, and I'm looking at this wooden ceiling that my architect convinced me to add three years ago. Back then, I thought it was unnecessary. Today, I can't imagine my house without it. That's when I realized I need to write this because so many people in Noida are stuck in the same place I was—clueless about finding the best architects in Noida, thinking they're a luxury they can't afford, or worse, not knowing that working with the best architects in Noida can completely transform your living space. Finding the right architect in Noida changed everything for me, and I want to help others avoid my initial mistakes. My name is Rajesh Sharma. I'm a marketing manager in Gurgaon. In 2021, I decided to build a house in Noida for my family. I had ₹1 crore budget, a wife who had Pinterest obsession with Scandinavian designs, and absolutely zero clue how construction actually works. The contractor my brother-in-law recommended seemed nice enough. He said, "Raj bhai, you don't need architect. I've built 200 houses. I know what I'm doing." That's when my wife said, "Ask someone in the office about architects." Best decision we made. How I Ended Up Looking for Architects in Noida The first guy I called was terrible. He spoke to me like I was stupid, kept using terms like "structural integrity" and "load-bearing capacity" without explaining anything. He quoted ₹8 lakhs for what seemed like just drawing some plans. I thanked him and hung up thinking architects are overpriced middlemen. Then my colleague Priya mentioned her brother-in-law had recently done a house in Sector 77. She offered his number. We met him for coffee, not a formal consultation. He didn't have a laptop with him. He just asked me questions. Actual questions. "Rajesh, where do you spend most of your time at home?" "Do you work from home?" "Your wife mentioned she loves cooking—show me how she cooks." "How often do your parents visit?" I remember thinking this guy is weird. Why does he care where I cook? But something felt right. The Conversation That Changed My Approach His name is Vikram, and he's been designing houses in Noida for 18 years. Not just buildings. Houses. He understands the difference. He took me and my wife to a house he designed in Sector 95. We spent an hour there talking to the owners—a couple in their 50s. The wife said, "When we first moved in, we just sat in the living room for an hour. We didn't know where to sit first. Everything felt like it was made for us." I asked Vikram, "How much did they pay you?" He said, "For this house, about ₹5.5 lakhs. Their project cost them ₹85 lakhs. So about 6.5% of the total cost." I did the math. For my ₹1 crore budget, that's about ₹6.5-7 lakhs. Honestly, it still felt like a lot. But then Vikram told me something I'll never forget. "Rajesh, I've seen so many clients who saved my fees by not hiring an architect. You know how much they regretted it? All of them. One guy built a kitchen without thinking about ventilation. He can't use an exhaust fan at night because it's too loud and his bedroom is right above. He's lived with that mistake for 8 years." That hit differently. The First Meeting (And Why It Matters) We sat with Vikram in his small office in Sector 62. No flashy website. No 3D renderings on the wall. Just sketches, some photographs of completed projects, and actual coffee. He asked me to describe my ideal day in the new house. I felt stupid at first—like, isn't that the point of having a house? But as I described it, I realized I'd never actually thought about it deeply. Where do I read the newspaper? Where do I have my morning coffee? Where do I work on my laptop? Where do my friends sit when they visit? What time is the sun annoying in different rooms? Most architects would

... like, with your portraits. Didn't people ever get mad if they didn't look they way they wanted?" Joan smiled, as if she'd heard this question before. "It depended on who was being photographed and whether they understood what I was going for. I think sometimes it was my fault. I needed to be clear with them about what I was trying to do, but you can't always explain yourself clearly, and sometimes people don't understand because they are clinging to an idea of themselves and any disturbance to that idea is devastating.