Yellow Pages Quotes

You should date a girl who reads. Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn. She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book. Buy her another cup of coffee. Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice. It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does. She has to give it a shot somehow. Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world. Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two. Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series. If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are. You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype. You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads. Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

I suppose he could have changed," Neal said dryly. "I myself have noticed my growing resemblance to a daffodil." The other pages snorted. Kel eyed her friend. "You do look yellow around the edges," she told him, her face quite serious. "I hadn’t wanted to bring it up." "We daffodils like to have things brought up," Neal said, slinging an arm around her shoulders. "It reminds us of spring.

...Something we once loved, and love now, in the shape of a book. Maybe eBooks are going to take over, one day, but not until those whizzkids in Silicon Valley invent a way to bend the corners, fold the spine, yellow the pages, add a coffee ring or two and allow the plastic tablet to fall open at a favorite page.

How do you press a wildflower into the pages of an e-book?

As I recall, Drew made me take him to see a voodoo priestess he found in the yellow pages that week because he said the friend put a hex on his penis. For two weeks he slept with a two-pound package of boneless, skinless chicken breasts on his junk since he refused to sacrifice a live chicken.

In here I'm the guy who can get things for you... outside all you need is the Yellow Pages. I don't think I could make it.

My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. I'm a wizard. I work out of an office in midtown Chicago. As far as I know, I'm the only openly practicing professional wizard in the country. You can find me in the yellow pages, under "Wizards." Believe it or not, I'm the only one there. My ad looks like this: HARRY DRESDEN — WIZARD Lost Items Found. Paranormal Investigations. Consulting. Advice. Reasonable Rates. No Love Potions, Endless Purses, Parties, or Other Entertainment You'd be surprised how many people call just to ask me if I'm serious.

Adventures are funny things. Some streak down upon you like a storm. Others emerge after many years have passed and something forgotten is revealed. They can be discovered on a dusty bookshelf or the yellowed pages of an ancient map. They promise great reward, but no adventure is without risk.

I hate the word shy. I don't ever use that word. Shy was when I was seven and my one Princess signature got smeared across the pastel yellow page because I dripped tears all over it, because I was afraid and couldn't lift my head no matter how much I wanted to. That's how the shyness works. You want to talk, but you can't. People look at you with scorn. Being ice princess is infinitely better, even if some people think you're a total bitch. A snob. Reserved. Those are choices a person makes, to be reserved, to be quiet, or to be a snob. Shy isn't a choice.

It was her first book, an indigo cover with a silver moonflower, an art nouveau flower, I traced my finger along the silver line like smoke, whiplash curves. ... I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails.

Just So You Know You fall in love with every book you touch. You never break the spine or tear the pages. That would be cruel. You have secret favorites but, when asked, you say that you could never choose. But did you know that books fall in love with you, too? They watch you from the shelf while you sleep. Are you dreaming of them, they wonder, in that wistful mood books are prone to at night when they’re bored and there’s nothing else to do but tease the cat. Remember that pale yellow book you read when you were sixteen? It changed your world, that book. It changed your dreams. You carried it around until it was old and thin and sparkles no longer rose from the pages and filled the air when you opened it, like it did when it was new. You should know that it still thinks of you. It would like to get together sometime, maybe over coffee next month, so you can see how much you’ve both changed. And the book about the donkey your father read to you every night when you were three, it’s still around – older, a little worse for wear. But it still remembers the way your laughter made its pages tremble with joy. Then there was that book, just last week, in the bookstore. It caught your eye. You looked away quickly, but it was too late. You felt the rush. You picked it up and stroked your hand over its glassy cover. It knew you were The One. But, for whatever reason, you put it back and walked away. Maybe you were trying to be practical. Maybe you thought there wasn’t room enough, time enough, energy enough. But you’re thinking about it now, aren’t you? You fall in love so easily. But just so you know, they do, too.

Allie sighed. It was an old, yellow sound, like turning pages.

According to the evidence provided by the Wasp Trap files, the Fleet Street newspaper proprietor was introduced to, among other prominent Nazis, Hitler’s architect, Albert Speer, in 1934. Speer was also Hitler’s closest military adviser just before the war. Evidence from a letter allegedly from Speer to the Fleet Street newspaper proprietor, thanking him for information about the Paris defences and the Free French army. A photograph of a letter allegedly from the Fleet Street proprietor, also included in these discovered files, advises Force Yellow – the German invading army – to avoid the Maginot line entirely and invade through neutral Belgium and the other Low Countries. There is no evidence that totally confirms these letters are genuine, or, indeed, from Speer or the Fleet Street newspaper proprietor. “In June 1940, when the Nazis occupied Paris, the Fleet Street newspaper proprietor was back in London and became liaison executive between the secret services in Britain and agents in France. It is possibly no coincidence that the invading Nazi forces occupied a house in Avenue Foch, Paris, owned by the newspaper proprietor’s family. The house was then used for the entertainment of senior Nazi officers. The Wasp Trap files document that the Fleet Street newspaper proprietor had allegedly been credited with over thirty British agents and Free French operatives being captured, tortured and killed.

He stares at the open textbook for hours and is distracted by the pain of the parallelogram, which is slanted for ever. His nails scratch the page to straighten its tired limbs. It affects him, the great arrogance of the Equilateral Triangle, the failed aspiration of the octagon to be a circle, the eternal suffocation of the denominator that has to bear the weight of the unjust numerator, the loneliness of Pluto. And the smallness of Mercury, always a mere dot next to a yellow sun. In this world, there is no respect for Mercury.

Agonizing really, how enduring love can be. Even after you have packed it up and put it away, it is still there—always there, yellowing around the edges and begging you to turn its pages again.

Serious readers know the singular pleasure of handling a well-made book - the heft and texture of the case, the rasp of the spine as you lift the cover, the sweet, dusty aroma of yellowed pages as they pass between your fingers. A book is more than a vessel for ideas; It is a living thing in need of love, warmth, and protection.

I have always been jealous of artists. The smell of the studio, the names of the various tools, the look of a half-finished canvas all shout of creation. What do writers have in comparison? Only the flat paper, the clacketing of the typewriter or the scrape of a pen across a yellow page. And then, when the finished piece is presented, there is a small wonder on one hand, a manuscript smudged with erasures or crossed out lines on the other. The impact of the painting is immediate, the manuscript must unfold slowly through time.

...demons do tend to cluster around the yellowing pages and cracked spines of second hand books.

Yet at least he had believed in the cars, maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bring with them the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopeless of children, of supermarket booze, or two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust--and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of 5 or 10¢, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the market, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a grey dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastes--it nauseated him to look, but he had to look.

He flicked through the yellowed rough-cut pages and breathed its musty smell. It filled him with a strange excitement, as if he'd caught a whiff of ancient, buried cities.

Every book was a tree living a second life. And the older the book, the more it smelled of the earth—the more the rustle of its crisp, yellowed pages sounded like the rustle of leaves.

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollow of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumns trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.

A series of books, dilapidated and faded, sit bundled together. Most of the bindings are separating from the yellowed pages, but each is at home in its battered state. Their wrinkled pages and discolored skin tell not of old age, but of a good life. These books, unlike so many others, were not just read, but revisited, loved, and experienced.

What is the colour of Christmas? Red? The red of the toyshops on a dark winter’s afternoon, Of Father Christmas and the robin’s breast? Or green? Green of holly and spruce and mistletoe in the house, dark shadow of summer in leafless winter? One might plainly add a romance of white, fields of frost and snow; thus white, green, red- reducing the event to the level of a Chianti bottle. But many will say that the significant colour is gold, gold of fire and treasure, of light in the winter dark; and this gets closer, For the true colour of Christmas is Black. Black of winter, black of night, black of frost and of the east wind, black of dangerous shadows beyond the firelight. I am not sure who wrote this. I got it from page nine of “A Book of Christmas” by William Sansom. Google didn’t help. It is rather true I think, that the true color of Christmas is black. For like the author said in succeeding sentences “The table yellow with electric light, the fire by which stories are told, the bright spangle of the tree- they all blazé out of shadow and out of a darkness of winter

So the price of careless rapture is a twisted history chronicled by envy. You were too busy being. And you are too busy now. You couldn't spare the time to note down a few facts: how the sun and silence poured into the big room with the yellow curtains; how everything was never-ending and expendable.

Drenched in British purples, I have offered up my tones: pigeon breast, hind belly, balky mule lung, monkey bottom pink, lapis lazuli and malachite, excited nymph thigh, panther pee-pee, high-smelling hen hair, hedgehog in aspic, barrel-maker's brothel, revered rose, monkeybush, turkey-like white, sly violet, page's slipper, immaculate nun spring, unspeakable red, Ensor azure, affected yellow, mummy skull, rock-hard gray, brunt celadon, shop soiled smoke ring.

It takes just one, he says over and over. You hear that all the time in this business. One big case, and you can retire. That's one reason lawyers do so many sleazy things, like full-color ads in the yellow pages, and billboards, and placards on city buses, and telephone solicitation. You hold your nose, ignore the stench of what you're doing, ignore the snubs and snobbery of big-firm lawyers, because it takes only one.

PRICELESS!— Ruem, the Mesmerizer, admires the Devil’s Book. A three-foot-tall and one-and-a-half-foot-wide book with leather bounding—preserved well through time. The ornate frame protects its thickness of nine inch. The yellowed pages are filled with Latin in dark ink and decorative drawings of … well, everything you can think of: astronomy, botany, physiology. A book of practical knowledge, yes. But it also holds the unknown, the mysteries of the abstract—the unreal realms of the universe.

Adele was in everybody’s wish list, and her list of Romeos was nearly as long as the Yellow Pages. Some witty person had suggested that her family needed a system of traffic lights to avoid fatal crashes for the men in her life.

Quite a few people still listen to vinyl records, use film cameras to take photographs, and look up phone numbers in the printed Yellow Pages. But the old technologies lose their economic and cultural force. They become progress’s dead ends. It’s the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people’s behavior and shape their perceptions. That’s why the future of knowledge and culture no longer lies in books or newspapers or TV shows or radio programs or records or CDs. It lies in digital files shot through our universal medium at the speed of light.

The pages were yellowed and had gone to brown at the edges. They were brittle, much like the memories the photos evoked.

Books age, they yellow, the pages dry and crackle and tear. Who can tell what tiny defect will change simple paper and ink into true meaning?

It was a cold autumn day with a cloudless, hazy sky and a yellow sun that no longer gave off any heat, the kind you can look at directly without hurting your eyes.

The three of us exchanged glances but said nothing. After all, what was there to say? The truth was that hookers did take credit cards—or at least ours did! In fact, hookers were so much a part of the Stratton subculture that we classified them like publicly traded stocks: Blue Chips were considered the top-of-the-line hooker, zee crème de la crème. They were usually struggling young models or exceptionally beautiful college girls in desperate need of tuition or designer clothing, and for a few thousand dollars they would do almost anything imaginable, either to you or to each other. Next came the NASDAQs, who were one step down from the Blue Chips. They were priced between three and five hundred dollars and made you wear a condom unless you gave them a hefty tip, which I always did. Then came the Pink Sheet hookers, who were the lowest form of all, usually a streetwalker or the sort of low-class hooker who showed up in response to a desperate late-night phone call to a number in Screw magazine or the yellow pages. They usually cost a hundred dollars or less, and if you didn’t wear a condom, you’d get a penicillin shot the next day and then pray that your dick didn’t fall off. Anyway, the Blue Chips took credit cards, so what was wrong with writing them off on your taxes? After all, the IRS knew about this sort of stuff, didn’t they? In fact, back in the good old days, when getting blasted over lunch was considered normal corporate behavior, the IRS referred to these types of expenses as three-martini lunches! They even had an accounting term for it: It was called T and E, which stood for Travel and Entertainment. All I’d done was taken the small liberty of moving things to their logical conclusion, changing T and E to T and A: Tits and Ass!

Doc bought a package of yellow pads and two dozen pencils. He laid them out on his desk, the pencils sharpened to needle points and lined up like yellow soldiers. At the top of a page he printed: OBSERVATIONS AND SPECULATIONS. His pencil point broke. He took up another and drew lace around the O and the B, made a block letter of the S and put fish hooks on each end. His ankle itched. He rolled down his sock and scratched, and that made his ear itch. “Someone’s talking about me,” he said and looked at the yellow pad. He wondered whether he had fed the cotton rats. It is easy to forget when you’re thinking.

In practice it undermines the transformation of faith. When Christians concentrate their time and energy on their own separate spheres and their own institutions-whether all-absorbing megachurches, Christian yellow-page businesses, or womb-to-tomb Christian cultural ghettoes-they lose the outward thrusting, transforming power that is at the heart of the gospel. Instead of being 'salt' and 'light' -images of a permeating and penetrating action-Christians and Christian institutions become soft and vulnerable to corruption from within.

The Taking Of Turns Monday, June 14, 2010 You are in some songs that still get played on the radio when the DJ is feeling nostalgic. You are in a book you once lent me (never returned) with yellowed pages. You are in trees when I touch them, even ones without names carved into them. You are in the way someone on the street laughs as I pass them. You are in a box I keep filled with letters. You are in a ring I no longer wear. And, every day, you each get a moment to haunt me.

My name is Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden. Conjure by it at your own risk. I’m a wizard. I work out of an office in midtown Chicago. As far as I know, I’m the only openly practicing professional wizard in the country. You can find me in the yellow pages, under “Wizards.” Believe it or not, I’m the only one there.

So long time has passed since those days, and since that story, which is still vivid in my memory, and even more vivid than all the rest. Some times I stay alone in my work - room here, in my father's old mansion in Pasadena, and I look through the old, yellow pages again and again. Then I go back to the north part which is furnished in my style, with many colored Bulgarian carpets and blankets (special kind of Bulgarian blankets with long fur), I make my coffee in a cooper coffee - pot, which has been brought from there, and my thoughts wonder to those absurd memories of mine... Very often some friends ask me - what is that unusual memories of yours? I can't explain to them, better say I don't want to, and I always avoid the answer by saying - a la Bulgaro - in a Bulgarian way..."Oh, yes, yes"...

Maybe eBooks are going to take over, one day, but not until those whizzkids in Silicon Valley invent a way to bend the corners, fold the spine, yellow the pages, add a coffee ring or two and allow the plastic tablet to fall open at a favourite page.

It is an art form to hate New York City properly. So far I have always been a featherweight debunker of New York; it takes too much energy and endurance to record the infinite number of ways the city offends me. Were I to list them all, I would fill up a book the size of the Manhattan yellow pages, and that would merely be the prologue. Every time I submit myself to the snubs and indignities of that swaggering city and set myself adrift among the prodigious crowds, a feeling of displacement, profound and enervating, takes me over, killing all the coded cells of my hard-won singularity. The city marks my soul with a most profane, indelible graffiti. There is too much of too much there.

As her dreams intensified, the red-haired girl became so real to Olivia that she found herself absentmindedly sketching her image during the day, bringing her to life on the page. She drew her surrounded by the flowers she held in her hands- white harebell, pink campion, and yellow cinquefoil- entwining them into the curls in her hair, until the flowers and plants were not around her, but part of her. A true child of the woodland.

Fortune favours the brave, sir," said Carrot cheerfully. "Good. Good. Pleased to hear it, captain. What is her position vis a vis heavily armed, well prepared and excessively manned armies?" "Oh, no–one's ever heard of Fortune favouring them, sir." "According to General Tacticus, it's because they favour themselves," said Vimes. He opened the battered book. Bits of paper and string indicated his many bookmarks. "In fact, men, the general has this to say about ensuring against defeat when outnumbered, out–weaponed and outpositioned. It is..." he turned the page, "'Don't Have a Battle.'" "Sounds like a clever man," said Jenkins. He pointed to the yellow horizon. "See all that stuff in the air?" he said. "What do you think that is?" "Mist?" said Vimes. "Hah, yes. Klatchian mist! It's a sandstorm! The sand blows about all the time. Vicious stuff. If you want to sharpen your sword, just hold it up in the air." "Oh." "And it's just as well because otherwise you'd see Mount Gebra. And below it is what they call the Fist of Gebra. It's a town but there's a bloody great fort, walls thirty feet thick. 's like a big city all by itself. 's got room inside for thousands of armed men, war elephants, battle camels, everything. And if you saw that, you'd want me to turn round right now. Whats your famous general got to say about it, eh?" "I think I saw something..." said Vimes. He flicked to another page. "Ah, yes, he says, 'After the first battle of Sto Lat, I formulated a policy which has stood me in good stead in other battles. It is this: if the enemy has an impregnable stronghold, see he stays there.'" "That's a lot of help," said Jenkins. Vimes slipped the book into a pocket. "So, Constable Visit, there's a god on our side, is there?" "Certainly, sir." "But probably also a god on their side as well?" "Very likely, sir. There's a god on every side." "Let's hope they balance out, then.

I open my eyes and stare at the page. I see the black letters. But I also see the pinks and greens and purples and yellows. I can’t say I’m surprised.

Those are the old, dusty, handwritten books with yellow pages, and the smell of age on them. They are the books people think aren’t needed anymore.

How do we exorcise one of the Jinn?" He shrugged. "You got Yellow Pages?" "Seriously?" Jai snorted. "Yes, Ari. There are Aissawa Exorcists in the Yellow Pages." Huffing, Ari walked away from him. "You really need to work on intonation when you use sarcasm. That way people will know when you're being an asshole." "And you need to work on your gullibility." "Well, I was under the impression you have no sense of humour so forgive me for believing everything you say." "Well that should be fun." "See!" she threw over her shoulder. "No intonation.

It is well known how the book spread like an infectious disease, from city to city, from continent to continent, barred out here, confiscated there, denounced by press and pulpit, censured even by the most advanced of literary anarchists. No definite principles had been violated in those wicked pages, no doctrine promulgated, no convictions outraged. It could not be judged by any known standard, yet, although it was acknowledged that the supreme note of art had been struck in "The King in Yellow," all felt that human nature could not bear the strain nor thrive on words in which the essence of purest poison lurked. The very banality and innocence of the first act only allowed the blow to fall afterwards with more awful effect.

No, no, Claude thought, the past never stops banging at the doors of the present. We pack it into tattered suitcases, lock it into rusting metal trunks beneath our beds, press it between yellowed pages of newsprint, but it hangs over us at night like a poisonous cloud, seeps into our shirt collars and bedclothes.

It wasn't enough to catch a glimpse of these lands and ideas through the small window of the pages she turned. She wanted to step through and feel the yellow waters of the Yangtze herself, to hear the celestial music of foreign pipes, to taste the foods described by adventurers who traveled purposefully into the areas on maps labeled 'Here be tygres.

Two links diverged from a yellow page, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it broke in the understroke; Then took the other, as just as fair And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there May wear them really about the same, And both that page-load equally lay In bits no click had colored black. — adapted from The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost

And the crocuses nodded and laughed, holding up their little yellow staves gaily to the sunshine, and shouting to each other that it was spring, clamouring to make the most of their great day, before the flowers came in battalions to crowd them out of sight and mind.

Knowing, above all, that I would come looking, and find what he had left for me, all that remained of The Jungle Book in the pocket of his doctor’s coat, that folder-up, yellowed page torn from the back of the book, with a bristle of thick, coarse hairs clenced inside. Galina, says my grandfather’s handwriting, above and below a child’s drawing of the tiger, who is curved like the blade of a scimitar across the page. Galina, it says, and that is how I know to find him again, in Galina, in the story he hadn’t told me but perhaps wished he had.

In the dresser mirror, my face looks the same, but I feel something happening around me, some change as palpable as weather. Stuck in the mirror are mementos from my childhood—red and yellow ribbons for various underachievements, a brown corsage from grad school graduation, a curling and faded picture of me petting a deer in Wisconsin—which is now over. I wandered through it and came out the other side. It’s a stark feeling. Like getting to the last page of a book and seeing ‘The End.’ Even if you didn’t like the story that much, or your childhood, you read it, you lived it. And now it’s over, book closed, that long-ago deer you petted in the Dells as dead as the one in The Yearling.

Author: A common gadabout who freely wanders over the landscape with wanton disregard. His days are spent picking up all the stray free words he can handle and squirreling them away for later use. Subsequently, (days, months or years later) working by candlelight and hidden away in his dank, musty secluded lair, the rogue simply rearranges the collected words on yellowed bond with a sharpened quill ink pen fashioned from the tail feather of a bald-headed vulture. Once finished, the dastardly cur audaciously attempts to sell those assembled pages for fleeting fame and profit.

Yet five minutes after she had passed the statue of Achilles she had the rapt look of one brushing through crowds on a summer's afternoon, when the trees are rustling, the wheels churning yellow, and the tumult of the present seems like an elegy for past youth and past summers, and there rose in her mind a curious sadness, as if time and eternity showed through skirts and waistcoats, and she saw people passing tragically to destruction.

Even a paperback printed on acidic paper, whose pages have yellowed ten years on, can still be read, no matter how badly the spine is cracked or how inflated it's become from being dropped in the bathtub. The pages might separate from the spine, but a rubber band can keep them together. You may loan a book to your circle of closest friends, but shoes are another matter. A great book will never go out of style - books go with every outfit.

If it is true that there are books written to escape from the present moment, and its meanness and its sordidity, it is certainly true that readers are familiar with a corresponding mood. To draw the blinds and shut the door, to muffle the noises of the street and shade the glare and flicker of its lights—that is our desire. There is then a charm even in the look of the great volumes that have sunk, like the “Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”, as if by their own weight down to the very bottom of the shelf. We like to feel that the present is not all; that other hands have been before us, smoothing the leather until the corners are rounded and blunt, turning the pages until they are yellow and dog’s-eared. We like to summon before us the ghosts of those old readers who have read their Arcadia from this very copy—Richard Porter, reading with the splendours of the Elizabethans in his eyes; Lucy Baxter, reading in the licentious days of the Restoration; Thos. Hake, still reading, though now the eighteenth century has dawned with a distinction that shows itself in the upright elegance of his signature. Each has read differently, with the insight and the blindness of his own generation. Our reading will be equally partial. In 1930 we shall miss a great deal that was obvious to 1655; we shall see some things that the eighteenth century ignored. But let us keep up the long succession of readers; let us in our turn bring the insight and the blindness of our own generation to bear upon the “Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia”, and so pass it on to our successors.

Tick Lu-Tze patiently adjusted a tiny mirror to redirect sunlight more favourably on one of the bonsai mountains. He hummed tunelessly under his breath. Lobsang, sitting cross-legged on the stones, carefully turned the yellowing pages of the ancient notebook on which was written, in faded ink, 'The Way of Mrs Cosmopilite'. 'Well?' said Lu-Tze. 'The Way has an answer for everything, does it?' 'Yes.' 'Then...' Lobsang nodded at the little volcano, which was gently smoking, 'how does that work? It's on a saucer!' Lu-Tze stared straight ahead, his lips moving. 'Page seventy-six, I think,' he said. Lobsang turned to the page. ' “Because”, he read.

Newcomers to manuscripts sometimes ask what such books tell us about the societies that created them. At one level, these Gospel Books describe nothing, for they are not local chronicles but standard Latin translations of religious texts from far away. At the same time, this is itself extraordinarily revealing about Ireland. No one knows how literacy and Christianity had first reached the islands of Ireland, possibly through North Africa. This was clearly no primitive backwater but a civilization which could now read Latin, although never occupied by the Romans, and which was somehow familiar with the texts and artistic designs which have unambiguous parallels in the Coptic and Greek churches, such as carpet pages and Canon tables. Although the Book of Kells itself is as uniquely Irish as anything imaginable, it is a Mediterranean text and the pigments used in making it include orpiment, a yellow made from arsenic sulphide, exported from Italy, where it is found in volcanoes. There are clearly lines of trade and communication unknown to us.

Listening to the radio, I heard the story behind rocker David Lee Roth’s notorious insistence that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause specifying that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage, but with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band. And at least once, Van Halen followed through, peremptorily canceling a show in Colorado when Roth found some brown M&M’s in his dressing room. This turned out to be, however, not another example of the insane demands of power-mad celebrities but an ingenious ruse. As Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, “Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.” So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause. “When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he wrote, “well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error.… Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.” These weren’t trifles, the radio story pointed out. The mistakes could be life-threatening. In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena floor.

... a new patina whitening the walls with marks of memories, all running together as if the memories themselves aspired to be the walls in which I was imprisoned...

A Yellow Raft on Blue Water. He’d left it opened to page 158. A hard place to stop.

And just at that second, the wind picked up, and thousands upon thousands of yellow sycamore leaves broke from their life support and streamed across the sky.

The pages were yellowing a tad but sometimes it was best to go old school for reliable facts. The internet was a flaky and unreliable tool sometimes.

Mr. Manzi stood at the bottom of the big, rickety old amphitheater, making blue flames and red flares and clouds of yellow stuff by pouring the contents of one test tube into another, and I shut his voice out of my ears by pretending it was only a mosquito in the distance and sat back enjoying the bright lights and the colored fires and wrote page after page of villanelles and sonnets.

I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadio hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, 'quartered her like a little bird' made my face hot. I bent down the page, whose small triangle marks the instant. Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by... And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message 'Mom 1/2', written in laundry pen, since no-one in our family ever stood on ceremony.

You’ll have to get your own lawyer, Dupree.” “Where am I supposed to get him? I’ve called every son of a bitch in the yellow pages.” A good lawyer, he thought, would be able to forestall the psychiatric examination at the prison hospital in Springfield, Missouri. That examination was what he feared most, and with good reason, even though the finding would no doubt have provided a solid defense.

you will write many poems about death yes, and here's another one and later it might even end up in one of my books. and the book will be sitting on a shelf waiting for you long after I am gone. think of that: in a sense I will be speaking again just for you. and remember this: the page you are looking at now, I once typed the words with care with you in mind under a yellow light with the radio on. If you think about death long enough I have found it belongs it makes sense just like this typewriter this match book this paper clip and the next page and the next poem after this one.

It's been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there's that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul.

Should I seek out some tree? Should I desert these form rooms and libraries, and the broad yellow page in which I read Catullus, for woods and fields? Should I walk under beech trees, or saunter along the river bank, where the trees meet united like lovers in the water? But nature is too vegetable, too vapid. She has only sublimities and vastitudes and water and leaves. I begin to wish for firelight, privacy, and the limbs of one person.

Leather spines, cracked with age. Yellowed pages with preservation spells wearing off. Plus, witches have terrible handwriting, making their scrawled spells uneven and almost illegible on the parchment. Give me an eBook any day.

Then there was the gray of human habitation. The blue places were turning brown, the yellow places to dust, the green places to smoke and ashes. Each time one of the animals disappeared--they went by species or sometimes by organizations of species, interconnected--it was as though all mountains were gone, or all lakes. A certain form of the world. But in the gray that metastasized over continents and hemispheres few appeared to be deterred by this extinguishing or even to speak of it, no one outside fringe elements and elite groups, professors and hippies, small populations of little general importance. The quiet mass disappearance, the inversion of the Ark, was passing unnoticed.

And I don't know, it is one thing to look out a window, but when you are Out, actually Out, that is something very powerful, and how embarrassing was that, because I could not help it, I went down flat on my gut checking out those flowers, and the feeling of the one I chose was like the silk on that Hermes jacket I could never seem to get Reserved because Vance was always hogging it, except the flower was even better, it being very smooth and built in like layers? With the outside layer being yellow, and inside that a white thing like a bell, and inside the white bell-like thing were fifteen (I counted) smaller bell-like red things, and inside each red thing was an even smaller orange two-dingly-thing combo.

First, I see her catch the scent. It's a combination of many things; the Christmas tree in the corner; the musty aroma of old house; orange and clove; ground coffee; hot milk; patchouli; cinnamon- and chocolate, of course; intoxicating, rich as Croesus, dark as death. She looks around, sees wall hangings, pictures, bells, ornaments, a dollhouse in the window, rugs on the floor- all in chrome yellow and fuchsia-pink and scarlet and gold and green and white. It's like an opium den in here, she almost says, then wonders at herself for being so fanciful. In fact she has never seen an opium den- unless it was in the pages of the Arabian Nights- but there's something about the place, she thinks. Something almost- magical.

Everything smelled of sheep. The dandelions were suddenly more sheep than flower, each petal reflecting wool and the sound of a bell ringing off the yellow. But the thing that smelled the most like sheep, was the very sun itself. When the sun went behind a cloud, the smell of the sheep decreased, like standing on some old guy's hearing aid, and when the sun came back again, the smell of the sheep was loud, like a clap of thunder inside a coffee cup. (from "On Paradise", page 50)

Song for the Last Act Now that I have your face by heart, I look Less at its features than its darkening frame Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame, Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook. Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease The lead and marble figures watch the show Of yet another summer loath to go Although the scythes hang in the apple trees. Now that I have your face by heart, I look. Now that I have your voice by heart, I read In the black chords upon a dulling page Music that is not meant for music's cage, Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed. The staves are shuttled over with a stark Unprinted silence. In a double dream I must spell out the storm, the running stream. The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark. Now that I have your voice by heart, I read. Now that I have your heart by heart, I see The wharves with their great ships and architraves; The rigging and the cargo and the slaves On a strange beach under a broken sky. O not departure, but a voyage done! The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun. Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

I practiced this when making my phone calls. I stopped calling every lawyer from A to Z in the Yellow Pages, as my coworkers were doing. Instead, I’d go into a relaxed, meditative level of mind, run my finger down the listings, and call the ones where I felt an impulse. The impulse often felt like guessing, but I heeded it. I realize this makes no logical sense. But I discovered that listening to my impulse somehow caused me to call lawyers more likely to buy. My closing rate started rising rapidly.

I pick up a few remembrances: a photo of my parents on their wedding day, a blue hair ribbon for Prim, the family book of medicinal and edible plants. The book falls open to a page with yellow flowers and I shut it quickly because it was Peeta’s brush that painted them.

My hands trembled as I flipped through the yellowed pages until I reached that final chapter. I stilled as I got to the last page. A beautiful bookmark lay there, one with flowers pressed into the thick paper. And on it read, The End is only a chance for another beginning.

If I ever needed to pick a place to hide, I would seek refuge inside a book. There's something about the musty smell emanating from the yellowed pages and the perfect alignment of printed words that appeases me. It is orderly, in massive contrast with my out-of-control life.

The wooden shelves were tall and packed with worn covers of books read many times over. Pages were yellowed and paperbacks had arched spines like old sway-backed horses. It was an old folks' home for secondhand books, with that smell of old newsprint and slightly musty wood smell.

And yet, in Raissa, at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of the scaffolding, "Darling, let me dip into it," to a young servant-maid who holds up a dish of ragout under the pergola, happy to serve it to the umbrella-maker who is celebrating a successful transaction, a white lace parasol bought to display at the races by a great lady in love with an officer who has smiled at her taking the last jump, happy man, and still happier his horse, flying over the obstacles, seeing a francolin flying in the sky, happy bird freed from its cage by a painter happy at having painted it feather by feather, speckled with red and yellow in the illumination of that page in the volume where the philosopher says: "Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.

I couldn’t do it,” I said. “I couldn’t get along on the outside. I’m what they call an institutional man now. In here I’m the man who can get it for you, yeah. But out there, anyone can get it for you. Out there, if you want posters or rock-hammers or one particular record or a boat-in-a-bottle model kit, you can use the fucking Yellow Pages. In here, I’m the fucking Yellow Pages. I wouldn’t know how to begin. Or where.” “You underestimate yourself,” he said. “You’re a self-educated man, a self-made man. A rather remarkable man, I think.” “Hell, I don’t even have a high school diploma.

But what after all is one night? A short space, especially when the darkness dims so soon, and so soon a bird sings, a cock crows, or a faint green quickens, like a turning leaf, in the hollows of the wave. Night, however, succeeds to night. The winter holds a pack of them in store and deals them equally, evenly, with indefatigable fingers. They lengthen; they darken. Some of them hold aloft clear planets, plates of brightness. The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flesh of tattered flags kindling in the doom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore. It seemed now as if, touched by human penitence and all its toil, divine goodness had parted the curtain and displayed behind it, single, distinct, the hare erect; the wave falling; the boat rocking; which, did we deserve them, should be ours always. But alas, divine goodness, twitching the cord, draws the curtain; it does not please him; he covers his treasures in a drench of hail, and so breaks them, so confuses them that it seems impossible that their calm should ever return or that we should ever compose from their fragments a perfect whole or read in the littered pieces the clear words of truth. For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only. The nights now are full of wind and destruction; the trees plunge and bend and their leaves fly helter skelter until the lawn is plastered with them and they lie packed in gutters and choke rain pipes and scatter damp paths. Also the sea tosses itself and breaks itself, and should any sleeper fancying that he might find on the beach an answer to his doubts, a sharer of his solitude, throw off his bedclothes and go down by himself to walk on the sand, no image with semblance of serving and divine promptitude comes readily to hand bringing the night to order and making the world reflect the compass of the soul. The hand dwindles in his hand; the voice bellows in his ear. Almost it would appear that it is useless in such confusion to ask the night those questions as to what, and why, and wherefore, which tempt the sleeper from his bed to seek an answer.

But that was twenty years ago, and with the exception of EQMM (still indisputably the fountainhead of significant mystery fiction throughout the civilized world), most of the magazines I listed above are dead. Crumbling yellow pulp relics in my files, dropping brittle little triangles from page corners.

George thrust into Alma's hand a lithograph of a spotted 'Catasetum.' The orchid had been rendered so magnificently that it seemed to grow off the page. Its lips were spotted red against yellow, and appeared moist, like living flesh. Its leaves were lush and thick, and its bulbous roots looked as though one could shake actual soil off them. Before Alma could thoroughly take in the beauty, George handed her another stunning print- a 'Peristeria barkeri,' with its tumbling golden blossoms so fresh they nearly trembled. Whoever had tinted this lithograph had been a master of texture as well as color; the petals resembled unshorn velvet, and touches of albumen on their tips gave each blossom a hint of dew. Then George handed her another print, and Alma could not help but gasp. Whatever this orchid was, Alma had never seen it before. Its tiny pink lobes looked like something a fairy would don for a fancy dress ball.

Seventy-five years ago a young woman kept a diary in which she wrote some of her innermost thoughts, many of the daily happenings, and all of the weather. This story is the fictionalized version of the real diary. The thoughts more or less trite pedantic have been curtailed, the happenings (for obvious reasons) sometimes changed, but the weather remains practically intact. ...So step out of the yellowed diary, Linnie Colsworth,.... Recreate yourself from the fading ink of it's pages and help us understand something of the stanch heart that beat under those hard little stays, bidding you defy convention three-quarters of a century ago.

Her parents noticed, when Dominika turned five, that the little girl had a prodigious memory. She could recite lines from Pushkin, identify the concertos of Tchaikovsky. And when music was played, Dominika would dance barefoot around the Oriental carpet in the living room, perfectly in time with the notes, twirling and jumping, perfectly in balance, her eyes gleaming, her hands flashing. Vassily and Nina looked at each other, and her mother asked Dominika how she had learned all this. “I follow the colors,” said the little girl. “What do you mean, ‘the colors’?” asked her mother. Dominika gravely explained that when the music played, or when her father read aloud to her, colors would fill the room. Different colors, some bright, some dark, sometimes they “jumped in the air” and all Dominika had to do was follow them. It was how she could remember so much. When she danced, she leapt over bars of bright blue, followed shimmering spots of red on the floor. The parents looked at each other again. “I like red and blue and purple,” said Dominika. “When Batushka reads, or when Mamulya plays, they are beautiful.” “And when Mama is cross with you?” asked Vassily. “Yellow, I don’t like the yellow,” said the little girl, turning the pages of a book. “And the black cloud. I do not like that.

The technology of the book is much more flexible than film, more user friendly. The reader can dip into the book at will, without electricity, and is always aware of where she is in the book, halfway through, a third of the way, mere pages from the end, her fingers helping to measure the excitement of coming to the conclusion.

My father noticed the direction of my reading. He came home from fairs and sales with books he thought might be interesting for me. Shabby little books, in manuscript mostly, yellowed pages tied with ribbon or string, sometimes hand-bound. I devoured them. Though my appetite for food grew frail, my hunger for books was constant.

In no particular order, I read what I could, sometimes with Fadiman as my docent, sometimes not: Flaubert, Twain, Kerouac, Brontë, Kafka, Camus, Ibsen, James, Thurber, Shakespeare. But in the course of reading great books, something happened. My reading molded me, the tool hammering its hand into shape. By some miracle—and by miracle, I mean great teachers—I pushed past the shallowness and stupidity of my own motivations. I fell in love with the actual literature and the actual ideas of great literature. As an immigrant, as a Vietnamese kid, as a poor kid, I had collected so many scarlet letters of alienation that I connected profoundly to the great works. As I read, I began to understand that all the great works wrangled with big questions, important questions: our place in the world, the value of our experience, the fairness and meaning of our suffering, our quest for love and belonging. Universal themes bound these great works together, and they bound me to their oaky, yellowed pages like Odysseus lashed to the mast of his ship. I felt a connective and humanizing resonance in books: I wasn’t alone in my aloneness. I wasn’t alone in my longing for love. I wasn’t alone in my fear of being rejected, my fear of never finding my place, my fear of failing. The snarl of my journey was untangled and laid out clearly by books.

Hence the real problem in understanding China’s loss of political and technological preeminence to Europe is to understand China’s chronic unity and Europe’s chronic disunity. The answer is again suggested by maps (see page 399). Europe has a highly indented coastline, with five large peninsulas that approach islands in their isolation, and all of which evolved independent languages, ethnic groups, and governments: Greece, Italy, Iberia, Denmark, and Norway / Sweden. China’s coastline is much smoother, and only the nearby Korean Peninsula attained separate importance. Europe has two islands (Britain and Ireland) sufficiently big to assert their political independence and to maintain their own languages and ethnicities, and one of them (Britain) big and close enough to become a major independent European power. But even China’s two largest islands, Taiwan and Hainan, have each less than half the area of Ireland; neither was a major independent power until Taiwan’s emergence in recent decades; and Japan’s geographic isolation kept it until recently much more isolated politically from the Asian mainland than Britain has been from mainland Europe. Europe is carved up into independent linguistic, ethnic, and political units by high mountains (the Alps, Pyrenees, Carpathians, and Norwegian border mountains), while China’s mountains east of the Tibetan plateau are much less formidable barriers. China’s heartland is bound together from east to west by two long navigable river systems in rich alluvial valleys (the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers), and it is joined from north to south by relatively easy connections between these two river systems (eventually linked by canals). As a result, China very early became dominated by two huge geographic core areas of high productivity, themselves only weakly separated from each other and eventually fused into a single core. Europe’s two biggest rivers, the Rhine and Danube, are smaller and connect much less of Europe. Unlike China, Europe has many scattered small core areas, none big enough to dominate the others for long, and each the center of chronically independent states.

Gabbe stepped forward. "Cam's right. I've heard the Scale speak of these shifts." She was tugging on the sleeves of her pale yellow cashmere cardigan as if she would never get warm. "They're called timequakes. They are ripples in our reality." "And the closer he gets," Roland added, with his usual understated wisdom, "the closer we are to the terminus of his Fall, the more frequent and the more severe the timequakes will become. Time is faltering in preparation for rewriting itself." "Like the way your computer freezes up more and more frequently before the hard drive crashes and erases your twenty-page term paper?" Miles said. Everyone looked at him in befuddlement. "What?" he asked. "Angels and demons don't do homework?

I started seeing Dr. Tuttle in January 2000. It started off very innocently: I was plagued with misery, anxiety, a wish to escape the prison of my mind and body. Dr. Tuttle confirmed that this was nothing unusual. She wasn’t a good doctor. I had found her name in the phone book. “You’ve caught me at a good moment,” she said the first time I called. “I just finished rinsing the dishes. Where did you find my number?” “In the Yellow Pages.” I liked to think that I’d picked Dr. Tuttle at random, that there was something fated about our relationship, divine in some way, but in truth, she’d been the only psychiatrist to answer the phone at eleven at night on a Tuesday. I’d left a dozen messages on answering machines by the time Dr. Tuttle picked up.

He didn't look at her, instead keeping his gaze on the piles of books still waiting to be returned to their shelves. "Which one do you want to borrow?" she asked him after another moment's silence. He carefully picked up a copy of Marie NDiaye's Trois femmes puissantes. Long fingers traced the black swirls of letters against the yellowed paper of an open page. "All of them.

Did Grandma Niara say how he found time to study things like the migratory patterns of terns and errisbirds? Or Fallorinia moths? He spends three pages talking about companion planting breeson root and kellenweed, then goes off about zakia berries and how if the birds migrate to Hedotis too late, they’re overripe and the flock drops dead, their little yellow beaks stained blue.

I don’t exist metal pressed to pages spilling blood, ink in vein each thought rages Sunlight shooting through a forest of pines black top winding and yellow dotted lines I am not here only a deep aching, a lightning flash and a tree trunk breaking Sheets once alive covered in a deep red mark the present but I am not yet dead Nothing is here only the rain and mist fresh air and soil I do not need to exist.

When I was twelve, one of two things happened. First, I became obsessed with spirituality./ I don’t have clear recollections of this early teen spiritual search. I don’t know how I found these alternate places of worship, pre-Internet. I asked mom. She doesn’t know either. I can only assume I researched using the Yellow Pages, and junk mail./ I point out this nexus - between my spiritual yearning and anxiety - because it’s helped me understand my restlessness ever since. Anxiety and existential curiosity are connected. Yes, absolutely, it can become medical when it spirals out too far. But its origins are far more fundamental./ i’ve done this since my early teens - revisited my spirituality on and off. And it’s always occurred in tandem with my anxiety. Indeed, I listed the help of a spiritual counsellor during this time.

The autumn trees, ravaged as they are, take on the flash of tattered flags kindling in the gloom of cool cathedral caves where gold letters on marble pages describe death in battle and how bones bleach and burn far away in Indian sands. The autumn trees gleam in the yellow moonlight, in the light of harvest moons, the light which mellows the energy of labour, and smooths the stubble, and brings the wave lapping blue to the shore.

Tom O’ Bedlam among the Sunflowers" To have gold in your back yard and not know it. . . I woke this morning before your dream had shredded And found a curious thing: flowers made of gold, Six-sided—more than that—broken on flagstones, Petals the color of a wedding band. You are sleeping. The morning comes up gold. Perhaps I made those flowers in my head, For I have counted snowflakes in July Blowing across my eyes like bits of calcium, And I have stepped into your dream at night, A stranger there, my body steeped in moonlight. I watched you tremble, washed in all that silver. Love, the stars have fallen into the garden And turned to frost. They have opened like a hand. It is the color that breaks out of the bedsheets. This morning the garden is littered with dry petals As yellow as the page of an old book. I step among them. They are brittle as bone china.

A film presents images; a book creates them inside the reader, with the reader's active participation. Books are good for your brain. Neurologists have found that, when watching television or film, the viewer's eyes remain idle, straight ahead, but when reading, the actual physical movement of scanning the page from left to right (or right to left, or up and down, depending) stimulates and conditions the brain, a Stairmaster of the mind.

This had been a very productive morning, he thought. He had not accomplished so much in weeks. Looking at the Big Chief tablets that made a rug of Indian headdresses around the bed, Ignatius thought smugly that on their yellowed pages and wide-ruled lines were the seeds of a magnificent study in comparative history. Very disordered, of course. But one day he would assume the task of editing these fragments of his mentality into a jigsaw puzzle of a very grand design; the completed puzzle would show to literate men the disaster course that history had been taking for the past four centuries. In the five years that he had dedicated to this work, he had produced an average of only six paragraphs monthly. He could not even remember what he had written in some of the tablets, and he realized that several were filled principally with doodling. However, Ignatius thought calmly, Rome was not built in a day.

I was looking for a book. A very particular book in a vast and wonderful library. I found what I was looking for. It hadn’t been opened for quite a long time judging by the dust that coated the upper edge and by the way the paper had yellowed on all sides creeping toward the gutter. When I opened it, some loose pages different from those in the book fell onto the floor. I picked them up and noticed that they were covered with a text in a language I did not understand.

opportunity. The bizarre codes on the pages she’d sorted for Randy suddenly made sense. They must have been the files that kept track of where the bank had stashed millions of dollars. Jim wanted the money out, and so did the Covellis. The Mob was somehow involved with the bank’s dealings, and Carmichael worked for them. Being a bartender was just a facade. Beatrice hadn’t known him at all. But Tony and Max had known him, she realized. Tony was a police detective; he was the one who told her about the Covellis in the first place. He must have known. Every word Carmichael might have overheard at the bar replayed in her mind—her conversations with Tony about snooping around the bank, the missing safe deposits, the missing master key. Maybe Tony had wanted Carmichael to hear. The old man pointed the gun at Teddy in her head. Maybe the Covellis would bring down the bank if law enforcement failed. No one, not even Tony, suspected that she and Max had the power to do anything but run. Max was right. They all underestimated women like them. Beatrice stepped out from behind the curtain with the keys in her hand and crept toward the vault. CHAPTER 72 Friday, August 28, 1998 A black-and-white photograph of two women looked up from Box 547 in the yellow glow of the detective’s flashlight. They were smiling. The glass in the silver picture frame was cracked. Iris picked it up and handed it to Detective McDonnell. Underneath it she found a brown leather book and a candle. That was it. “What the hell is this?” Iris

At the time, I paid no heed to the emblem above the door of a compass crossed with a square; the library had been founded by Masons. There, in the quiet shadows, I read for hours from the books that the kind librarian allowed me to take from the shelves: fairy tales, adventure stories, adaptations of classics for children, and dictionaries of symbols. One day while browsing among the shelves I ran across a yellowed volume: Les Tarots by Eteilla. All my efforts to read it were in vain. The letters looked strange and the words were incomprehensible. I began to worry that I had forgotten how to read. When I communicated my anguish to the librarian, he began to laugh. “But how could you understand it; it’s written in French, my young friend! I can’t understand it either!” Oh, how I felt drawn to those mysterious pages! I flipped through them, seeing many numbers, sums, the frequent occurrence of the word Thot, some geometric shapes . . . but what fascinated me most was a rectangle inside which a princess, wearing a three-pointed crown and seated on a throne, was caressing a lion that was resting its head on her knees. The animal had an expression of profound intelligence combined with an extreme gentleness. Such a placid creature! I liked the image so much that I committed a transgression that I still have not repented: I tore out the page and brought it home to my room. Concealed beneath a floorboard, the card “STRENGTH” became my secret treasure. In the strength of my innocence, I fell in love with the princess.

We take the stairs down to the first level of the parking garage and I lead us toward the area reserved for doctors. She makes her way toward a black Audi, turns, and waits for me to join her. I smirk. “That’s not my car.” She nods. “Right, of course. I see it now.” She goes to a bright yellow Ferrari that belongs to one of the plastic surgeons. The vanity license plate reads: SXY DOC88. “Here we are.” “Not even close.” “Oh, okay. I get it. You aren’t flashy. Maybe that gray Range Rover over there?” I press the unlock button on my key fob and my rear lights flash. There she is, the car I’ve driven since I was in medical school. “You’re kidding. A Prius?! Satan himself drives a Prius?!” She turns around as if hoping to find someone else she can share this moment with. All she’s got is me. I shrug. “It gets good gas mileage.” She blinks exaggeratedly. “I couldn’t be more shocked if you’d hitched a horse to a buggy.” I chuckle and open the back door to toss in her backpack. “Get in. Traffic is going to be hell.” We buckle up in silence, back up and leave the parking garage in silence, pull out into traffic in silence. Finally, I ask, “Where do you live?” “On the west side. Right across from Franklin Park.” “Good. I have an errand I need to run that’s right by there. Mind if I do that before I drop you off?” “Well seeing as how you stole my backpack and forced me into your car, I don’t really think it matters what I want.” I see. She’s still pouting. That’s fine. “Good. Glad we’re on the same page.” She doesn’t think I’m funny.

My artistic expression initially started out as revenge, a wound that unraveled and revealed itself in the unloved corners of houses, in yellowing pages. I settled into being creature of shadow and light, stealthy and secretly furious, almost like I believed that I was fated for a glorious future, and my meekness was a form of asking. I was passionately and decidedly isolated, alone was an artform. Any art I create, in any medium, is a reflection of that faint anger: of having believed in glory, and having lived instead.

The page begins with the person’s picture. A photo if we can find it. If not, a sketch or painting by Peeta. Then, in my most careful handwriting, come all the details it would be a crime to forget. Lady licking Prim’s cheek. My father’s laugh. Peeta’s father with the cookies. The color of Finnick’s eyes. What Cinna could do with a length of silk. Boggs reprogramming the Holo. Rue poised on her toes, arms slightly extended, like a bird about to take flight. On and on. We seal the pages with salt water and promises to live well to make their deaths count. Haymitch finally joins us, contributing twenty-three years of tributes he was forced to mentor. Additions become smaller. An old memory that surfaces. A late primrose preserved between the pages. Strange bits of happiness, like the photo of Finnick and Annie’s newborn son. We learn to keep busy again. Peeta bakes. I hunt. Haymitch drinks until the liquor runs out, and then raises geese until the next train arrives. Fortunately, the geese can take pretty good care of themselves. We’re not alone. A few hundred others return because, whatever has happened, this is our home. With the mines closed, they plow the ashes into the earth and plant food. Machines from the Capitol break ground for a new factory where we will make medicines. Although no one seeds it, the Meadow turns green again. Peeta and I grow back together. There are still moments when he clutches the back of a chair and hangs on until the flashbacks are over. I wake screaming from nightmares of mutts and lost children. But his arms are there to comfort me. And eventually his lips. On the night I feel that thing again, the hunger that overtook me on the beach, I know this would have happened anyway. That what I need to survive is not Gale’s fire, kindled with rage and hatred. I have plenty of fire myself. What I need is the dandelion in the spring. The bright yellow that means rebirth instead of destruction. The promise that life can go on, no matter how bad our losses. That it can be good again. And only Peeta can give me that. So after, when he whispers, “You love me. Real or not real?” I tell him, “Real.

she wrote out an incident report. "Yes, Mr. Lemon. I agree. Those teenagers should not have positioned your garden gnomes like that. Yes. I do believe I've heard that is in the Kama Sutra. No, I don't know what page." She wheeled her chair over to one of the massive file cabinets and pulled out a yellow folder packed with paperwork. "Just tell Mrs. Lemon the gnomes were wrestling," she said, stuffing the report inside. "I'm sure there is a nonviolent solution, but I don't see how the mayor can help. Nevertheless, I'll put it on file immediately.

The Mercy The ship that took my mother to Ellis Island eighty-three years ago was named "The Mercy." She remembers trying to eat a banana without first peeling it and seeing her first orange in the hands of a young Scot, a seaman who gave her a bite and wiped her mouth for her with a red bandana and taught her the word, "orange," saying it patiently over and over. A long autumn voyage, the days darkening with the black waters calming as night came on, then nothing as far as her eyes could see and space without limit rushing off to the corners of creation. She prayed in Russian and Yiddish to find her family in New York, prayers unheard or misunderstood or perhaps ignored by all the powers that swept the waves of darkness before she woke, that kept "The Mercy" afloat while smallpox raged among the passengers and crew until the dead were buried at sea with strange prayers in a tongue she could not fathom. "The Mercy," I read on the yellowing pages of a book I located in a windowless room of the library on 42nd Street, sat thirty-one days offshore in quarantine before the passengers disembarked. There a story ends. Other ships arrived, "Tancred" out of Glasgow, "The Neptune" registered as Danish, "Umberto IV," the list goes on for pages, November gives way to winter, the sea pounds this alien shore. Italian miners from Piemonte dig under towns in western Pennsylvania only to rediscover the same nightmare they left at home. A nine-year-old girl travels all night by train with one suitcase and an orange. She learns that mercy is something you can eat again and again while the juice spills over your chin, you can wipe it away with the back of your hands and you can never get enough.

Trying to get to 124 for the second time now, he regretted that conversation: the high tone he took; his refusal to see the effect of marrow weariness in a woman he believed was a mountain. Now, too late, he understood her. The heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the Word, didn't count. They came in her yard anyway and she could not approve or condemn Sethe's rough choice. One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed. The whitefolks had tired her out at last. And him. Eighteen seventy-four and whitefolks were still on the loose. Whole towns wiped clean of Negroes; eighty-seven lynchings in one year alone in Kentucky; four colored schools burned to the ground; grown men whipped like children; children whipped like adults; black women raped by the crew; property taken, necks broken. He smelled skin, skin and hot blood. The skin was one thing, but human blood cooked in a lynch fire was a whole other thing. The stench stank. Stank up off the pages of the North Star, out of the mouths of witnesses, etched in crooked handwriting in letters delivered by hand. Detailed in documents and petitions full of whereas and presented to any legal body who'd read it, it stank. But none of that had worn out his marrow. None of that. It was the ribbon. Tying his flatbed up on the bank of the Licking River, securing it the best he could, he caught sight of something red on its bottom. Reaching for it, he thought it was a cardinal feather stuck to his boat. He tugged and what came loose in his hand was a red ribbon knotted around a curl of wet woolly hair, clinging still to its bit of scalp. He untied the ribbon and put it in his pocket, dropped the curl in the weeds. On the way home, he stopped, short of breath and dizzy. He waited until the spell passed before continuing on his way. A moment later, his breath left him again. This time he sat down by a fence. Rested, he got to his feet, but before he took a step he turned to look back down the road he was traveling and said, to its frozen mud and the river beyond, "What are these people? You tell me, Jesus. What are they?" When he got to his house he was too tired to eat the food his sister and nephews had prepared. He sat on the porch in the cold till way past dark and went to his bed only because his sister's voice calling him was getting nervous. He kept the ribbon; the skin smell nagged him, and his weakened marrow made him dwell on Baby Suggs' wish to consider what in the world was harmless. He hoped she stuck to blue, yellow, maybe green, and never fixed on red. Mistaking her, upbraiding her, owing her, now he needed to let her know he knew, and to get right with her and her kin. So, in spite of his exhausted marrow, he kept on through the voices and tried once more to knock at the door of 124. This time, although he couldn't cipher but one word, he believed he knew who spoke them. The people of the broken necks, of fire-cooked blood and black girls who had lost their ribbons. What a roaring.

Opposite the hotel was a barren little park, as wretched as only the park of a dirty little town can be, but for Tereza it had always been an island of beauty: it had grass, four poplars, benches, a weeping willow, and a few forsythia bushes. He was sitting on a yellow bench that afforded a clear view of the restaurant entrance. The very same bench she had sat on the day before with a book in her lap! She knew then (the birds of fortuity had begun alighting on her shoulders) that this stranger was her fate. He called out to her, invited her to sit next to him. (The crew of her soul rushed up to the deck of her body.)

I traveled those book-walled corridors, bathed in the odor of yellowing paper and musty cloth bindings. I felt as if the London of Dickens and the Arab world of Burton and a thousand other worlds of a thousand other writers were here to be breathed in and assimilated almost without the necessity of reading, as if they were mushrooms that had thrown off pungent clouds of pollen which, on inhalation, fertilized the mind and the imagination. I longed to pluck a volume off a shelf and escape into its pages, for even the nightmare worlds of Lovecraft, Poe, or Bram Stoker would be more appealing than the real world in which we had to live.

Her parents noticed, when Dominika turned five, that the little girl had a prodigious memory. She could recite lines from Pushkin, identify the concertos of Tchaikovsky. And when music was played, Dominika would dance barefoot around the Oriental carpet in the living room, perfectly in time with the notes, twirling and jumping, perfectly in balance, her eyes gleaming, her hands flashing. Vassily and Nina looked at each other, and her mother asked Dominika how she had learned all this. “I follow the colors,” said the little girl. “What do you mean, ‘the colors’?” asked her mother. Dominika gravely explained that when the music played, or when her father read aloud to her, colors would fill the room. Different colors, some bright, some dark, sometimes they “jumped in the air” and all Dominika had to do was follow them. It was how she could remember so much. When she danced, she leapt over bars of bright blue, followed shimmering spots of red on the floor. The parents looked at each other again. “I like red and blue and purple,” said Dominika. “When Batushka reads, or when Mamulya plays, they are beautiful.” “And when Mama is cross with you?” asked Vassily. “Yellow, I don’t like the yellow,” said the little girl, turning the pages of a book. “And the black cloud. I do not like that.

It was all old music—Bach and Beethoven, Mozart and Purcell—the pages yellow, the engraving rough to the finger. In three minutes she was deep in a very difficult, very classical fugue in A, and over her face came a queer remote impersonal expression of complete absorption and anxious satisfaction. Now she stumbled; now she faltered and had to play the same bar twice over; but an invisible line seemed to string the notes together, from which rose a shape, a building. She was so far absorbed in this work, for it was really difficult to find how all these sounds should stand together, and drew upon the whole of her faculties, that she never heard a knock at the door.

By the end of that summer in Ashcroft my father had nearly run out of stories. He’d almost read his father’s full library and arrived at last at Moby Dick. The edition I have is a Penguin paperback (Book 2,333, Herman Melville, Penguin, London). It’s been well-thumbed, at least triple-read, there’s that smell the fat orange-spine Penguins get when their pages have yellowed and the book bulges, basically the smell of complex humanity, sort of sweat and salt and endeavour. Like all the fat orange Penguins, it gets fatter with reading, which it should, because in a way the more you read it the bigger your own experience of the world gets, the fatter your soul. Try it, you’ll see.

You have asked too many questions. If you want more, you will have to win them.” He showed no sign of distraction now. As they played, he ignored her attempts to provoke him or make him laugh. “I’ve seen your tricks on others,” he said. “They won’t work with me.” He won. Kestrel waited, nervous, and wondered if the way she felt was how he felt when he lost. His voice came haltingly. “Will you play for me?” “Play for you?” Arin winced. In a more determined tone, he said, “Yes. Something I choose.” “I don’t mind. It’s only…people rarely ask.” He stood from the table, searched the shelves along the wall, and returned with a sheaf of sheet music. She took it. “It’s for the flute,” he said. “It will probably take you time to transpose it for the piano. I can wait. Maybe after our next game--” She fanned the paper impatiently to silence him. “It’s not that hard.” He nodded, then sat in the chair farthest away from the piano, by the glass garden doors. Kestrel was glad for his distance. She settled on the piano’s bench, flipping through the sheet music. The title and notations were in Herrani, the page yellow with age. She propped the paper on the piano’s rack, taking more time than necessary to neaten the sheets. Excitement coursed through her fingers as if she had already plunged her hands into the music, but that feeling was edged with a metallic lace of fear.

He was quiet as he pulled out his phone and began typing something in. I watched as he searched feminine products, and boxes of tampons, pads, and liners came up in various sizes and brands. “Fucking hell… why are there so many flavours?” I stilled on the spot, my eyes going wide as I stared at him, wondering if I heard him correctly. “I beg your pardon?” “Look here!” He held up his phone, showing a picture of a box marked green for small. “I think this means mint or lime… there’s also yellow. Is that lemon? Or do you want oranges?” He scrolled through, looking at the different sizes, and it took literally every ounce of self-control I had to not burst into laughter as he continued his search. “What flavour should I ask for, love?

Necessities 1 A map of the world. Not the one in the atlas, but the one in our heads, the one we keep coloring in. With the blue thread of the river by which we grew up. The green smear of the woods we first made love in. The yellow city we thought was our future. The red highways not traveled, the green ones with their missed exits, the black side roads which took us where we had not meant to go. The high peaks, recorded by relatives, though we prefer certain unmarked elevations, the private alps no one knows we have climbed. The careful boundaries we draw and erase. And always, around the edges, the opaque wash of blue, concealing the drop-off they have stepped into before us, singly, mapless, not looking back. 2 The illusion of progress. Imagine our lives without it: tape measures rolled back, yardsticks chopped off. Wheels turning but going nowhere. Paintings flat, with no vanishing point. The plots of all novels circular; page numbers reversing themselves past the middle. The mountaintop no longer a goal, merely the point between ascent and descent. All streets looping back on themselves; life as a beckoning road an absurd idea. Our children refusing to grow out of their childhoods; the years refusing to drag themselves toward the new century. And hope, the puppy that bounds ahead, no longer a household animal. 3 Answers to questions, an endless supply. New ones that startle, old ones that reassure us. All of them wrong perhaps, but for the moment solutions, like kisses or surgery. Rising inflections countered by level voices, words beginning with w hushed by declarative sentences. The small, bold sphere of the period chasing after the hook, the doubter that walks on water and treads air and refuses to go away. 4 Evidence that we matter. The crash of the plane which, at the last moment, we did not take. The involuntary turn of the head, which caused the bullet to miss us. The obscene caller who wakes us at midnight to the smell of gas. The moon's full blessing when we fell in love, its black mood when it was all over. Confirm us, we say to the world, with your weather, your gifts, your warnings, your ringing telephones, your long, bleak silences. 5 Even now, the old things first things, which taught us language. Things of day and of night. Irrational lightning, fickle clouds, the incorruptible moon. Fire as revolution, grass as the heir to all revolutions. Snow as the alphabet of the dead, subtle, undeciphered. The river as what we wish it to be. Trees in their humanness, animals in their otherness. Summits. Chasms. Clearings. And stars, which gave us the word distance, so we could name our deepest sadness.

I went to grab the perfect shade of green and realized I didn’t have it. How could bamboo be colored with primary green? I blew out a frustrated breath and looked back into the box. Rand was crouched beside me, his hand resting gently on my back. His touch was light but also strong and reassuring. I couldn’t help but lean into him, even if I swore to myself I wasn’t. “What’s wrong?” “This green isn’t right for the bamboo.” Because that was the most normal sentence I’d ever uttered. “What about these colors?” he pulled out a pink crayon, then a blue, and finally a purple. “Bamboo is green! But it isn’t primary green.” To his credit, Rand didn’t look at me like I had four heads. But then again, he picked up the blue crayon and handed it to me. “I think blue and pink and purple bamboo would be perfect.” My mouth hung open, and I tried to argue. “No! No, it’s not.” Rand rubbed his hand over my head. “Kyle, it’s coloring in a children’s coloring book. You aren’t entering this into an art contest. It can be blue and purple and yellow and orange if you want it to be. It can be out of the lines, it can be scribbles on the page. You aren’t trying to imitate life right now. You’re coloring a picture that I can hang on the fridge and we can smile at.” “The fridge?” “I’m going to take the green away completely if you keep worrying about it.” I gasped in horror. “You wouldn’t!” I needed the green. Rand raised an eyebrow at me, asking me if I wanted to push it. I shut my mouth quickly and picked up the light-blue color he was holding out to me. Could bamboo really be light blue? I bit my lip as I put the blue to the paper and colored the first few lines in smooth up and down motions. “It’s going to be beautiful,” Rand gushed. He was over exaggerating, but I felt myself swell with pride.

My mother is finally rolling out her kulebiaka dough, maneuvering intently on a dime size oasis of kitchen counter. I inhale the sweetish tang of fermented yeast once again and try to plumb my unconscious for some collective historical taste memory. No dice. There's no yeast in my DNA. No heirloom pie recipes passed down by generations of women in the yellowing pages of family notebooks, scribbled in pre-revolutionary Russian orthography. My two grandmothers were emaciated New Soviet women, meaning they barely baked, wouldn't be caught dead cooking 'czarist.' Curious and passionate about food all her life, Mom herself only became serious about baking after we emigrated. In the USSR she relied on a dough called na skoruyu ruku ('flick of a hand'), a version involving little kneading and no rising. It was a recipe she'd had to teach her mother. My paternal babushka, Alla, simply wasn't interested.

began to walk home, very quickly. A car full of high-school girls screeched around the corner. They were the girls who ran all the clubs and won all the elections in Allison’s high-school class: little Lisa Leavitt; Pam McCormick, with her dark ponytail, and Ginger Herbert, who had won the Beauty Revue; Sissy Arnold, who wasn’t as pretty as the rest of them but just as popular. Their faces—like movie starlets’, universally worshiped in the lower grades—smiled from practically every page of the yearbook. There they were, triumphant, on the yellowed, floodlit turf of the football field—in cheerleader uniform, in majorette spangles, gloved and gowned for homecoming; convulsed with laughter on a carnival ride (Favorites) or tumbling elated in the back of a September haywagon (Sweethearts)—and despite the range of costume, athletic to casual to formal wear, they were like dolls whose smiles and hair-dos never changed.

COOKBOOK FOR THE MODERN HOUSEWIFE The cover was red with a subtle crosshatch pattern and distressed, the book's title stamped in black ink- all of it faded with age. Bordering the cookbook's cover were hints of what could be found inside. Alice tilted her head as she read across, down, across, and up the cover's edges. Rolls. Pies. Luncheon. Drinks. Jams. Jellies. Poultry. Soup. Pickles. 725 Tested Recipes. Resting the spine on her bent knees, the cookbook dense yet fragile in her hands, Alice opened it carefully. There was an inscription on the inside cover. Elsie Swann, 1940. Going through the first few, age-yellowed pages, Alice glanced at charts for what constituted a balanced diet in those days: milk products, citrus fruits, green and yellow vegetables, breads and cereals, meat and eggs, the addition of a fish liver oil, particularly for children. Across from it, a page of tips for housewives to avoid being overwhelmed and advice for hosting successful dinner parties. Opening to a page near the back, Alice found another chart, this one titled Standard Retail Beef Cutting Chart, a picture of a cow divided by type of meat, mini drawings of everything from a porterhouse-steak cut to the disgusting-sounding "rolled neck." Through the middle were recipes for Pork Pie, Jellied Tongue, Meat Loaf with Oatmeal, and something called Porcupines- ground beef and rice balls, simmered for an hour in tomato soup and definitely something Alice never wanted to try- and plenty of notes written in faded cursive beside some of the recipes. Comments like Eleanor's 13th birthday-delicious! and Good for digestion and Add extra butter. Whoever this Elsie Swann was, she had clearly used the cookbook regularly. The pages were polka-dotted in brown splatters and drips, evidence it had not sat forgotten on a shelf the way cookbooks would in Alice's kitchen.

History Eraser I got drunk and fell asleep atop the sheets but luckily i left the heater on. And in my dreams i wrote the best song that i've ever written...can't remember how it goes. I stayed drunk and fell awake and i was cycling on a plane and far away i heard you say you liked me. We drifted to a party -- cool. The people went to arty school. They made their paints by mixing acid wash and lemonade In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name I found an ezra pound and made a bet that if i found a cigarette i'd drop it all and marry you. Just then a song comes on: "you can't always get what you want" -- the rolling stones, oh woe is we, the irony! The stones became the moss and once all inhibitions lost, the hipsters made a mission to the farm. We drove by tractor there, the yellow straw replaced our hair, we laced the dairy river with the cream of sweet vermouth. In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name You said "we only live once" so we touched a little tongue, and instantly i wanted to... I lost my train of thought and jumped aboard the Epping as the doors were slowly closing on the world. I touched on and off and rubbed my arm up against yours and still the inspector inspected me. The lady in the roof was living proof that nothing really ever is exactly as it seems. In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name We caught the river boat downstream and ended up beside a team of angry footballers. I fed the ducks some krill then we were sucked against our will into the welcome doors of the casino. We drank green margaritas, danced with sweet senoritas, and we all went home as winners of a kind. You said "i guarantee we'll have more fun, drink till the moon becomes the sun, and in the taxi home i'll sing you a triffids song!" In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name

I open the closest piece of folded construction paper to see it’s a drawing. At the bottom of the page is a label in a teacher’s handwriting, Title—My Family—Dominic King—Age six. A lemon-yellow sun sits at the top right of the page finishing off a dark blue sky. Inside of one of the puffy clouds dead center is two stick figures labeled Maman, Papa. Below stands Tobias and Dominic in the middle of light-brown colored mountains. Tobias is much, much larger in size. He might as well be a giant compared to the way Dominic drew himself. They’re holding stick hands, and I can clearly see the dynamic in the relationship—so much trust, love, and adoration. Dominic spent more time on Tobias’s details than he did on any other aspect of the drawing. And it’s because he loved him, idolized him, because Tobias was his world, his brother, his teacher, his mentor, and in essence, his father. Eyes stinging, I gaze on at the clear picture of devotion of one brother for another.

The people around him, his family, his friends, aroused a feeling of shame and rage within him. He had seen them on the road, them and people like them: he recalled the cars full of officers running away with their beautiful yellow trunks and their painted women, civil servants abandoning their posts, panic-stricken politicians dropping files of secret papers along the road, young girls, who had diligently wept the day the armistice was signed, being comforted in the arms of the Germans. “And to think that no one will know, that there will be such a conspiracy of lies that all this will be transformed into yet another glorious page in the history of France. We’ll do everything we can to find acts of devotion and heroism for the official records. Good God! To see what I’ve seen! Closed doors where you knock in vain to get a glass of water and refugees who pillaged houses; everywhere, everywhere you look, chaos, cowardice, vanity and ignorance! What a wonderful race we are!

I know I will not find us lying beneath the stars. We won’t be walking through the sunflower fields. We won’t fall in love with the sun rise, or kiss in the afternoon. Maybe I’ll miss you, and then I’ll cry for you. And when I’ll miss you, I’ll look for you on my bookshelf. You’ll be there in between four hundred pages. Maybe covered in dust, maybe stained with tears, I’ll wipe it with my yellow t-shirt, The one I wore on October first. But no matter how much I cry, with a broken heart, on a Saturday night. I’ll grab the book close to my heart. Then I’ll close my hazy eyes and see you smile under clear sky. I’ll stay an old soul and you’ll stay my vintage dream. A dream that will bring me back to life like a fantasy novel, and break my heart like a dead poetry. I’ll open my eyes, the illusions will be destroyed. But no matter how much I cry. About you, I’ll never write. This isn’t our song. But years later, on a winter night, if ever, you’ll call it our song. Then believe me, in a blink, I’ll call it a love song.

I stood with my job-book beneath my arm in which were logged the hours and the days and the years and wherein was ledgered down each sack of mortar and each perch of stone and I stood alone in that whitened forecourt beyond which waited the God of all being and I stood in the full folly of my own righteousness and I took the book from under my arm and I thumbed through it a final time as if to reassure myself and when I did I saw that the pages were yellowed and crumbling and the ink faded and the accounts no longer clear and suddenly I thought to myself fool fool do you not see what will be asked of you? How He will lean down perhaps the better to see you, regarding perhaps with something akin to wonder that which is his own handiwork, He whom the firmament itself has not power to puzzle. Gazing into your soul beyond bone or flesh to its uttermost nativity in stone and star and in the unformed magma at the core of creation. And ask as you stand there alone with your book—perhaps not even unkindly—this single question: Where are the others? Where are the others?

Something More Fragile Than This" Quick before our bodies turn themselves in, with a reverence reserved for the dead touch me because I want to remember how beautiful I am. While Spring snows around us, cracking her eggs on our windows, in her meager dress of yellowing-white, because I want to rise into today. So why the urge to render something more fragile than this? Why, always, the soul blowing glass? The soul, once again, filling the lungs with smoke because a memory of regret sweats in the plastic sleeve of a family album. Because there’s a snapshot caught between the pages of some thick book: my heavy 20 year old frame setting off the 60lb weight of a dying mother. Because somewhere, there’s a negative slide of my heart. Because and because and because I’m sure there’s a photo in some drawer that shows me dressed in black. But I want to devote myself to the mystery of this afternoon. I want to honor this falling night, worship the hour vanishing between six and seven. This moment where I’m standing against myself and against you with a taste in my mouth that’s yolk. With Bob Marley taking that one long drag on the refrigerator door.

Yet at least he had believed in the cars. Maybe to excess: how could he not, seeing people poorer than him come in, Negro, Mexican, cracker, a parade seven days a week, bringing the most godawful of trade-ins: motorized, metal extensions of themselves, of their families and what their whole lives must be like, out there so naked for anybody, a stranger like himself, to look at, frame cockeyed, rusty underneath, fender repainted in a shade just off enough to depress the value, if not Mucho himself, inside smelling hopelessly of children, supermarket booze, two, sometimes three generations of cigarette smokers, or only of dust and when the cars were swept out you had to look at the actual residue of these lives, and there was no way of telling what things had been truly refused (when so little he supposed came by that out of fear most of it had to be taken and kept) and what had simply (perhaps tragically) been lost: clipped coupons promising savings of .05 or .10, trading stamps, pink flyers advertising specials at the markets, butts, tooth-shy combs, help-wanted ads, Yellow Pages torn from the phone book, rags of old underwear or dresses that already were period costumes, for wiping your own breath off the inside of a windshield with so you could see whatever it was, a movie, a woman or car you coveted, a cop who might pull you over just for drill, all the bits and pieces coated uniformly, like a salad of despair, in a gray dressing of ash, condensed exhaust, dust, body wastesit made him sick to look, but he had to look. If it had been an outright junkyard, probably he could have stuck things out, made a career: the violence that had caused each wreck being infrequent enough, far enough away from him, to be miraculous, as each death, up till the moment of our own, is miraculous. But the endless rituals of trade-in, week after week, never got as far as violence or blood, and so were too plausible for the impressionable Mucho to take for long. Even if enough exposure to the unvarying gray sickness had somehow managed to immunize him, he could still never accept the way each owner, each shadow, filed in only to exchange a dented, malfunctioning version of himself for another, just as futureless, automotive projection of somebody else's life. As if it were the most natural thing. To Mucho it was horrible. Endless, convoluted incest.

All Night, All Night Rode in the train all night, in the sick light. A bird Flew parallel with a singular will. In daydream's moods and attitudes The other passengers slumped, dozed, slept, read, Waiting, and waiting for place to be displaced On the exact track of safety or the rack of accident. Looked out at the night, unable to distinguish Lights in the towns of passage from the yellow lights Numb on the ceiling. And the bird flew parallel and still As the train shot forth the straight line of its whistle, Forward on the taut tracks, piercing empty, familiar -- The bored center of this vision and condition looked and looked Down through the slick pages of the magazine (seeking The seen and the unseen) and his gaze fell down the well Of the great darkness under the slick glitter, And he was only one among eight million riders and readers. And all the while under his empty smile the shaking drum Of the long determined passage passed through him By his body mimicked and echoed. And then the train Like a suddenly storming rain, began to rush and thresh-- The silent or passive night, pressing and impressing The patients' foreheads with a tightening-like image Of the rushing engine proceeded by a shaft of light Piercing the dark, changing and transforming the silence Into a violence of foam, sound, smoke and succession. A bored child went to get a cup of water, And crushed the cup because the water too was Boring and merely boredom's struggle. The child, returning, looked over the shoulder Of a man reading until he annoyed the shoulder. A fat woman yawned and felt the liquid drops Drip down the fleece of many dinners. And the bird flew parallel and parallel flew The black pencil lines of telephone posts, crucified, At regular intervals, post after post Of thrice crossed, blue-belled, anonymous trees. And then the bird cried as if to all of us: 0 your life, your lonely life What have you ever done with it, And done with the great gift of consciousness? What will you ever do with your life before death's knife Provides the answer ultimate and appropriate? As I for my part felt in my heart as one who falls, Falls in a parachute, falls endlessly, and feel the vast Draft of the abyss sucking him down and down, An endlessly helplessly falling and appalled clown: This is the way that night passes by, this Is the overnight endless trip to the famous unfathomable abyss.

Song for the Last Act Now that I have your face by heart, I look Less at its features than its darkening frame Where quince and melon, yellow as young flame, Lie with quilled dahlias and the shepherd's crook. Beyond, a garden. There, in insolent ease The lead and marble figures watch the show Of yet another summer loath to go Although the scythes hang in the apple trees. Now that I have your face by heart, I look. Now that I have your voice by heart, I read In the black chords upon a dulling page Music that is not meant for music's cage, Whose emblems mix with words that shake and bleed. The staves are shuttled over with a stark Unprinted silence. In a double dream I must spell out the storm, the running stream. The beat's too swift. The notes shift in the dark. Now that I have your voice by heart, I read. Now that I have your heart by heart, I see The wharves with their great ships and architraves; The rigging and the cargo and the slaves On a strange beach under a broken sky. O not departure, but a voyage done! The bales stand on the stone; the anchor weeps Its red rust downward, and the long vine creeps Beside the salt herb, in the lengthening sun. Now that I have your heart by heart, I see.

As the season changed to autumn and the air turned crisp, we took out our cosy sweaters, snuggled in warm blankets, and found comfort in the little things like warm drinks. While we watched the leaves change their colour from green to yellow, bright orange or red, we came to realize that it was also the right time for us to make a change in our life, to make a new beginning. It has been a different kind of year. Things have changed around here, the circumstances we found ourselves in were like a restless wave. A sudden storm came on, producing wind and hail, changing the rule of the game. From one day to the next, there was little room for manoeuvre left. Where was the fun in that, we wondered. Things just didn’t go well and the situation was getting harder. We could sense along the way that it was time to let go of something that no longer served us. Our instincts told us that the time has come to turn the page, to allow new things to happen and think new thoughts. At first, it was hard to admit that there was no way around it of letting go because we fell in a comfort zone and getting out of it can be uncomfortable. We didn’t want to leave a place that was so familiar to us. New beginnings can be scary. But luckily, the autumn season taught us that change can be beautiful.

We are accustomed to thinking of Ernest Hemingway as a boozy, undisciplined genius who got through a quart of whiskey a day for the last twenty years of his life but nevertheless had the muse upon him. He was indeed an alcoholic driven by complex passions.2 But when it came to writing, he was the quintessence of discipline! His early writing was characterized by obsessive literary perfectionism as he labored to develop his economy of style, spending hours polishing a sentence, or searching for the mot juste—the right word. It is a well-known fact that he rewrote the conclusion to his novel A Farewell to Arms seventeen times in an effort to get it right. This is characteristic of great writers. Dylan Thomas made over two hundred handwritten(!) manuscript versions of his poem “Fern Hill.”3 Even toward the end, when Hemingway was reaping the ravages of his lifestyle, while writing at his Finca Vigia in Cuba he daily stood before an improvised desk in oversized loafers on yellow tiles from 6:30 A.M. until noon every day, carefully marking his production for the day on a chart. His average was only two pages — five hundred words.4 It was discipline, Ernest Hemingway’s massive literary discipline, which transformed the way his fellow Americans, and people throughout the English-speaking world, expressed themselves.

Carolina removed an old and creased single sheet of paper, yellowed with age, that was now carefully protected in clear, acid-free paper. She handed it to Dara. "This was folded up in a parik-til, in the box with my birth certificate." "A parik-til?" asked Jennifer. "It is a small pouch that is filled with things to bring good luck or blessings." She held up the cloth bag and opened it for the girls to see. "Gypsies use them, but so do Native Americans as well as people from Central and South America and other parts of the world. When I got it, I had no idea what it was or what it meant. I knew the folded piece of paper was old and somehow had to be important to me since my birth parents had included it with the other things they wanted me to have." Carolina stood up and walked over to the window. How well she remembered the overwhelming emotions she felt when she first saw those pages of the Voynich Manuscript in the book she was reading, and then realizing that the ancient script was the same as what was on the piece of paper that had been preserved in the parik-til--her parik-til. "Anyway, as soon as I saw the photographs of some of the manuscript pages in the book I was reading, I made the connection immediately. It was the same script as what was on this sheet of paper that I had been given." All three FIGS crowded closely together to look at Carolina's treasure.

Blues Elizabeth Alexander, 1962 I am lazy, the laziest girl in the world. I sleep during the day when I want to, ‘til my face is creased and swollen, ‘til my lips are dry and hot. I eat as I please: cookies and milk after lunch, butter and sour cream on my baked potato, foods that slothful people eat, that turn yellow and opaque beneath the skin. Sometimes come dinnertime Sunday I am still in my nightgown, the one with the lace trim listing because I have not mended it. Many days I do not exercise, only consider it, then rub my curdy belly and lie down. Even my poems are lazy. I use syllabics instead of iambs, prefer slant to the gong of full rhyme, write briefly while others go for pages. And yesterday, for example, I did not work at all! I got in my car and I drove to factory outlet stores, purchased stockings and panties and socks with my father’s money. To think, in childhood I missed only one day of school per year. I went to ballet class four days a week at four-forty-five and on Saturdays, beginning always with plie, ending with curtsy. To think, I knew only industry, the industry of my race and of immigrants, the radio tuned always to the station that said, Line up your summer job months in advance. Work hard and do not shame your family, who worked hard to give you what you have. There is no sin but sloth. Burn to a wick and keep moving. I avoided sleep for years, up at night replaying evening news stories about nearby jailbreaks, fat people who ate fried chicken and woke up dead. In sleep I am looking for poems in the shape of open V’s of birds flying in formation, or open arms saying, I forgive you, all.

...and the handsome jester, Devil’s Gold, is shaking his bead-covered rattle, making medicine and calling us by name. We are so tired from our long walk that we cannot but admire his gilded face and his yellow magic blanket. And, holding each other’s hands like lovers, we stoop and admire ourselves in the golden pool that flickers in the great campfire he has impudently built at the crossing of two streets in Heaven. But we do not step into the pool as beforetime. Our boat is beside us, it has overtaken us like some faithful tame giant swan, and Avanel whispers: “Take us where The Golden Book was written.” And thus we are up and away. The boat carries us deeper, down the valley. We find the cell of Hunter Kelly,— . St. Scribe of the Shrines. Only his handiwork remains to testify of him. Upon the walls of his cell he has painted many an illumination he afterward painted on The Golden Book margins and, in a loose pile of old torn and unbound pages, the first draft of many a familiar text is to be found. His dried paint jars are there and his ink and on the wall hangs the empty leather sack of Johnny Appleseed, from which came the first sowing of all the Amaranths of our little city, and the Amaranth that led us here. And Avanel whispers:—“I ask my heart: —Where is Hunter Kelly, and my heart speaks to me as though commanded: ‘The Hunter is again pioneering for our little city in the little earth. He is reborn as the humblest acolyte of the Cathedral, a child that sings tonight with the star chimes, a red-cheeked boy, who shoes horses at the old forge of the Iron Gentleman. Let us also return’.” It is eight o’clock in the evening, at Fifth and Monroe. It is Saturday night, and the crowd is pouring toward The Majestic, and Chatterton’s, and The Vaudette, and The Princess and The Gaiety. It is a lovely, starry evening, in the spring. The newsboys are bawling away, and I buy an Illinois State Register. It is dated March 1, 1920. Avanel of Springfield is one hundred years away. The Register has much news of a passing nature. I am the most interested in the weather report, that tomorrow will be fair. THE END - Written in Washington Park Pavilion, Springfield, Illinois.

There is a porter at the door and at the reception-desk a grey-haired woman and a sleek young man. 'I want a room for tonight.' 'A room? A room with bath?' I am still feeling ill and giddy. I say confidentially, leaning forward: 'I want a light room.' The young man lifts his eyebrows and stares at me. I try again. 'I don't want a room looking on the courtyard. I want a light room.' 'A light room?' the lady says pensively. She turns over the pages of her books, looking for a light room. 'We have number 219,' she says. 'A beautiful room with bath. Seventy-five francs a night.' (God, I can't afford that.) 'It's a very beautiful room with bath. Two windows. Very light,' she says persuasively. A girl is called to show me the room. As we are about to start for the lift, the young man says, speaking out of the side of his mouth: 'Of course you know that number 219 is occupied.' 'Oh no. Number 219 had his bill before yesterday.' the receptionist says. 'I remember. I gave it to him myself.' I listen anxiously to this conversation. Suddenly I feel that I must have number 219, with bath - number 219, with rose-coloured curtains, carpet and bath. I shall exist on a different planet at once if I can get this room, if only for a couple of nights. It will be an omen. Who says you can't escape from your faith? I'll escape from mine, into room number 219. Just try me, just give me a chance. 'He asked for his bill,' the young man says, in a voice which is a triumph of scorn and cynicism. 'He asked for his bill but that doesn't mean that he has gone.' The receptionist starts arguing. 'When people ask for their bills, it's because they are going, isn't it?' 'Yes,' he says, 'French' people. The others ask for their bills to see if we're going to cheat them.' 'My God,' says the receptionist, 'foreigners, foreigners, my God. ...' The young man turns his back, entirely dissociating himself from what is going on. Number 219 - well, now I know all about him. All the time they are talking I am seeing him - his trousers, his shoes, the way he brushes his hair, the sort of girls he likes. His hand-luggage is light yellow and he has a paunch. But I can't see his face. He wears a mask, number 219. ... 'Show the lady number 334.

I lift the lid of the chest. Inside, the air is musty and stale, held hostage for years in its three-foot-by-four-foot tomb. I lean in to survey the contents cautiously, then pull out a stack of old photos tied with twine. On top is a photo of a couple on their wedding day. She's a young bride, wearing one of those 1950's netted veils. He looks older, distinguished- sort of like Cary Grant or Gregory Peck in the old black-and-white movies I used to watch with my grandmother. I set the stack down and turn back to the chest, where I find a notebook, filled with handwritten recipes. The page for Cinnamon Rolls is labeled "Dex's Favorite." 'Dex.' I wonder if he's the man in the photo. There are two ticket stubs from 1959, one to a Frank Sinatra concert, another to the movie 'An Affair to Remember.' A single shriveled rosebud rests on a white handkerchief. A corsage? When I lift it into my hand, it disintegrates; the petals crinkle into tiny pieces that fall onto the living room carpet. At the bottom of the chest is what looks like a wedding dress. It's yellowed and moth-eaten, but I imagine it was once stark white and beautiful. As I lift it, I can hear the lace swishing as if to say, "Ahh." Whoever wore it was very petite. The waist circumference is tiny. A pair of long white gloves falls to the floor. They must have been tucked inside the dress. I refold the finery and set the ensemble back inside. Whose things are these? And why have they been left here? I thumb through the recipe book. All cookies, cakes, desserts. She must have loved to bake. I tuck the book back inside the chest, along with the photographs after I've retied the twine, which is when I notice a book tucked into the corner. It's an old paperback copy of Ernest Hemingway's 'The Sun Also Rises.' I've read a little of Hemingway over the years- 'A Moveable Feast' and some of his later work- but not this one. I flip through the book and notice that one page is dog-eared. I open to it and see a line that has been underscored. "You can't get away from yourself by moving from one place to another." I look out to the lake, letting the words sink in. 'Is that what I'm trying to do? Get away from myself?' I stare at the line in the book again and wonder if it resonated with the woman who underlined it so many years ago. Did she have her own secret pain? 'Was she trying to escape it just like me?

After loud overtures from his daughters, Anthony finally left the house and went up the winding path to the “museum,” to the mobile home where he and his parents had lived from 1949 to 1958. It has been left untouched. The furniture, tables, the paint on the walls, the ’50s cabinets, the dressers, the closets, are all unchanged, remaining as they once were. And in her closet in the bedroom, past the nurse’s uniform, far away in the right-hand corner on the top shelf, lies the black backpack that contains Tatiana’s soul. Every once in a while when she can stand it—or when she can’t stand it—she looks through it. Alexander never looks through it. Tatiana knows what Anthony is about to see. Two cans of Spam in the pack. A bottle of vodka. The nurse’s uniform she escaped from the Soviet Union in that hangs in plastic in the museum closet, next to the PMH nurse’s uniform she nearly lost her marriage in. The Hero of the Soviet Union medal in the pack, in a hidden pocket. The letters she received from Alexander—including the last one from Kontum, which, when she heard about his injuries, she thought would be the last one. That plane ride to Saigon in December 1970 was the longest twelve hours of Tatiana’s life. Francesca and her daughter Emily took care of Tatiana’s kids. Vikki, her good and forgiven friend, came with her, to bring back the body of Tom Richter, to bring back Anthony. In the backpack lies an old yellowed book, The Bronze Horseman and Other Poems. The pages are so old, they splinter if you turn them. You cannot leaf, you can only lift. And between the fracturing pages, photographs are slotted like fragile parchment leaves. Anthony is supposed to find two of these photographs and bring them back. It should take him only a few minutes. Cracked leaves of Tania before she was Alexander’s. Here she is at a few months old, held by her mother, Tania in one arm, Pasha in the other. Here she is, a toddler in the River Luga, bobbing with Pasha. And here a few years older, lying in the hammock with Dasha. A beaming, pretty, dark-haired Dasha is about fourteen. Here is Tania, around ten, with two dangling little braids, doing a fantastic one-armed handstand on top of a tree stump. Here are Tania and Pasha in the boat together, Pasha threateningly raising the oar over her head. Here is the whole family. The parents, side by side, unsmiling, Deda holding Tania’s hand. Babushka holding Pasha’s, Dasha smiling merrily in front.

college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with Utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood; the community "leaders" without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil-War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed nothing beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard; the younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream -- the business students from southern colleges, for whom business was a vague, abstract game with rules as obsolete as Noah's Ark but who yet were drunk on finance. Yes, and that older group with similar aspirations, the "fundamentalists," the "actors" who sought to achieve the status of brokers through imagination alone, a group of janitors and messengers who spent most of their wages on clothing such as was fashionable among Wall Street brokers, with their Brooks Brothers suits and bowler hats, English umbrellas, black calfskin shoes and yellow gloves; with their orthodox and passionate argument as to what was the correct tie to wear with what shirt, what shade of gray was correct for spats and what would the Prince of Wales wear at a certain seasonal event; should field glasses be slung from the right or from the left shoulder; who never read the financial pages though they purchased the Wall Street Journal religiously and carried it beneath the left elbow, pressed firm against the body and grasped in the left hand -- always manicured and gloved, fair weather or foul -- with an easy precision (Oh, they had style) while the other hand whipped a tightly rolled umbrella back and forth at a calculated angle; with their homburgs and Chesterfields, their polo coats and Tyrolean hats worn strictly as fashion demanded. I could feel their eyes, saw them all and saw too the time when they would know that my prospects were ended and saw already the contempt they'd feel for me, a college man who had lost his prospects and pride. I could see it all and I knew that even the officials and the older men would despise me as though, somehow, in losing my place in Bledsoe's world I had betrayed them . . . I saw it as they looked at my overalls.

But…but that’s tragic! To go through life without color? Unable to appreciate art, or beauty?” He laughed. “Now, sweet-hold your brush before you paint me a martyr’s halo. It’s not as though I’m blind. I have a great appreciation for art, as I believe we’ve discussed. And as for beauty…I don’t need to know whether your eyes are blue or green or lavender to know that they’re uncommonly lovely.” “No one has lavender eyes.” “Don’t they?” His gaze caught hers and refused to let go. Leaning forward, he continued, “Did that tutor of yours ever tell you this? That your eyes are ringed with a perfect circle a few shades darker than the rest of the…don’t they call it the iris?” Sophia nodded. “The iris.” He propped his elbow on the table and leaned forward, his gaze searching hers intently. “An apt term it is, too. There are these lighter rays that fan out from the center, like petals. And when your pupils widen-like that, right there-your eyes are like two flowers just coming into bloom. Fresh. Innocent.” She bowed her head, mixing a touch of lead white into the sea-green paint on her palette. He leaned closer still, his voice a hypnotic whisper. “But when you take delight in teasing me, looking up through those thick lashes, so saucy and self-satisfied…” She gave him a sharp look. He snapped his fingers. “There! Just like that. Oh, sweet-then those eyes are like two opera dancers smiling from behind big, feathered fans. Coy. Beckoning.” Sophia felt a hot blush spreading from her bosom to her throat. He smiled and reclined in his chair. “I don’t need to know the color of your hair to see that it’s smooth and shiny as silk. I don’t need to know whether it’s yellow or orange or red to spend an inordinate amount of time wondering how it would feel brushing against my bare skin.” Opening his book to the marked page, he continued, “And don’t get me started on your lips, sweet. If I endeavored to discover the precise shade of red or pink or violet they are, I might never muster the concentration for anything else.” He turned a leaf of his book, then fell silent. Sophia stared at her canvas. Her pulse pounded in her ears. A bead of sweat trickled down the back of her neck, channeling down between her shoulder blades, and a hot, itchy longing pooled at the cleft of her legs. Drat him. He’d known she was taunting him with her stories. And now he sat there in an attitude of near-boredom, making love to her with his teasing, colorless words in a blatant attempt to fluster her. It was as though they were playing a game of cards, and he’d just raised the stakes. Sophia smiled. She always won at cards. “Balderdash,” she said calmly. He looked up at her, eyebrow raised. “No one has violet lips.” “Don’t they?” She laid aside her palette and crossed her arms on the table. “The slope of your nose is quite distinctive.” His lips quirked in a lopsided grin. “Really.” “Yes.” She leaned forward, allowing her bosom to spill against her stacked arms. His gaze dipped, but quickly returned to hers. “The way you have that little bump at the ridge…It’s proving quite a challenge.” “Is that so?” He bent his head and studied his book. Sophie stared at him, waiting one…two…three beats before he raised his hand to rub the bridge of his nose. Quite satisfactory progress, that. Definite beginnings of fluster.

You should date a girl who reads. Date a girl who reads. Date a girl who spends her money on books instead of clothes, who has problems with closet space because she has too many books. Date a girl who has a list of books she wants to read, who has had a library card since she was twelve. Find a girl who reads. You’ll know that she does because she will always have an unread book in her bag. She’s the one lovingly looking over the shelves in the bookstore, the one who quietly cries out when she has found the book she wants. You see that weird chick sniffing the pages of an old book in a secondhand book shop? That’s the reader. They can never resist smelling the pages, especially when they are yellow and worn. She’s the girl reading while waiting in that coffee shop down the street. If you take a peek at her mug, the non-dairy creamer is floating on top because she’s kind of engrossed already. Lost in a world of the author’s making. Sit down. She might give you a glare, as most girls who read do not like to be interrupted. Ask her if she likes the book. Buy her another cup of coffee. Let her know what you really think of Murakami. See if she got through the first chapter of Fellowship. Understand that if she says she understood James Joyce’s Ulysses she’s just saying that to sound intelligent. Ask her if she loves Alice or she would like to be Alice. It’s easy to date a girl who reads. Give her books for her birthday, for Christmas, for anniversaries. Give her the gift of words, in poetry and in song. Give her Neruda, Pound, Sexton, Cummings. Let her know that you understand that words are love. Understand that she knows the difference between books and reality but by god, she’s going to try to make her life a little like her favorite book. It will never be your fault if she does. She has to give it a shot somehow. Lie to her. If she understands syntax, she will understand your need to lie. Behind words are other things: motivation, value, nuance, dialogue. It will not be the end of the world. Fail her. Because a girl who reads knows that failure always leads up to the climax. Because girls who read understand that all things must come to end, but that you can always write a sequel. That you can begin again and again and still be the hero. That life is meant to have a villain or two. Why be frightened of everything that you are not? Girls who read understand that people, like characters, develop. Except in the Twilight series. If you find a girl who reads, keep her close. When you find her up at 2 AM clutching a book to her chest and weeping, make her a cup of tea and hold her. You may lose her for a couple of hours but she will always come back to you. She’ll talk as if the characters in the book are real, because for a while, they always are. You will propose on a hot air balloon. Or during a rock concert. Or very casually next time she’s sick. Over Skype. You will smile so hard you will wonder why your heart hasn’t burst and bled out all over your chest yet. You will write the story of your lives, have kids with strange names and even stranger tastes. She will introduce your children to the Cat in the Hat and Aslan, maybe in the same day. You will walk the winters of your old age together and she will recite Keats under her breath while you shake the snow off your boots. Date a girl who reads because you deserve it. You deserve a girl who can give you the most colorful life imaginable. If you can only give her monotony, and stale hours and half-baked proposals, then you’re better off alone. If you want the world and the worlds beyond it, date a girl who reads. Or better yet, date a girl who writes.

… The most important contribution you can make now is taking pride in your treasured home state. Because nobody else is. Study and cherish her history, even if you have to do it on your own time. I did. Don’t know what they’re teaching today, but when I was a kid, American history was the exact same every year: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock, Pilgrims, Thomas Paine, John Hancock, Sons of Liberty, tea party. I’m thinking, ‘Okay, we have to start somewhere— we’ll get to Florida soon enough.’…Boston Massacre, Crispus Attucks, Paul Revere, the North Church, ‘Redcoats are coming,’ one if by land, two if by sea, three makes a crowd, and I’m sitting in a tiny desk, rolling my eyes at the ceiling. Hello! Did we order the wrong books? Were these supposed to go to Massachusetts?…Then things showed hope, moving south now: Washington crosses the Delaware, down through original colonies, Carolinas, Georgia. Finally! Here we go! Florida’s next! Wait. What’s this? No more pages in the book. School’s out? Then I had to wait all summer, and the first day back the next grade: Christopher Columbus, Plymouth Rock…Know who the first modern Floridians were? Seminoles! Only unconquered group in the country! These are your peeps, the rugged stock you come from. Not genetically descended, but bound by geographical experience like a subtropical Ellis Island. Because who’s really from Florida? Not the flamingos, or even the Seminoles for that matter. They arrived when the government began rounding up tribes, but the Seminoles said, ‘Naw, we prefer waterfront,’ and the white man chased them but got freaked out in the Everglades and let ’em have slot machines…I see you glancing over at the cupcakes and ice cream, so I’ll limit my remaining remarks to distilled wisdom: “Respect your parents. And respect them even more after you find out they were wrong about a bunch of stuff. Their love and hard work got you to the point where you could realize this. “Don’t make fun of people who are different. Unless they have more money and influence. Then you must. “If someone isn’t kind to animals, ignore anything they have to say. “Your best teachers are sacrificing their comfort to ensure yours; show gratitude. Your worst are jealous of your future; rub it in. “Don’t talk to strangers, don’t play with matches, don’t eat the yellow snow, don’t pull your uncle’s finger. “Skip down the street when you’re happy. It’s one of those carefree little things we lose as we get older. If you skip as an adult, people talk, but I don’t mind. “Don’t follow the leader. “Don’t try to be different—that will make you different. “Don’t try to be popular. If you’re already popular, you’ve peaked too soon. “Always walk away from a fight. Then ambush. “Read everything. Doubt everything. Appreciate everything. “When you’re feeling down, make a silly noise. “Go fly a kite—seriously. “Always say ‘thank you,’ don’t forget to floss, put the lime in the coconut. “Each new year of school, look for the kid nobody’s talking to— and talk to him. “Look forward to the wonderment of growing up, raising a family and driving by the gas station where the popular kids now work. “Cherish freedom of religion: Protect it from religion. “Remember that a smile is your umbrella. It’s also your sixteen-in-one reversible ratchet set. “ ‘I am rubber, you are glue’ carries no weight in a knife fight. “Hang on to your dreams with everything you’ve got. Because the best life is when your dreams come true. The second-best is when they don’t but you never stop chasing them. So never let the authority jade your youthful enthusiasm. Stay excited about dinosaurs, keep looking up at the stars, become an archaeologist, classical pianist, police officer or veterinarian. And, above all else, question everything I’ve just said. Now get out there, class of 2020, and take back our state!

Not liking to think of him so, and wondering if they had guessed at dinner why he suddenly became irritable when they talked about fame and books lasting, wondering if the children were laughing at that, she twitched the stockings out, and all the fine gravings came drawn with steel instruments about her lips and forehead, and she grew still like a tree which has been tossing and quivering and now, when the breeze falls, settles, leaf by leaf, into quiet. It didn't matter, any of it, she thought. A great man, a great book, fame—who could tell? She knew nothing about it. But it was his way with him, his truthfulness—for instance at dinner she had been thinking quite instinctively, If only he would speak! She had complete trust in him. And dismissing all this, as one passes in diving now a weed, now a straw, now a bubble, she felt again, sinking deeper, as she had felt in the hall when the others were talking, There is something I want—something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed. And she waited a little, knitting, wondering, and slowly rose those words they had said at dinner, "the China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the honey bee," began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically, and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one blue, one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind, and seemed leaving their perches up there to fly across and across, or to cry out and to be echoed; so she turned and felt on the table beside her for a book. And all the lives we ever lived And all the lives to be, Are full of trees and changing leaves, she murmured, sticking her needles into the stocking. And she opened the book and began reading here and there at random, and as she did so, she felt that she was climbing backwards, upwards, shoving her way up under petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white, or this is red. She did not know at first what the words meant at all. Steer, hither steer your winged pines, all beaten Mariners she read and turned the page, swinging herself, zigzagging this way and that, from one line to another as from one branch to another, from one red and white flower to another, until a little sound roused her—her husband slapping his thighs. Their eyes met for a second; but they did not want to speak to each other. They had nothing to say, but something seemed, nevertheless, to go from him to her. It was the life, it was the power of it, it was the tremendous humour, she knew, that made him slap his thighs. Don't interrupt me, he seemed to be saying, don't say anything; just sit there. And he went on reading. His lips twitched. It filled him. It fortified him. He clean forgot all the little rubs and digs of the evening, and how it bored him unutterably to sit still while people ate and drank interminably, and his being so irritable with his wife and so touchy and minding when they passed his books over as if they didn't exist at all. But now, he felt, it didn't matter a damn who reached Z (if thought ran like an alphabet from A to Z). Somebody would reach it—if not he, then another. This man's strength and sanity, his feeling for straight forward simple things, these fishermen, the poor old crazed creature in Mucklebackit's cottage made him feel so vigorous, so relieved of something that he felt roused and triumphant and could not choke back his tears. Raising the book a little to hide his face, he let them fall and shook his head from side to side and forgot himself completely (but not one or two reflections about morality and French novels and English novels and Scott's hands being tied but his view perhaps being as true as the other view), forgot his own bothers and failures completely in poor Steenie's drowning and Mucklebackit's sorrow (that was Scott at his best) and the astonishing delight and feeling of vigour that it gave him.

I hated how she lived everywhere: in the halls and on my voice mail and scrawled across pages and pages of yellow legal paper. Everything reminded me of who we weren't anymore.

Having hit on this “theory,” I began to recognize checklists in odd corners everywhere—in the hands of professional football coordinators, say, or on stage sets. Listening to the radio, I heard the story behind rocker David Lee Roth’s notorious insistence that Van Halen’s contracts with concert promoters contain a clause specifying that a bowl of M&M’s has to be provided backstage, but with every single brown candy removed, upon pain of forfeiture of the show, with full compensation to the band. And at least once, Van Halen followed through, peremptorily canceling a show in Colorado when Roth found some brown M&M’s in his dressing room. This turned out to be, however, not another example of the insane demands of power-mad celebrities but an ingenious ruse. As Roth explained in his memoir, Crazy from the Heat, “Van Halen was the first band to take huge productions into tertiary, third-level markets. We’d pull up with nine eighteen-wheeler trucks, full of gear, where the standard was three trucks, max. And there were many, many technical errors—whether it was the girders couldn’t support the weight, or the flooring would sink in, or the doors weren’t big enough to move the gear through. The contract rider read like a version of the Chinese Yellow Pages because there was so much equipment, and so many human beings to make it function.” So just as a little test, buried somewhere in the middle of the rider, would be article 126, the no-brown-M&M’s clause. “When I would walk backstage, if I saw a brown M&M in that bowl,” he wrote, “well, we’d line-check the entire production. Guaranteed you’re going to arrive at a technical error.… Guaranteed you’d run into a problem.” These weren’t trifles, the radio story pointed out. The mistakes could be life-threatening. In Colorado, the band found the local promoters had failed to read the weight requirements and the staging would have fallen through the arena floor. “David Lee Roth had a checklist!” I yelled at the radio.

Cassilda: (speaking to herself) We strain our ears for the sound of love, but must all mothers bear the horror of seeing their Children grow from wonderful possibility to grim reality? Stranger: (Stands mutely in the shadows, his hands folding across his chest) Cassilda: If only we could stay a moment behind the veil of time, and live in that moment of indecision. Stranger: (Whispers so Cassilda cannot hear) Existence is decision. (...) [Te Child appears before the closed curtain] 1 Te Child: I am not the Prologue, nor the Afterword; call me the Prototaph. My role is this: to tell you it is now too late to close the book or quit the theatre. You already thought you should have done so earlier, but you stayed. How harmless it all is! No definite principles are involved, no doctrines promulgated in these pristine pages, no convictions outraged…but the blow has fallen, and now it is too late. And shall I tell you where the sin lies? It is yours. You listened to us; and all the say you stay to see the Sign. Now you are ours, or, since the runes also run backwards, we are yours…forever. (...) Along the shore the cloud waves break, The twin suns sink behind the lake, The shadows lengthen In Carcosa. Strange is the night where black stars rise, And strange moons circle through the skies But stranger still is Lost Carcosa. Songs that the Hyades shall sing, Where flap the tatters of the King, Must die unheard in Dim Carcosa. Song of my soul, my voice is dead; Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed Shall dry and die in Lost Carcosa. (...) [As the gong continues to strike, everyone begins to unmask. There are murmurs and gestures of surprise, real or polite, as identities are recognized or revealed. Ten there is a wave of laugher. The music becomes louder and increases in tempo.] Camilla: You, sir, should unmask. Stranger: Indeed? Camilla: Indeed, it’s time. We have all laid aside disguise but you. Stranger: I wear no mask. Camilla: No mask? No mask! Stranger: I, I am the Pallid Mask itself. I, I am the Phantom of Truth. I came from Alar. My star is Aldebaran. Truth is our invention; it is our weapon of war. And see–by this sign we have conquered, and the siege of good and evil is ended… § [On the horizon, the towers of Carcosa begin to glow] Noatalba: (Pointing) Look, look! Carcosa, Carcosa is on fire! (...) The King: Te Phantom of ruth shall be laid. Te scalloped tattersof Te King must hide Haita forever. As for thee, Yhtill– All: No! No, no! Te King: And as for thee, we tell you this; it is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living god. (...) Te Stranger falls, and everyone else sinks slowly to the ground after him. Te King can now be seen, although only faintly. He stands in state upon the balcony. He has no face, and is twice as tall as a man. He wears painted shows under his tattered, fantastically colored robes, and a streamer of silk appears to fall from the pointed tip of his hood. Behind his back he holds inverted a torch with a turned and jeweled shaft, which emits smoke, but no light. At times he appears to be winged; at others, haloed. These details are for the costumier; at no point should Te King be sufficiently visible to make themall out. Behind him, Carcosa and the Lake of Hali have vanished. Instead, there appears at his back a huge sculptured shield, in shape suggesting a labrys of onyx, upon which the Yellow Sign is chased in gold. Te rest of the stage darkens gradually, until, at the end, it is lit only by the decomposed body of the Stranger, phosphorescing bluely.]

Blue I emerge from our yellow linoleum bathroom blue at one end of our single-wide trailer and I have the length of narrow hallway to consider before reaching the living room blue Blue!? And I know my mother is furious You look ridiculous it’s all she says and I do I had torn the pages from a magazine lined my bedroom floor with them and studied those punk rock spiked hair white teeth high fashion popped collar leather studded glossy photos strewn across my small space like a spread of tarot cards telling me a future I would never get to not out here not in the white trailer rusting amber thick of trees stretch of reservation of highway that stood between me and whatever else was out there record stores the mall parking lots where kids were skateboarding and smoking pot probably kids with boom boxes and bottles of beer out there were beaches with bands playing on them and these faces these shining faces with pink green purple and blue hair blue I could get that at least I could mix seventeen packets of blue raspberry Kool-Aid with a little water and I could get that it was alchemy it was potion-making but no one told me about the bleach about my dark hair needing to lift to lighten in order to get that blue no one told me that the mess of Kool-Aid would only run down my scalp my face my neck would stain me blue Blue is what you taste like he says still holding me on the twin bed in the glow of dawn my teenage curiosity has pushed me to ask What does my body taste like to you his fingers travel from neck to navel breath on my thigh and here in our sacred space he answers simply Blue you taste blue and I wonder if what he means is sad you taste sad taqʷšəblu the name is given to me when I am three to understand it my child brain has to break it apart taqʷšəblu talk as in talking as in to tell as in story sha as in the second syllable of my English name as in half of me blue as in the taste of me blue as in sad my grandmother was taqʷšəblu before me and now I am taqʷšəblu too

I take a moment to observe the personal objects on his nightstand. A worn copy of The Great Gatsby has five different sticky notes protruding from the yellowed pages,

His gaze darted to the child in question. Her wide brown eyes, exactly like Rachel's, were focused on him. She clutched a little yellow blanket against her chest and huddled against her mother for security. Something shifted inside Matt, an unknown emotion he couldn't label and wasn't sure he wanted to explore. (Page 36)

Since I had two brand new Ender Pearls, all I needed was Blaze powder. I fished around inside my magic expandable pocket and pulled out the yellow Blaze rod I had picked up when I visited the nasty Nether a few worlds back. I plunked it down on the crafting table, and two little piles of yellow powder appeared! That was the easy part. Then came the hard part—putting everything together! Making stuff in Minecraft usually means arranging every single ingredient on a crafting table in EXACTLY the right way. And if just one little thing is out of place, you get NOTHING! Let me tell you, I was NOT looking forward to hours and hours of trial and error and error and error and... But I psyched myself up by remembering that Eyes of Ender were my only way back home! I took a deep breath, and got ready for a long and boring day of flailing around at a crafting table. So of course, after getting myself all worked up, the second I put the ingredients on the crafting table an Eye of Ender instantly appeared! I guess you could say it was “Eye-ronic!” (Heh. Get it? Eye-ronic = ironic!) Hey, don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining! I’m just glad that the Minecraft irony worked in MY favor for once! Then quick as a flash, I had two brand new Eyes of Ender! Unfortunately, that didn’t mean my problems were over just yet. The torn page made it sound like I’d need a bunch of Eyes, and I was fresh out of Blaze powder! I couldn’t go back to the Nether (no Nether Portal… and no DEATH WISH either!), so there wasn’t any way for me to get more! Hmm. Or was there? Hanging all over the walls inside the tower, were all kinds of framed pictures. One of them was a Blaze rod, and another one was Blaze powder. They looked totally life-like. Then a crazy idea popped into my head. I reached out, and tapped a picture. The Blaze rod went POP! out of the frame, and onto the floor! It WAS real! I tapped the “picture” of the Blaze powder, and it popped out too! WOW! Man, if I had known the items in the frames were REAL, I’d have pulled out stuff in the other hacker kid houses, and saved myself TONS of time and trouble and, more importantly… PAIN!

Jaylynn, she was so like me in every way; in her personality, in her actions, her laughter, and when I looked into her eyes it is all the same as if am looking into the eyes of a reflection of myself in my bloodstained mirror, from the eras of past, oh so long ago. I have never spoken about her to anyone until now; no one even knows about these stories, no one cares. Now that I am getting older, and getting closer to that casket, I feel that I should share my story with someone, so I decided on putting everything in my life down onto paper in my scrapbook diary, as you know! I have some of it on notepaper, yet I want to get it all on neat crisp paper with the black crisp font. Yet my early 1920’s vintage black Underwood Standard Typewriter No.5. It- the typewriter just smiles at me, because I start and stop one word at a time, plus the button letter ‘N’ has gone missing. Where it has gone is a mystery too, using a typewriter is not the way things work these days, everything is done digitally, with either video or recordings. Until now my dream was to write and complete my story! So, that is just okay with me. I am not a writer, there are not many out there anymore. I cannot even get a complete thought on a page… without jamming, or type-o's now, it pisses me off, but I will do it in time! I wonder how much more time I have to do this. There is nothing more annoying than that snowy old page, maybe there is, but I need to get this down somehow. This is all my misery, which cannot stop playing in my head that I need to let out. Furthermore, this is the only way I want to do it because they all said I never would. The paper is so old now, that it is yellow. The stack of paper is just like my cracked teeth; hell, the little bell does not even go ding anymore.

My mother, by now, clings to life like a yellowing piece of Scotch tape in a scrapbook. It can detach at any moment, and yet it still does the job. All you need to do is turn the page to unstick it, so that it leaves a pale rectangular stain behind. I’m not impressed by what I’ve just written, it feels overwrought, but I hold on to the receipt.

I had discovered the recipe in a book in the basement just last week, had devoured its advice and warnings about beauty, and instructions for potpourri, herbal masks, and beauty soaks. The stern Victorian words, capitalized and underscored: The Young Lady is advised to retire to the Privacy of her own toiletry with only the company of her Maid to assist in the Beauty Episode. When I had leafed through the yellowed, musty pages, a pressed pansy, as brittle and brown as a moth's wing, had zigzagged to the floor in a papery flurry.

It’s lighter than I expected, smaller somehow too. The cover is a deep-green leather, and both right-hand corners are decorated with metal embellishments. I run my fingers along the edges. There is no title. No author name. This is not a book. I open to the first page, confirming my suspicions. Across the delicate, yellowing front page in a scratchy, handwritten font, I scan the words with a ball of fear swelling in my chest. This diary belongs to Celine Mason, age 16. DO NOT READ!

Life is what you make it, and what we learned today in that magical little canal bookshop is that books are there for you when you need comfort, and they’ll always be there. Their pages might be yellowed with age, dog-eared, with notes in the margins, or a birthday scrawl in the front, but that’s what makes them special.

Large fountain glasses arrived at our table, layered with sweet beans, caramelized saba bananas, jackfruit, palm fruit, nata de coco, and strips of macapuno topped with shaved ice, evaporated milk, a slice of leche flan, a healthy scoop of ube halaya, and a scattering of pinipig, the toasted glutinous rice adding a nice bit of crunch. This frosty rainbow confection raised my spirits every time I saw it, and both Sana and I pulled out our phones to take pictures of the dish. She laughed. "This is almost too pretty to eat, so I wanted to document its loveliness before digging in." "This is for the restaurant's social media pages. My grandmother only prepares this dish in the summer, so I need to remind our customers to come while it lasts." "How do we go about this?" Rob asked, looking at his rapidly melting treat in trepidation. "Up to you. You can mix everything together like the name says so that you get a bit of everything in each bite. Or you can tackle it layer by layer. I'm a mixing girl, but you better figure it out fast or you're going to be eating dessert soup." We all dug in, each snowy bite punishing my teeth making me shiver in delight. I loved the interplay of textures---the firmness of the beans versus the softness of the banana and jackfruit mingling with the chewiness of the palm fruit, nata de coco, and macapuno. The fluffy texture of the shaved ice soaked through with evaporated milk, with the silky smoothness of the leche flan matched against the creaminess of the ube halaya and crispiness of the pinipig. A texture eater's (and sweet tooth's) paradise. "This is so strange," Valerie said. "I never would've thought of putting all these things together, especially not in a dessert. But it works. I mean, I don't love the beans, but they're certainly interesting. And what are these yellow strips?" "Jackfruit. When ripe, they're yellow and very sweet and fragrant, so they make a nice addition to lots of Filipino desserts. They were also in the turon I brought to the meeting earlier. Unripe jackfruit is green and used in vegetarian recipes, usually.

Alkins stood before the jury and surveyed their faces over the tops of the pages of his opening statement. He always wore the same tie on the first day of a trial, yellow with navy diagonal stripes. He was not superstitious about anything except that tie, which he kept in an old tobacco box in his office desk drawer

And remember this: the page you are looking at now, I once typed the words with care with you in mind under a yellow light with the radio on.

I feel the porcelain cold against my palm. I see the dust motes drifting through the stale air. I smell the yellowed pages of books that haven’t been opened for decades. I taste something metallic on my tongue. Fear, I realize, of what will happen when I look inside the urn. Then I do look, and my gasp is loud enough to echo off the library bookshelves. Because what I see is . . . nothing. No ashes. No dust. The urn is completely empty.

Jim Dickinson: They started running down “Brown Sugar” the first night, but they didn’t get a take. I watched Mick write the lyrics. It took him maybe forty-five minutes; it was disgusting. He wrote it down as fast as he could move his hand. I’d never seen anything like it. He had one of those yellow legal pads, and he’d write a verse a page, just write a verse and then turn the page, and when he had three pages filled, they started to cut it. It was amazing! If you listen to the lyrics, he says, “Skydog slaver” (though it’s always written “scarred old slaver”). What does that mean? Skydog is what they called Duane Allman in Muscle Shoals, because he was high all the time. And Jagger heard somebody say it and he thought it was a cool word so he used it. He was writing about literally being in the South. It was amazing to watch him do it. The same thing happened with “Wild Horses.” Keith had “Wild Horses” written as a lullaby. It was about Marlon, about not wanting to leave home because he’d just had a son.

Maybe she hadn't worked in a restaurant, but anyone who made their cookbooks look like that must have known something. I flipped through a few others. Thai salads, meringue-topped cakes, Carolina barbecue. Then on the bottom shelves, I found a row of cheap black-and-white speckled notebooks. They didn't fit the grown-up vibe of the rest of the room. Everyone has a soft spot, Jay had said. I reached for one. "Cooking Notes," it said in sparkly green pen on the cover. The handwriting was rounder. A kid's. "October 25," I read slowly, trailing my finger along the page. Fish sticks. Cook at 400F for two minutes longer than the box says. Hank likes one tablespoon ketchup and one tablespoon yellow mustard mixed together. Mom likes one tablespoon mayonnaise with juice of a quarter of a lemon and one teaspoon Tabasco. Hank's waffles. Toast Eggos on medium, put on butter and maple syrup, then microwave for ten seconds to melt everything together. I flicked through a year of little Ellie's cooking. A lot of it was her trying to dress up convenience food--- pancakes, ramen. Toward the end of the notebook, she'd started to try random scratch recipes. Ground Turkey Tacos had lots of stars and fireworks drawn around it, while another for zucchini omelets only had "Yuck.

Red smoke came rising out of the bottle, and Jasmine scrambled backward, crying out in panic. Something fiery within was pulling itself free, and though she tried to slam the lid back on, she was too late. The fire had escaped. It was growing larger and larger before her eyes, but the opposite of the Genie's comforting blue appearance. This creature had spotted red skin and flaming yellow eyes; it had claws longer than Jasmine's arms and dark hooves for feet. Jasmine had never seen anything so terrifying in her life. She trembled, staring up at the demon, which looked like it had crawled off the pages of one of Taminah's books. "The Story of Dahish the Ifrit." She could almost hear her tutor's voice again now. "A tale of a jinn who chose darkness." It was real... all of it. There was only one thing this demonic creature looming above her could be: an ifrit, evil jinn of the underworld. Just like the creature Jafar had turned into when he made his fateful final wish on the lamp--- the Genie's malevolent opposite.

Two links diverged from a yellow page, And sorry I could not travel both And be one traveler, long I stood And looked down one as far as I could To where it broke in the understroke; Then took the other, as just as fair And having perhaps the better claim, Because it was grassy and wanted wear; Though as for that the passing there May wear them really about the same, And both that page-load equally lay In bits no click had colored black.

I’ve had that happen to me plenty of times,” I say. Who hasn’t? This is the kind of pseudo-problem that would easily succumb to a Sponsor call. And as always, my solution would be: Forget the hell about it. Think about something better—a new apartment with a wheelchair ramp and maybe a Jenn-Air and lots of phone jacks. Your mind’s not the fucking Yellow Pages. You’ve got no business asking it to perform tasks it’s not interested in just so you can show off. To me, it’s a worse signal that anybody would ever worry about these

Sometimes a turn of phrase would throw her off, or a character description would go over her head. But the darkness of the novel living within those old, yellow pages always struck true and familiar in such a way that it felt special. She read it slow, savoring every syllable, every description.

There was something strange about Emory Yew. Now I understood what it really was. The infection—it was eating at him, ripping away his sanity. He’s degenerating, the Nightmare said. Little by little. Magic always comes at a cost. I twisted the crow’s foot in my pocket. “What magic did Emory’s infection grant him?” Elm’s gaze shifted to his young cousin. “He can read people,” he said. “As if all their secrets had been transcribed onto the pages of a book. All it takes is a single touch.” Coldness crept up my spine. I see a yellow gaze narrowed by hate, the boy had said to me. I see darkness and shadow. And I see your fingers, long and pale, covered in blood.

Jessie’s eyes widened and her head shot up. “And you’re only coming for advice now, after all of this time?” she asked pointedly. “I don’t need your judgement, Jessie,” Toni countered angrily. In an instant Jessie regretted her tone. Where was her so called professional manner? The scratching of the ballpoint pen against yellow paper was the only sound in the office as Jessie transcribed the gist of their discussion in shorthand. A small, dark part of Jessie still hated Toni for abandoning her to the mercy of those bullies ten years ago, and it revelled in seeing her in similar straits now. But she hated that part of herself for holding on to an empty grudge for so long. As her pen filled the page with notes, she cleared her throat for Toni’s attention. “I’m very sorry to hear that you’ve suffered this kind of treatment, Toni. You really do have my sympathies. Who did you take your concerns to at your place of work?” “I spoke to the owner, Mark Baldwin. He basically tried to shut me down by taking her side.” “Did you put your complaint in writing?” “No, I didn’t see the point after my conversation with him. So what happens now? Are you going to call him?” Jessie shook her head. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work like that. I’ll give you an outline of the procedure, should you wish to proceed.” Jessie rested the pad on the desk. “So far, you have only made an informal complaint, so your first step is to write a grievance letter to your employer about the issues you have encountered.” She restlessly played with the pen between her fingers as she continued. “They will investigate and then invite you to a meeting to state your case. You can have someone accompany you at this meeting. Your workplace will then inform you of the outcome and if you aren’t happy, you have the right to appeal their decision. It is only after this that you can consider a tribunal and it would be at that point we would get involved.” “Okay, so I just write the letter to start with? I can’t see it doing any good though,

But Susan didn’t have a yellow pages, so she’d gone online instead, and Juliet’s Web site had been the first to come up. I wasn’t surprised. It was sometimes the first to come up when your search string was “Chinese restaurants” or “plumbers.” I was pretty sure she’d done something to Google that was both illegal and supernatural.

I’m gonna apply for law school for next year. I already took the LSATs and I did good.” “You really want to be a fuckin’ lawyer?” Del asked. “Look in the yellow pages. There are thousands of them. They’re like rats.” “Yeah, I know. I don’t know what to do. I used to think I could be a defense lawyer, but now, you know, after looking at four years of dirtbags, maybe not,” Lucas said. “So then I’m thinking about being a prosecutor, but then I see the prosecutors we work with, and the political bullshit they put up with, and I’m thinking . . .

We walk past a clown who is painting kids’ faces, and I suddenly stop, something catching my eye. “I like that unicorn,” I say, pointing to the bright pink stuffed animal hanging from the ceiling of a game booth. Travis looks from the unicorn to me. “Is that a hint?” “I didn’t think I was being subtle,” I say, batting my eyelashes at him. “How much is it?” Travis asks the man in charge of the game, reaching for his wallet. “One dart for three dollars, four for ten. You just pop a balloon with the dart and you get a prize,” he says, perking up at the prospect of a new customer. “Oh, that sounds easy!” I say, clapping my hands together. “How many times do you have to pop a balloon to get the unicorn?” Travis asks. “Five,” the man answers brightly. “I could buy you a unicorn for cheaper than that!” Travis says, turning to me. My face falls. “But that’s not the point,” I argue. Travis looks at my pout before he lifts his eyes up to the ceiling, shaking his head. “Okay, I will take five darts.” I immediately perk up again, and reach out for his arm. “You’ll do great!” I say. Travis takes the first dart from the man and throws it at the wall. It doesn’t even make it all the way and falls pitifully to the floor. “Must have been a bad dart,” I argue. He frowns, picks up the second dart and this time takes a little more aim before throwing it. This time it makes it to the wall but doesn’t manage to stick. “That’s okay, it−” Before I can finish my thought, Travis is handing me his jacket to hold so he has both hands free. He picks up the next dart, his face all business, and plants his feet, ready for action. None of the five darts pop any balloons, and before I can offer him any words of consolation he has slapped down a twenty on the ledge and rolled up his sleeves. “Travis, you don’t have to−” but I can tell he isn’t listening to a word I’m saying. He throws another dart and it actually connects to the side of a balloon, but it only serves to pin the balloon to the wall more. Is that even possible? These are like miracle balloons. “This is obviously rigged!” I argue, picking up one of the darts. I throw it at the wall, my back leg kicking up from the effort and it connects with a bright yellow balloon, popping it instantly. “We have a winner!” The operator yells. I look up at Travis who is just staring at the popped balloon. “That was just beginner’s luck,” I assure Travis, picking up another dart and trying to throw it at the wall a little higher than before, aiming for above the balloons. It quickly curves down in the air and pops a blue balloon. Honestly, I tried out for my high school’s baseball team and got laughed off the diamond. If it wasn’t so inappropriate I would have Travis take a video so I could post it on my Facebook page. That would show Shannon Winters and all her baseball friends. “Another winner!” the operator yells. “Three more, pretty lady, and you’ve got your unicorn.” I shoot my eyes to Travis, but he’s still staring at the wall in disbelief. I have no problem popping the other three balloons and I stand gleefully with my arms outstretched, waiting for my unicorn. “You have three more darts,” the operator points out. “Did you want to try and win your boyfriend something?” I clamp my lips together while Travis stands beside me, completely silent. “We’re going to try something else,” I say, holding my unicorn in one hand and grabbing Travis’s hand with the other. Travis walks away shaking his head. “I played football in university. I was on the provincial lacrosse team.” “I know,” I say, wrapping my arm around his middle as we walk away. “You were so close.” I try and hide the smile from my face. There is hardly anything I’m able to beat Travis at and now I know whenever I challenge him it should definitely include darts

XXVI Potential Energy Its swimming in my cream and coffee and exploding with that first  soft bite of the pencil – filling me as i taste yellow paint and pink eraser in my mouth O Leap out from my heart like lightning! Oh my love! O lets Catch the sun and press it to the page! Flail at the leaves of paper as they pirouette and spring into space. I throw myself atop the pile   hoping to prevent their explosion from killing you with my joy. They slowly melt beneath my weight and flow back into me.

No matter how far back Ned searched in the brittle yellowed pages, always he found the gold yielding before the coal.

Endangered Species Even this brief thought is endless. A man speaks as if unaware of the erotic life of the ampersand. In the isolate field he comes to count one by one the rare butterflies as they die. He says witness is to say what you mean as if you mean it. So many of them are the color of the leaves they feed on, he calls sympathy a fact, a word by which he means to make a claim about grace. I have in my life said many things I did not exactly mean. Walk graceless through the field. Graceless so the insects leap up into the blank page where the margins fill with numbers that speak diminishment. Absence as it nears also offers astonishment. Absence riddles even this briefest thought, here is your introduction to desire, time's underneath where the roots root down into nothing like loose threads hanging from the weaving's underside. No one seeing the roots can guess at the field above. Green equation that ends in yellow occasions. Theory is insubstantial. The eye latches on to the butterflies as they fly and the quick heart follows, not a root in nothing but a thread across abstraction. They fly away. What in us follows we do not name. What the butterflies pull out us as in battle horses pull chariot, we do not name. But there is none, no battle, no surge, no retreat, a field full not of danger, but the endangered, where dust-wings pull from us what we thought we lost, what theory denies, where in us ideas go to die, and thought with the quaking grass quakes. Some call it breath but I'm still breathing. So empty I know I'm not any emptier. On slim threads they pull it out me, disperse-no one takes notes-disappear, &

¿Por qué no creó Rupert Murdoch The Huffington Post? ¿Por qué no lanzó AT&T Skype, ni Visa creó PayPal? La CNN podría haber creado Twitter, visto que de frases cortas e impactantes como titulares se trata, ¿no? General Motors o Hertz podrían haber lanzado Uber, y Marriott, Airbnb. Gannett podría haber creado Craigslist o Kijiji. Yellow Pages podría haber fundado perfectamente eBay. Microsoft tenía la posibilidad de crear Google o cualquier modelo de negocio basado en internet más que en el ordenador personal. ¿Por qué no inventó la NBC YouTube? Sony podría haberse adelantado al iTunes de Apple. ¿Dónde estaba Kodak cuando se inventaron Instagram o Pinterest? ¿Y si People o Newsweek hubieran creado BuzzFeed o Mashable?

The place was a wreck, and Nancy insisted that the first thing we had to do was tear up the rotting linoleum in the kitchen. One layer yielded to another, until finally I came to a bunch of newspapers that had been laid over the warped wooden floor to make it level. They were issues of the New York Daily News and Daily Mirror from 1936. The papers, nearly thirty years old, were smelly and yellow with age, but otherwise readable. The giant black headlines concerned a child custody trial in Los Angeles. The News banner for August 1 screamed ASTOR’S BABY TO BE JUDGE. Next came ASTOR’S SENSATIONS SCARE FILM MOGULS. And by August 8 it was ASTOR DIARY “ECSTACY” (sic), with the subhead G. S. KAUFMAN TRYST BARED. I began piecing the pages together chronologically.

Here, this is for you," the girl said, holding out one of the pages on which she'd been drawing. "Oh, I... well, thank you." Meg reached out and took the sketch between her fingers. Gazing down, her eyes widened. Instead of the typical childish scribble she'd expected, she discovered two well-rendered figures. The style was a bit loose, and still immature with a tendency to distort the proportions. Even so, it was refined enough enough to have captured remarkably accurate likenesses of her and Cade seated side by side on the sofa. Esme might be only be nine years of age, but already she was an exceptional artist, better than many adults would ever hope to be. "This is... extraordinary," Meg said. "It's you and Cade," the girl offered, clutching a small fist against her yellow wool skirt. "Do you like it?" "I most certainly do. How could I not? You've drawn Cade and me so perfectly. It's beautiful." The girl's oval features came alive with a pleased smile. "Good night, Miss Amberley. I'm glad you're going to be my sister." At a sudden loss for what she knew would never be, Meg settled on the only honest reply she could offer. "Sweet dreams, Esme.

As though to fortify me she took the letter out and placed it on the table between us. Its pages were folded, yellowed like old skin, the faint tattoo of aged ink that had seeped onto the blank side visible to me. Just like me, I thought, looking at the letter. The life I had lived was folded, only a blank page exposed to the world, emptiness wrapped round the days of my life; faint traces of it could be discerned, but only if you looked closely, very closely.

She'd told Gustav never to cry. But it seemed that this rule didn't apply to her, because there were times, late at night, when Gustav would creep out of his room to find Emilie weeping over the pages of the Matzlingerzeitung. At these moments, her breath often smelled of aniseed and she would be clutching a glass clouded with yellow liquid, and Gustav felt afraid of these things - of her aniseed breath and the dirty glass and his mother's tears.

They would need a logo for the app, something that instantly enticed users to download and use Picaboo. Reggie and Evan sat together and created the logo over the course of a few hours, going back and forth on ways to symbolize the disappearing nature of the app. They settled on a friendly ghost who was smiling and sticking out its tongue. Evan drew the ghost in Adobe InDesign while Reggie tossed in ideas. Reggie named the ghost Ghostface Chillah, after the Wu-Tang Clan rapper Ghostface Killah. Evan studied the hundred most popular apps in the app store and noticed that none had yellow logos. To make Picaboo stand out, he put the Ghostface Chillah logo on a bright yellow background. Reggie slapped the logo on Facebook and Twitter pages he made for the app. While Evan worked hard on the design and vision for the product and Bobby coded, Reggie contributed less. Plenty of successful Silicon Valley founders do not write code; but they play other roles, relentless hustling in the early days of their companies, dominating nontechnical jobs like marketing and user growth. Reggie simply wasn’t doing that. Having recently turned twenty-one, he wanted to enjoy the Los Angeles nightlife, and he stayed out into the wee hours of the morning. While Evan and Bobby lived the plot of Silicon Valley, Reggie was more Entourage. Evan had always remembered and valued what Clarence Carter had told him when he worked at Red Bull, “When everyone is tired and the night is over, who stays and helps out? Because those are your true friends. Those are the hard workers, the people that believe that working hard is the right thing to do.” His co-founders felt Reggie was not pulling his weight, and it was beginning to cause resentment.

Author: A common gadabout who freely wanders over the landscape, picking up free words and squirreling them away for later use. Subsequently, (days, months or years later)working by candlelight and hidden away in his dank, musty secluded lair, the rogue simply rearranges the collected words on yellowed bond with a sharpened quill ink pen fashioned from the tail feather of a bald-headed vulture. Once finished, the dastardly cur audaciously attempts to sell those assembled pages for fleeting fame and profit.

4 cups (940 ml) homemade Chicken Stock (see page 198) or ready-to-eat chicken broth with 1 envelope (1 tablespoon, or 7 g) plain gelatin added ½ cup (80 g) yellow onion, chopped ½ cup (65 g) carrot, chopped 1 tablespoon (4 g) minced fresh parsley ½ teaspoon minced fresh thyme 1 bay leaf ½ teaspoon black pepper 4 ounces (115 g) uncooked GF macaroni or small pasta shells 2 cups (about ¾ pound, or 340 g) cubed cooked turkey 1 cup (180 g) chopped tomatoes In a large sauce pot over medium heat, combine broth, onion, carrot, parsley, thyme, bay leaf, and pepper. Bring to a boil. Stir in macaroni, cover, and reduce heat. Simmer for about 6 minutes. Stir in turkey and tomatoes. Cook until heated through and macaroni is tender. Discard bay leaf before serving.

Flipped through memories like old copies of National Geographic, pages in a yellowing high-school year book, cable-television channels looking for a baseball game.

In a kingdom long ago there was a man who lived alone. In spring he never sowed his seeds for fear there might be drought, and in fall he would not travel lest his ship be blown into the deep. But though he locked his doors inside and out, it did not bring him peace. One day a bird, small and slight as a pebble, flew to his window. He marveled at her green wings and at the beauty of her song. 'I have heard that wind can uproot a tree from the ground,' said the man. 'Are you not afraid of wind?' The bird cocked her head brightly. 'Of course,' she said. 'And I have heard that fire can sweep a forest in a day,' the man said. 'Are you not afraid of fire?' 'Yes,' she said. Her wings, thin as pages in a book, glinted in the yellow sunlight. 'But if you are afraid,' asked the man, 'why do you fly? Why do you build your nest?' The bird cracked a grain of millet in her beak. 'There are things I would not miss,' she said. 'Every day there is morning, ripe as a peach.' She trilled a score of grace-notes effortlessly. 'And fledglings in the spring, of course-small things.' 'I do not wish to hear of these,' said the man. 'What of wind and fire?' The bird considered thoughtfully. 'My song,' she said finally, 'requires them all.' The man watched her fly away, as frail and strong as ashes dancing in the air.

I fixed her a drink, then lowered myself on the spider's silk of my attention back into One Hundred Years of Solitude and the adventures of the Buendia family. The scene where the prodigal Jose Arcadio hoisted his adopted sister by her waist into his hammock and, in my translation, 'quartered her like a little bird' made my face hot I bent down the page, whose small triangle marks the instant. Touching that triangle of yellowed paper today is like sliding my hand into the glove of my seventeen-year-old hand. Through magic, there are the Iowa fields slipping by... And there is my mother, not yet born into the ziplock baggie of ash my sister sent me years ago with the frank message 'Mom 1/2', written in laundry pen, since no-one in our family ever stood on ceremony.

A small book lay nestled in the paper. A rich brown leather cover, creased with age, and with hand stitching at the binding, encased the yellowed pages. Keelin marveled over the beauty of the simple craftsmanship. No words or symbols marred the soft leather, yet years of scratches from use had weathered the cover to a perfect patina. The book seemed to speak volumes without a word on its cover. This book was old. Really old. Keelin wondered if she needed gloves to touch

Henny started to check things over—cables, speedometer, tire pressure, mirror adjustment—and then he sprayed the chain with WD40. He always does this, even if he’s going two blocks to the grocery. “Almost ready,” he said, when I thought he was all done. “I’m going to fill the water bottle and throw a bag of dried fruit into the seat pack.” Then he made one more trip for a bandage, just in case. When we finally got going, it was the hottest part of the day. I didn’t want to know how hot it was, but I knew Henny was going to tell me. “Did you check the thermometer?” he called up to me at the first intersection. “A hundred and five in the shade. It’s hot enough to uncurl your hair. We’ll die of heat exhaustion out here on the high-way. Can’t we go in something air-conditioned?” Henny never does anything without a few complaints. He has terrible things to say about trumpet lessons but he likes to play the trumpet. And then there are book reports. Henny reads the long, nonfiction books, the Yellow Pages, everything. Just don’t ask him to write up a report, because he will complain about it forever, and then turn in thirty pages.

She chose books because they never left her lonely the way that Kirk had left her lonely. BEcause company was often nothing of the kind, whereas a good book always was. She chose books for the smell of fresh-pressed pages, for the yellow-brown musk of library mould, but always for the breathy kiss of paper rustling. She chose books because some of the held prose that made her weep, or poetry that winded her, and words that mae her heart skip beats. She chose books because some came readey-made with characters that seemed like perfect versions of hrself, all of them little proofs that somehow, somewhere, it might just be possible for her to be better: to be popular, powerful, sexy and smart. She chose books because they lied to her with more conviction than people ever had.

Why should anyone expect that sending a person to a second-rate university to think about the media or philosophy will increase economic growth? It is surely more likely to put into their heads thoughts of a non-economic sort which could actually divert them from making an economic contribution of any substance. Even if some of them are eventually well paid, how useful are they? As the Daily Mail columnist Linda Lee-Potter put it, ‘I have often been in urgent need of a plumber. I have never desperately thumbed through the Yellow Pages trying to find a sociologist.

make a Yellow Pages

YELLOW RICE Serves 6 to 8 This simple, spiced rice dish is a great accompaniment to Spice Trade Fish Stew (page 78) or any roast or grilled chicken, fish, or meat dish. 2 cups white basmati rice 2 tablespoons olive oil 1 cup chopped onion 1 tablespoon hawaij for soup or Instant Almost Hawaij (page 216) 3 cups water Place the rice in a bowl and rinse it in several changes of water until the water runs clear. Cover with warm tap water and let sit for 20 minutes. Drain the rice and set aside. In a large saucepan, heat the oil over medium-high heat. Add the onion and sauté until golden, 5 to 7 minutes. Add the hawaij and rice and stir until evenly coated. Add the water, stir well, raise the heat to high, and bring to a boil. Cover, lower the heat to low, and simmer for 15 minutes. Remove from the heat and let rest, covered, for 10 minutes. Fluff the rice with a fork before serving warm.

And inevitably, a neutered “Jesus” gives us piles of little neutered Christians. But what God has in mind is the complete renovation of the world. Jesus didn’t send His apostles out to start a social club, a special interest group, or a new “religion” that could be filed in the yellow pages, right there between Cats and Creeps. Jesus didn’t send His apostles out to make deals, to compromise, and offer alternative lifestyles. Jesus claimed all authority in heaven and on earth. He claimed all of it, and sent His apostles to announce that claim in the words of the gospel and to enact it with water, bread, and wine, with His full authority.

Looked you up in the yellow pages under ‘Evil Syndicates,’” he said. “Lo and behold, there you were right in between Hydra and Spectre.

Yellow journalism turns purple when third page obituaries appear on page one.

That evening I went to a dance class held in an old yellow school whose window frames were painted sky blue. I love to dance, but by the time I came to understand that I ought to have tried to become a dancer instead of a writer, it was too late. More and more it seems to me that dancing is where my true happiness lies, and that when I write, what I am really trying to do is dance, and because it is impossible, because dancing is free of language, I am never satisfied with writing. To write is, in a sense, to seek to understand, and so it is always something that happens after the fact, is always a process of sifting through the past, and the results of this, if one is lucky, are permanent marks on a page. But to dance is to make oneself available (for pleasure, for an explosion, for stillness); it only ever takes place in the present—the moment after it happens, dance has already vanished. Dance constantly disappears,

They had read a fantastic book, a doorstop novel from India with colors and spices and music and poetry spilling out into the margins, a seven-course literary feast. After reading a brief biographical note about the author, they always went around the table. When it was Maya's turn, she was ready with yellow Post-its stuck in between the pages that held the paragraphs she wanted to read aloud. "I thought this book was like a tapestry," she'd begun, hearing her own voice sounding excited but focused. "Poetic and romantic descriptions of nature and art combined with a social message that's both brutal and- provocative

The pro for search-based traffic is that when they come to you, they’re hot buyers who are ready to buy. This is similar to people who walk into your store or find you in the Yellow Pages and give you a call.

You don't know a thing about me. You can't see me sitting at this yellow wood desk, the salt-sweet breeze riffling these pages like a reader looking for her bookmark. You can't see the scars that twist and knot across my skin. You don't even know my name. It's January Scaller. So now, I suppose you do know a little something about me and I've ruined my point.

The Old World was the domain of the Old School of wizardry—the “maintain secrecy and don’t attract attention” way of thinking. I guess they have a point, given the Inquisition and all. I don’t belong to the Old School. I have an ad in the Yellow Pages, under “Wizards.” Big shocker—I’m the only one there. I have to pay the bills somehow, don’t I?