Hamas in the park
Hamas has scored a stinging political victory that has thrown an already unstable Middle East into complete disarray.
Er something.
I know little about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, as I am afraid to pick up any book on the subject lest I am inculcated by some sinister ideology.
In that subject, alone among all others, I wish to be ideologieless.
In London, when the writing wasn't going so well, or if I was lonely, or drunk, I would end up in Bloomsbury Square.
From about ten pm until six am it was a bacchanalia.
Summer nights were orgiastic--the men, dozens of them--would undulate in groups among the weak leaves of the battered limes.
One time I stepped into a muddy glen, two sides brush, one side wrought iron that looked out upon a cobbled street of row houses, and a skinny young man, perhaps nineteen or twenty, pale in the light, was being attended to, like a prince with a coterie, by men who knelt and kneaded at his penis and neck and lips with gloved hands.
He detached himself from them and found me.
We kissed for a while before he took me away from there.
I can't remember where his flat was--off the Edgware Road I think, somewhere east of there, an area some called Noho, he owned the flat himself.
We fucked in this room that was blindingly bright from arc-sodiums that lit up the square of the council block.
After, I kicked around the books he had stacked on floor in the living room.
He said he went to college in Southwark and was studying Yiddish theatre and performance cultures at the turn of the century.
We began to speak of Jewish culture--he was a Jew.
Members of his family had immigrated to Israel but he was in actor and wanted to make it in London.
"And who are you?" He asked me.
Despite everything that had come before, it was the first point at which he had asked anything about me.
"What's your background?"
"I'm American," I said.
"I know that--but your ethnicity."
"French," I said.
His face fell. "French? You mean--you aren't Arab?"
My left eye winced as it is wont to do. His face fell some more.
I shared the bed with him but we didn't speak much. In the morning, he quickly left me, saying he had important appointments.
That's how I remember it.
Er something.
I know little about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, as I am afraid to pick up any book on the subject lest I am inculcated by some sinister ideology.
In that subject, alone among all others, I wish to be ideologieless.
In London, when the writing wasn't going so well, or if I was lonely, or drunk, I would end up in Bloomsbury Square.
From about ten pm until six am it was a bacchanalia.
Summer nights were orgiastic--the men, dozens of them--would undulate in groups among the weak leaves of the battered limes.
One time I stepped into a muddy glen, two sides brush, one side wrought iron that looked out upon a cobbled street of row houses, and a skinny young man, perhaps nineteen or twenty, pale in the light, was being attended to, like a prince with a coterie, by men who knelt and kneaded at his penis and neck and lips with gloved hands.
He detached himself from them and found me.
We kissed for a while before he took me away from there.
I can't remember where his flat was--off the Edgware Road I think, somewhere east of there, an area some called Noho, he owned the flat himself.
We fucked in this room that was blindingly bright from arc-sodiums that lit up the square of the council block.
After, I kicked around the books he had stacked on floor in the living room.
He said he went to college in Southwark and was studying Yiddish theatre and performance cultures at the turn of the century.
We began to speak of Jewish culture--he was a Jew.
Members of his family had immigrated to Israel but he was in actor and wanted to make it in London.
"And who are you?" He asked me.
Despite everything that had come before, it was the first point at which he had asked anything about me.
"What's your background?"
"I'm American," I said.
"I know that--but your ethnicity."
"French," I said.
His face fell. "French? You mean--you aren't Arab?"
My left eye winced as it is wont to do. His face fell some more.
I shared the bed with him but we didn't speak much. In the morning, he quickly left me, saying he had important appointments.
That's how I remember it.
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