Sublime

He had eventually flushed his fugitive sister out from Hôtel d’Alsace in St. Germain, a degenerate endroit, in Hugh’s estimation, the scene of Oscar Wilde’s demise, which said everything you needed to know about the place.

I see this girl, Vanden, for a while, who paints my futon frame black and who stopped seeing me because she said she saw “a spider the size of Norman Mailer” in my bathroom. I didn’t ask her who Norman Mailer was, and I didn’t ask her to come back.

Dear Jeannette, I write to you from Paris, though I am soon to leave it. After these four years I am returning to Palestine. I am sorry that I did not write to you before. I wish I had. Regrets pile on regrets. You see I had hoped I would forget you. In my mind you were bound up for so long with pain that to think of you was always to feel again th

Zawata,

facetious

trenchant,

Once it was a young girl who entered the kitchen suddenly in a gust of wind, pale, thin, and strange, like a stray thought.

Un soir d’été, la chaleur était moite, étouffante, Soraya ne vint pas à notre rendez-vous et ne répondit pas davantage à mes appels téléphoniques. Le lendemain je la contactai à nouveau, en vain. Les jours suivants je me présentai chez elle à plusieurs reprises mais, à chaque fois, la porte resta close.

Tu es un expatrié. Tu as perdu contact avec le sol. Tu deviens précieux. De faux standards européens t'ont gâté. Tu te tues à force de boire. Tu te laisses obséder par le sexe. Tu passes ton temps à parler au lieu de travailler. Tu es un expatrié, tu comprends ? Tu traînes dans tous les cafés.