for Christina Pluhar I let the sirens’ voices lead me and began a new day. Even not knowing the words I know this is how one sings of love and freedom. We have run a long road, from morning to dark. Régimes have changed as seasons do, people fallen like leaves. Odysseus had been warned: Plug your ears, they’ll seduce […]
The Constitution [Ustav Republike Hrvatske], a Croatian film written and directed by Rajko Grlić (2016), dramatizes how living together in a society challenged by interethnic hatred and homophobia requires interconnectedness and understanding. Seemingly intractable differences are unexpectedly reconciled at the end of the film through the cultural custom of ritual kinship known as kum or godfatherhood. The film’s inspired but […]
Snow has fallen on the fruit-tree blossoms. Let each one love who his heart desires. If she will not, let him not impose it. From imposing there can be no blessing. Were I lucky rather than unlucky, and might I come up into your chambers, I would sit there on your silken cushions like a pasha among his faithful stewards […]
The city opens up in the morning, when, giddy from sleep, it throws off the covers of night. It greets passers-by with a gap-toothed asphalt smile full of holes and fillings and hugs them with its enchanting tree-lined streets which aren’t so easy to categorize in English. But I adore sidewalks, even when they are humpbacked. They are the […]
for Dominika Křesťanová Dear Wayles, I’m back from a long journey. Rain saw me off in Prague and greeted me in Syracuse. Were the heavens lamenting my departure or my return? Or was it just a normal change of location which I try to assign some emotional higher sense to? The plane took off gently, pierced the Prague rain and […]