bernd on beirut

nursing my guilt of choosing my india adventure over reunion in the middle east, i come across the this quote by a former reuters’ man in beirut, bernd debusmann.

“Where else could you see people happily sip poolside cocktails served by smartly uniformed waiters in one part of their city, while mortar duels were being fought in another? Where else could you find a pet parrot that imitated the sound of an incoming shell so accurately that newcomers to the bar of the Commodore Hotel would dive for cover? Where else wold you complain that your car had been stolen, not to the police, but to the leader of the teenage militia at the roadblock near your office? Where else would it be returned in a convoy led by a tank that once belonged to the Army? Where else could you have dinner-table conversations in three languages with wordly educated people who insisted on calling their fratricidal war ‘les evenements,’ as if these events had been wrought by force majeure rather than by people? Life in Lebanon had a tinge of surrealism that I found seductive.”

in defence of blogging

“A reporter can wait—must wait—until every source has confirmed. A novelist can spend months or years before committing words to the world. For bloggers, the deadline is always now. Blogging is therefore to writing what extreme sports are to athletics: more free-form, more accident-prone, less formal, more alive. It is, in many ways, writing out loud.” – why i blog, the atlantic by andrew sullivan

(you can read the rest of the article here)

every day for me

“I have no concept of leisure or relaxation and, more particularly, no sense of cumulative achievement. Every day for me is like the beginning of a new term at school, with a vast and empty summer behind it, and an uncertain tomorrow before it.”

i dream in both

“With an unexceptionally Arab family name like Said connected to an improbably British first name (my mother much admired the Prince of Wales in 1935, the year of my birth), I was an uncomfortably anomalous student all through my early years: a Palestinian going to school in Egypt, with an English first name, an American passport and no certain identity at all. To make matters worse, Arabic, my native language, and English, my school language, were inextricably mixed: I have never known which was my first language, and have felt fully at home in neither, although I dream in both. Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic, and vice versa.” – london review of books, edward said

on keeping a notebook

“perhaps it is difficult to see the value in having one’s self back in that kind of mood, but i do see it; i think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends…i have already lost touch with a couple of people i used to be…the other one, a twenty-three-year-old, bothers me more. she was always a good deal of trouble, and i suspect she will reappear when i least want to see her, skirts too long, shy to the point of aggravation, always the injured party, full of recriminations and little hurts and stories i do not want to hear again, at once saddening me and angering me with her vulnerability and ignorance, an apparition all the more insistent for being so long banished.” – joan didion

(art by ghada amer)