“They know something real about the surface of things. I would say that they defy the abstractions, statistics, and agendas of public policy, the academic event of the structure in whose shadow they roughly glide, jump, and fall.”
We are a little hung-over, a little loud, a little late. As my friend Giri drives the car up a dusty, unpaved road, my friend Louise and I comment on how rustic the rough wooden fence separating from the field from Princeton Friends Meeting is.
Call me Moses Goldstein. You won’t be wrong. Say it and I’ll turn around, look back at you out of the corner of my eye, smile a bit and raise an eyebrow at you coyly, because I’m a coy guy, and—of course—that is my name.
“In my desperate search for a ‘cure’ for my concussion, I experimented with the outermost fringes of the medical world: the truly punk-rock subculture of medical science.”
While I am crowded into the park with my Hong Kong friends, awaiting the moment to begin our procession from Causeway Bay westward to Central, I wonder: Why is it that I, a black American who does not even understand Cantonese, who has lived in Hong Kong for less than one month, am out among the crowds supporting the protests?
A few weeks ago my friend Demi sat on the floor of my dorm room. She was the first person I had seen from my time studying abroad in Switzerland since I had come back to the U.S. almost two years ago. She hadn’t changed much, though I had, and when she said in the rough Swiss German I had missed so strongly, “er het sich verhängt,”—he had hanged himself— I thought to myself in a language I hadn’t spoken in years — “jetzt gibt’s zwei.” Now there are two.
Brian introduced me to rap music on bus #177 in what I think was fourth grade. I know it was 177 and not 181 or 161 because this memory is accompanied by a host of other unique sensory inputs: the … Read More
