The World’s Shifting Navel They are not communities – backwaters, provincial boltholes, global metropolises – so much as psychogeographical places. . .
The Only Way Out I dream that I am sitting in a large string orchestra, whose seats are arranged in rows on a gradient, so that the rearmost one is a few meters higher than the front one, where I have just taken a seat next to a writer friend. . .
Sudden Urge to Get Off I must have performed at least seven bypass surgeries on the novel I have been working on for a few years. . .
Bloodletting Part of what makes literature indispensable, I suppose, is that its sensations are as difficult to pinpoint as they are impossible to deny. . .
Sand and Unknowing Only when the carousel has made a full rotation and I am once again sitting in the chair where I discovered the Sphinx at Giza do I leave the hall. My knees tremble slightly, as if I have been thrown off balance. . .
Coming Home Over the years, I have discovered that I want to step out of my own skin when I write. . .
On the Banks of the Alpheios For each year, the water passing underneath the bridge which I tend to cross with a jolt of reverence in my spine seems a little less buoyant, a little more sluggish. . .
Day by Day, Bone by Bone For the past few years, I have been drinking two glasses of water as soon as I am on my feet, barely awake. . .
Over and Over Again, and Always As If for the First Time It is over a decade since the man who called himself »a sort of biologist« died. Strangers like us aren’t able to judge whether his ghost haunts the studio. Still, everything exudes calm, clarity, concentration. In a word: presence of mind. . .
Alaska The only thing needed was this will to detach oneself from everything and everyone, no matter at what cost. I associated it with the thirty-first point of the compass, which is to say north by west, and with a name: Alaska. . .
Rather Be Deaf Recently I was asked if I could name an appealing utopia in literature. The question made me awkward. In truth, »the Isle of Bliss«, of which the Romantic poet Atterbom spoke, makes me claustrophobic; every fibre of my body wants to flee. . .
Fuck, Marry, Kill Is it not high time we killed off fictional characters whose principal purpose is to give the narrating protagonist self-insight and cause to celebrate himself as the best thing since pomade?. . .
(Four Questions Concerning) Money Matters One doesn’t need to have read Marx to know that an empty wallet begets an empty stomach. . .
