TOBI'S DESK

In the spring of his thirty-second year, the wandering monk Hanshan Deqing (1546–1623) returned to the monastery of Mount Wutai after a period of absence. “At this time,” he later wrote in his autobiography, “I recalled the benevolence of my parents and the care they had given me. I also thought of all of the obstacles that stood between me and the Law.” But his thoughts were so fixed on the debt he owed to his mother and father that he was no longer able to make spiritual progress along the path to enlightenment. In his pain, Deqing resolved to undertake an act of extraordinary penance: copying out the sūtra known as The Flower of Adornment using ink made from his own blood . “Above, this would tie me to the karma of prajna [wisdom],” he explained, “and below it would repay my parents for their benevolence.” Among the constellation of ascetic practices in Chinese Buddhism, one of the most common was blood writing. According to T he History of the Chen Dynasty , blood writing b...

  Sulaiman Addonia’s Silence Is My Mother Tongue hit the book stands a few days ago. Last week, loved ones and well-wishers gathered at London’s Vout-O-Reenee to celebrate the release of the new novel. The book launch also doubled as the celebration of Indigo Press’s one year birthday. How fitting! Silence Is My Mother Tongue is […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2ADt3TH

Wendy was the best salesperson in the store, which meant she was the best liar, which meant her co-workers should have been suspicious of her “homemade” pie. She made it for the ramshackle Thanksgiving dinner in the store that year, a potluck for the staff to sustain them through the Black Friday deluge. It was a hit, apparently, among all the dishes served, and so was Wendy, who refrained from eating any of the dessert herself. “Everybody was saying how nice she was, how thoughtful,” but Wendy was neither of those things. “Wendy and I were the only ones who didn’t have the shits that day,” says the lone co-worker, our narrator, who smelled bullshit in Wendy’s poisoned pie. “That was when Wendy was sales lead. Which meant she had the highest sales goals” that Black Friday, which would be her last. “Who knows what she put in that pie. I made it my mission to beat her. And I did … I’ve been lead ever since.” He’s proud, even though he knows he shouldn’t be—but in the cutthroat and unsta...

Arthur Machen. In 1895, the editors of a new magazine, The Unicorn , sought to make a splash by engaging a pair of literary hot properties to contribute parallel series of tales. The two writers were Arthur Machen and H. G. Wells, both fresh off recent publishing triumphs (in Machen’s case perhaps scandal is closer to the mark), and their contributions were to offer readers distinct modes or flavors of what we today would call genre fiction. The magazine, unfortunately, folded after a mere three issues, in which only one of Wells’s stories, and none of Machen’s, appeared. Machen related the episode, nearly three decades later, in characteristically self-deprecating fashion: ‘The Great God Pan” had made a storm in a Tiny Tot’s teacup. And about the same time, a young gentleman named H. G. Wells had made a very real, and a most deserved sensation with a book called ‘The Time Machine”; a book indeed. And a new weekly paper was projected by Mr. Raven Hill [ sic ] and Mr. Girdlesto...

Conserving culture and pushing boundaries in Somaliland: Hargeysa International Book Fair 2018 Republished with the kind permission of Africa in Words . Go through the gates of the  Xaranta Dhaqanka , the Hargeysa Cultural Centre in Somaliland’s capital, and you’ll encounter a courtyard of small buildings. To your right is the Cultural Centre’s library, housing a wide-ranging collection including academic text books, African politics, theory, memoirs and an impressive variety of African literature titles. To your left are the centre’s administrative offices, an art gallery and a coffee stand. Ahead of you is a newly-constructed, freshly-painted roof under which are lined rows and rows of plastic chairs leading up to the raised stage. At the opening of the Hargeysa International Book Fair’s 11th edition, this compound is buzzing with activity. Around 8,000 people are estimated to attend over the five days of the fair. Book stalls are stacked with Somali fiction and non-fictio...

It started with a gunshot. I had just moved into my new house in the woods of Maine, a log-sided cabin surrounded by miles of “public access” forest that were owned by logging companies and managed, as far as I could tell, by no one. It was October, and I was working in my bedroom, with my dog lying heavy on my feet. Suddenly, a shot rang out. It was close. Then another, and another. It was the echoey boom of a shotgun, a sound I’m familiar with, thanks to hours spent skeet shooting under the tutelage of an L2L. Bean instructor in the woods of Freeport. As I listened to the sound of gunfire, I slowly became aware of the stench of urine. My elderly dog, a sweet husky-hound mix named Deja, had pissed all over the floorboards. She was shaking from fear, trembling like an autumn leaf. I didn’t have the heart to discipline her. This has become an annual occurrence. People trek out into the lumber-land to shoot their guns. I become tense and resentful. Deja pees. And repeat. I no longer w...

In early 2016, I had a chance to take my wife and kids to Barcelona for a few months. It felt like a great time to be out of the U.S. in general—primary season!—but especially to be there on the Mediterranean, where winter is what we here call “spring.” I’d been abroad only a handful of times before, never for more than a couple weeks, and now I surrendered giddily to food and architecture and people, a whole different tempo of life. Perhaps not coincidentally, I fell in love with pretty much every book I opened there. I read Open City . I read Spring Torrents . I read Mercè Rodoreda , Catalonia’s answer to Clarice Lispector (and a shamefully neglected writer here at home). I read Isherwood and  Saramago . Especially, though, I fell under the spell of three contemporary masters of Spanish-language fiction: Javier Cercas , of Barcelona, Javier Marías , of Madrid, and Álvaro Enrigue , of Mexico and New York. Even later, back in the U.S., I would feel with these writers the connecti...

This is the story of a child, whose life Right from birth has been very wild Living in the pages of obscurity, Existing in the chapters of insanity and loss of identity. Revelling in the sweetness of crisis Liberating the cruelty of the uniform, She is suppose to be refined because she has gone through … Continue reading If Nigeria Was A Book → from NaijaStories.com https://ift.tt/2qjjh39

Balenciaga’s “ugly dad sneakers.” In 2009, Alexander McQueen sketched a shoe that would forever change footwear, even for those like me who’d never try it on or even see it in person. The shoe was shaped like a crab claw and covered in glittering scales. It had a nine-inch spiked heel and an interior platform, where the wearer would stand on tip-toes, feet curved into the extreme arch of a plastic Barbie doll, or a ballerina in pointe shoes. It was aggressively ugly. McQueen didn’t intend to make these “armadillo shoes” (as they came to be called) available to the masses; they were designed as show pieces. The collection that season was filled with fantastical items, objects that came from a future where “the ice caps would melt … the waters would rise … and life on earth would have to evolve in order to live beneath the sea once more or perish,” McQueen said. “Humanity would go back to the place from whence it came.”    McQueen’s Armadillo Boot (Via the museum of savag...