In the morning we wake to the sound of the neighbor’s two cows walking up the road to pasture. They walk slowly, as though their feet hurt. That’s at about quarter after six. The temptation to stay in bed, rather than venturing into the dismal cold of the room (especially shocking after a night of [...]
From the balcony.
Though ethnie and nationality might be distinguished in any number of ways – size, attachment to territory, secular versus religious identity, ‘soft’ versus ‘hard’ boundaries – the most fundamental difference is not some ‘objective’ characteristic internal to the group, but rather the discursive universe in which it operates and realizes itself. A modern nationality, with [...]
We had mock language proficiency interviews the other day, just so our instructors could get a better sense of where we were in our language interview and whether they need to panic about our chances of passing the actual language proficiency interview at the end of training.1 The format was simple, the first part being [...]
The family cow ate some noxious weeds and fell and was butchered. The neighbor’s dog ate five of the youngest chicks and was thereafter executed. One chicken wandered into the latrine and drowned. Ten chicks mysteriously died in their box. For the anniversary of a death in the family, they slaughtered a sheep, slitting its [...]
The rooster runs across the bare uneven ground towards the barn like a samurai from some black and white film you can half remember seeing, sunlight pooling on his rusty black feathers.
In the kitchen there is hope for another cup of coffee, thick with sugar, and lavash with a hard-boiled egg, yolk apricot-colored, and a [...]
There is something outrageous in a person’s misdirecting a traveller who has lost his way and then leaving him to himself in error, yet what is that compared with causing someone to go astray in himself? The lost traveller, after all, has a consolation that the country around him is constantly changing, and with every [...]
In Jerusalem, I had spent much of my time among the books of Gulbenkian library, following the loose threads of Armenian history. But the massacres, I put off until the end. What I’d been reluctant to start absorbed me at once; it was that that I had been afraid of. Everything else seemed meaningless when [...]
ἀρχαιολογία δέ τίς ἐστι περὶ τοῦ ἔθνους τοῦδε τοιαύτη· Ἄρμενος ἐξ Ἀρμενίου πόλεως Θετταλικῆς, ἣ κεῖται μεταξὺ Φερῶν καὶ Λαρίσης ἐπὶ τῇ Βοίβῃ, καθάπερ εἴρηται, συνεστράτευσεν Ἰάσονι εἰς τὴν Ἀρμενίαν· τούτου φασὶν ἐπώνυμον τὴν Ἀρμενίαν οἱ περὶ Κυρσίλον τὸν Φαρσάλιον καὶ Μήδιον τὸν Λαρισαῖον, ἄνδρες συνεστρατευκότες Ἀλεξάνδρῳ· τῶν δὲ μετὰ τοῦ Ἀρμένου τοὺς μὲν τὴν [...]
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ego hoc feci mm–mmviii
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