Author : DWDLLC
The Mystery of Transparency
How to say goodbye to the world with peace ? How accept everything around us, including the fact that “us” itself is something of an illusion, and certainly about to be no longer ? How take leave of things with light ? Those questions have been circling around the later songs of Leonard Cohen, as […]
Frederick Prokosch
“Then northward with the spring into Kashmir,” begins a paragraph in the book you are holding in your hand, “past valley after lovely valley, shepherds and their flocks moving across the greenery in the day, men squatting by their hillside fires in the night. Soft-lipped boys with enormous turbans shrieking at us from their dark […]
What Would Graham Do?
We stumble toward another election that can look, to the disenchanted, like a choice between one shade of grey and another. A liberation theologian is violently deposed in Haiti. Guerrillas, in Russia and everywhere, say that even the deaths of children are justified in the light of a larger cause. And a Tibetan monk flies […]
Saigon: City of Night
From the air, as one descends, Saigon looks to be a vast and scattered web of white and yellow lights, coming up from shacks and tiny houses, notably impoverished, not flashy, the graceful curve of the Saigon River breaking up the grid and reminding you of the paucity of clustered lights and high-rises. But as […]
The Global City
Here are a few statistics from Suketu Mehta’s stunning new book, Maximum City. In some parts of Bombay, you can find 1 million people in a single square mile. Two millon of the city’s residents lack access to latrines, and the air has ten times the maximum permissible levels of lead (to breathe it in, […]
The Fan in Japan
The Japan we imagine from afar is placid, tidy and seamlessly efficient, correct to the last place. The trains arrive on the dot, and when the crowds pour out of them, in streamlined rows of look-alike Chanel and grey suits, not a bead of sweat is visible even in the heat of summer rush-hour. Japan […]
Travel Writing in America
American travel writing is about looking for the light. Or so, at least, I told myself, rather loftily, as I landed in Atlanta on my first trip to the city, got into a new Aspire and proceeded to drive around the “Phoenix of the South.” I passed Perimeter Point and Perimeter Mall, drove through a […]
Move On
Four years ago on New Year’s Day, while contemplating the intricate battle of good and evil depicted on the walls of Angkor Wat in Cambodia, I saw two of the Khmer Rouge’s chief killers—Pol Pot’s lieutenants, in effect—walking, unprotected, through the country they had devastated. Having turned themselves in to Cambodian authorities under an amnesty […]
The End of The Road
In all the stories, California is the point of arrival, the place to which everyone aspires: the end of the line, as more sardonic souls might put it, or at the very least, in Don Henley’s agile pun, the “last resort.” It is the place where dreams and dreamers culminate (which is another way of […]