Equivocality

When the overloaded Toyota pickup roared off there was nothing at all but sand under my feet and the black outlines of a few desiccated trees in the nearly moonless night. I had been dropped off somewhere along the 400 kilometer desert track between Timbuktu and Gao, and suddenly found myself standing completely alone, at night, in the most nowhere place I’d ever been. I had two liters of water, a tin of sardines, half a kilo of dates, and two mangoes. I needed to find civilization in the next forty-eight hours or so.

There is girl who lives inside a song, a song from a summer that never happened. It’s a slow, wordless melody of long warm afternoons. It’s yellow and green, sunlight filtering through tall grass, flecks of seeds floating in the air. Most of all, it’s a girl with sandy hair.
She’s seventeen, a few months younger […]

I have just arrived in a small town named Ghourma-Rharous, about 150km east of Timbuktu on the Niger river. My host is a very nice man named Mohammed, whom I met almost accidentally. Turns out he is a writer too, both as a journalist for the local branch of the state radio station and personally, […]

“Pleasure is the only thing worth having a theory about,” says Lord Henry, the subversive nobleman, and this sums exactly one half of the book – by far the larger half. Hedonism is the only worthy philosophy, and decadence can be an art form: that is the argument here. And oh, Wilde makes it so […]