NOUMENON / ICON

PARIJAH DIARIES 12 There was something else I was looking forward to when I came back to Jamrock — to put myself under the mushroom again. I’d been thinking about it for a while, up there on my parched plain in the North-East. I’d been in Isan more than a year already, working with Red […]

LOST WAKINGS

Image: My Beautiful Apocalypse (detail) by Catherine Forsayeth PARIJAH DIARIES 4 /July 2020 Sometimes I experience a disorientation on waking, not knowing where I am. If something wakes me in the night or pre-dawn, I’ll lie there in the dark for a long moment, listening for cues and trying to arrange my surroundings around me. […]

ALREADY DEAD

PARIJAH DIARIES 9 An old acquaintance of mine has opened a new bar down by Rawai Beach. The Phuket Pirates, he calls it. I met him on an obscure beach about six years ago. It was early in the morning, and I’d had my swim and was mooching around bagging up today’s plastic from the […]

THE SUCKER BRIGADES

“We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Karl Rove These words are from a brief but memorable conversation the journalist Ron Suskind had with Karl Rove, the chief political adviser and Machiavellian ‘teacher of tricks’ to the Bush dynasty. Rove was senior adviser and Deputy Chief of Staff during […]

[Aleph], Mem, Tav

“Legends of the golem, usually sourced as an archetype in Kabbalah, are actually found in Talmud, but may stem from the same magical traditions. According to these stories, sometimes presented as cautionary tales, a rabbi could create a crude, humanoid being, in a travesty of God’s creation. These monsters had no will or intelligence of their […]