“When we got up the nerve to crack the door open, we were immediately met with the smell of air that hadn’t been smelled in a long time: a mix of dust, musk, and cedar — a whiff that gave a sense, even to a kid, of past lives and an odor that we didn’t experience in the city, where every space seemed to be in constant use and never remained closed off for long.”
A collection of all the articles we’ve published over the past month, for those who like to savor their Magpies’ tidings as an issue.
The Disappointed Tourist tries to create a level playing field in which personal losses and larger cultural losses can meet and be recognized and create a new conversation about our love for our physical environment, harnessing nostalgia to create empathy rather than division.
All of the articles from the past month for people who like to savor their magpies’ tidings as an issue.
Pia De Girolamo shares a travelogue recounting observations and art from her trip to Vietnam.
“I sit on the wall and watch a fisherman wrangle his net; the sea is dark and a little choppy, and I feel an overwhelming sense of sadness.”
My goal is to read solely Afro-kwea books for at least the next year. Aside from my anger at the dismissal of African lives elsewhere, this ambition was also motivated by a new wave of homophobia that has spread across the continent … My goal is to counter this intolerance by doing my bit to increase our visibility.
“The wind that comes off the Sahara towards the Atlantic is called Harmattan. The breezes over Senegal and Mauritania mingle with the warm waters near Cape Verde and occasionally become one of those end-of-summer storms that plod their way up the Mid-Atlantic states, dropping enormous amounts of rain and causing damage.”
There is a second sort of bamboo growing here, with beautiful varied dark green stripes on a yellow background. My friend tells me that in Vietnam this is special and a spirit might live in such bamboo. There is a large stand of such striped bamboo nearby. I’ve seen no spirits but there are weaver birds occupying the grove, much activity from the birds building their nests. The ground around the stand is littered with failed nest attempts.
That light and the memory of it: to glide along without friction in the warm spring air and take in that peculiar beauty shining all about is to find yourself suddenly in a higher order of landscapes, a place made more real and more present through the congruence of your solitude and its primeval majesty that demands no more than your awareness and of which you ask only that you be allowed to move slowly through it without intrusion or interruption.
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