*3*ТНЄ ТЯΙВЄ //Hilary Plum//العشيرة
Posts tagged:Hilary Plum
Hilary Plum: Lions
Saul Leiter, Barbara, 1951. Source: designobserver.com
.
The long fact of the turned face is named faith.
Through the tall windows opposing the tapestries
that depict the gaze of the lion, low hills with dark cows
remain far. A pheasant plump in the dirt, a voice saying you,
and modern angles guide us into the room where we were
never again, as in the absence of any machine a man
watches the ball propelled down the lane toward him
then bends, pins in hand. I hear his regular breath.
.
Angelus Novus: A Letter from Hilary Plum
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920. Source: fleurmach.com
Dear Youssef,
A few days after you proposed that I write you this letter, a man was killed, his execution public enough that despite the five thousand miles between us we both could look on. This man, a journalist, had once been captured in Libya, then released, then was captured anew in Syria in 2012, this captivity ending in death. He was American, from New England as I am, he and I earned the same degree from the same university, enough years between us that I did not know him, though we each or both passed years among the low mountains and rising rents of Western Massachusetts, the grave of Emily Dickinson (called back, May 15, 1886) that even if one never bothers to walk behind the hair salon and the Nigerian restaurant to visit it serves as heart, destination of a pilgrimage one imagines.
The video his killers posted online may or may not in fact include the moment of his beheading, but confirms beyond doubt its occurrence. Here, we call the group who killed James Foley ISIS: the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria; or Iraq and al-Sham; or simply—months pass and the name grows more ambitious—the Islamic State. We’re told that the caliphate they envision stretches from the coast of Syria to Iraq’s eastern border. I had thought that Foley was taken from an internet café, but an article I just glanced at says something about a car being stopped, how men with Kalashnikovs forced him out of the car. If I were to tell the story in a novel, he would be in an internet café, sending as though it were nothing the story of one land and its wars to another, to a land whose replies are silent until the missile drops out of the sky.
Hilary Plum: They Dragged Them Through the Streets
A. Abbas, Qasemiya shrine in Baghdad, 2003. Source: magnumphotos.com
In They Dragged Them Through the Streets, a veteran of the US war in Iraq commits suicide, and his brother joins with four friends in search of ways to protest the war. Together they undertake a series of small-scale bombings, until an explosion claims one of their own: Zechariah, or Z. The novel is structured around these two deaths, the veteran’s and the activist’s.
The four remaining friends—Ford, Vivienne, Sara, and “A”—narrate in turn; the excerpt below includes brief chapters by A and Vivienne. Throughout, the characters’ names often dissolve into initials—their intimate shorthand for one another.
No more posts.
тнє ѕυℓтαη'ѕ ѕєαℓ 