Christian Molenaar

Category: Nothings

  • Talismans

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    In Buenos Aires the Zahir is a common twenty-centavo coin into which a razor or penknife has scratched the letters N T and the number two; the date stamped on the face is 1929. (In Gujarat, at the end of the eighteenth century, Zahir was a tiger; in Java a blind man in the Sukarta… Read more

  • A Model Of Its Kind

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    Excavations began in 1930 and lasted more than five years. In the final year Beaumont was visit by Bartlebooth, who had come to nearby Gijon, also an ancient capital of the Asturian kings to paint the first of his seascapes. Read more

  • Anticipating the Butcher

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    Ich höre, dass du die Hand gegen dich erhoben hastDem Schlächter zuvorkommend.Acht Jahre verbannt, den Aufstieg des Feindes beobachtendZuletzt an eine unüberschreitbare Grenze getriebenHast du, heißt es, eine überschreitbare überschritten.Reiche stürzen. Die BandenführerSchreiten daher wie Staatsmänner. Die VölkerSieht man nicht mehr unter den Rüstungen.So liegt die Zukunft in Finsternis, und die guten KräfteSind schwach. All… Read more

  • November 4

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    I am no doubt occupied with weighty thoughts, I am on the way to certain discoveries, an invincible power bears me toward a luminary which shone at an early age on the darkness of my moral life; but what name can I give to the power that ties my hands and shuts my mouth, and… Read more

  • Saving Daylight

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    Twilight shone through the spaces between these structures and illuminated their soaring peaks with an amber light, the hue of setting suns and fading worlds. Read more

  • El Día de los Difuntos

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    Towards sunset on the Day of the Dead in November 1939, two men in white flannels sat on the main terrace of the Casino drinking anís. Read more

  • Wedding Party

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    Where did you hear me in this cold… Where did I bring names and contra-names into the story, into this account out of poverty, my specter… My Word picked sheep, pigs, whipped oxen in calf, drank from the back of the cow… in thousand-year-old books my father’s plow scarred the stars back and forth… Read more

  • The Country Will Bring Us No Peace

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    Even such is time that takes in trust Our youth, our joys, and all we have, And pays us but with age and dust: Who in the dark and silent grave When we have wandred all our ways Shuts up the story of our days And from which earth and grave and dust The Lord… Read more

  • Blackberries

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    Out under yellow bulbs at a long weathered table, Zoyd found himself trying to help Flash with the shock of meeting so many in-laws in one place, both men from time to time looking around fearfully, like unarmed visitors in a jungle clearing, as out beyond this particular patch of light Traverses and Beckers went… Read more

  • Mambo No. 5

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    The match could not have been more perfect: our two closest friends in the world — my best friend of fifteen years, your former college roommate, both simultaneously single at last. After half a decade of half-secret crushes, missed connections and ill-timed rendezvous, the timing was finally right. And a month later it was over. Read more

Thought:

“I have had to learn the simplest thing / last.”

Charles Olson | “Maximus, to Himself”