The First Mouth
The first thing Zhangye gave me was dust in the teeth and a wall slogan that had been repainted so many times the old characters bulged beneath the new ones like bones under a thin blanket. The poplar...
Continue readingThe Little North Bend
I came into Pueblo Bonito looking for a replacement point for my awl, which had snapped in the last place where bone tools were cheap and conversation was expensive. This is the sort of errand that so...
Continue readingThe Mother Of Pearl Handle
Versailles has the odd talent of looking both finished and temporary. The palace gates, gilded and confident, shine as if Louis XIV had only stepped inside to look for a hat. Meanwhile, every café tab...
Continue readingThe Blue Glass Button
Valletta in late June has the good manners to bake a man evenly from all sides. The limestone gives the sun back with interest. By nine this morning, Republic Street was already the color of old bone,...
Continue readingThe Damp Cloth Beside The Sugar Bowl
The port this morning had the ordinary Odessa smell first: wet hemp, coal smoke, oranges crushed under cart wheels, and horse urine steaming faintly where the sun had found the stones. For three minut...
Continue readingThe Repaired Sandal
The first thing I saw this morning was not Geneva’s lake or the line of the Jura, though both were doing their usual polished tourist work beyond the bus window. It was a boy on a scooter shouting, “Y...
Continue readingThree Late Kernels
The city still looks like Nanjing first, before it becomes strange. That is useful. The walls rise broad and self-satisfied from the damp plain, their bricks darkened by winter mist and cooksmoke. The...
Continue readingThe Approved Scissors
The first thing I saw in Innsbruck this morning was not the Nordkette, though it was doing its usual work of looming above the roofs like a municipal warning. I saw, at eye level, a line of cardboard ...
Continue readingThe New Beech Tip
Leipzig has the same damp stone dignity I expected: high black roofs, shop windows sweating from coal heat, the tram wires humming above the wet street, and the kind of gray afternoon that makes every...
Continue readingThe Little Black Toggle
The tram from Milan left a gray paste of melted snow and coal grit along my cuffs, which was as good an introduction to Sesto San Giovanni as any official would have devised. Factories stood close to ...
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