compare and contrast

You know that lady neurscientist who is on trial, Aafia Saddiqui? There's recent activity...

ny times's version

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/18/nyregion/18siddiqui.html?scp=4&sq=aafia&st=cse

le monde's version

http://www.lemonde.fr/web/depeches/0,14-0,39-37652302@7-37,0.html

It's interesting to note that NY times' version has no mention of her hallucinations about her kids who are dead, or about the shady-ness surrounding her imprisonment, instead implying she is guilty of affiliation or at least of being sketchy.

Youth (M. Radnoti)

When Columbus stepped onto the noisy beach trailed by his drunken sailors, a fragrant wind started to blow, a nest fell at his feet, a green monkey, shaking its fists, ran up to him. He felt he knew how eternity begins. His large eyes twinkled, his tired eyelids itched. He shrugged and whispered something over his shoulder. (translated from the Hungarian by Steven Polgar, Stephen Berg, and S.J. Marks)

"Not important, okay?"

The morning told us otherwise. The crickets refuse to die. There's rain, then it's gone, the cat that has managed to win his affections sits as nothing happens, as a car turns the corner. I remember the bird who was so startled when I climbed up the pine tree in our backyard, his three-minute silence, and the loud protective squalk when he decided to fly away. No one had climbed that tree for years, at least 5, since I had been living in this house, younger, before moving to New York. 

Anyway. That's not the point. Bethlehem used to have a train to New York and Philadelphia. They tore it up. Wallingford has one train a day, I used to hear it first on the other side of the phone, a hairs-width after David, and then again in real life, as the whistle crossed the town and up to my hill, my house. Anyway. That was my first intellectual relationship. The things I learned with Adrian were emotional: any intellect was personal affair, like the pierced tongue.

"There are courts over there - " 

"I really just think I want to run."

Sometimes, and I never would have imagined it when I was younger, my body holds inside of it a sleek motion, a sway of emotion, pulled in from a mix of future, past and present desire; I am left to close my eyes involuntarily, with slight delay. There has been a constant conversation between leaves and trees today; the wind kept close to the earth and agitated by the grey, grey, grey... and only the most occasional rain up to now. & I am sitting on a round table. I am next to the red building of books and death - there is some forgetting everyone needs to do to feel comfortable there- and also next to the strange steeple that is elevated on a pedestal, with tiny faces out of Dante's hell mouthing at me: --//-- : hidden behind a few, young-adult aged trees. Fresh. The right shadow. A cultured woman - smoking and reading - what is her capacity for passion? - short red hair, freckles, red earrings, oblique glance, oh and distracted phone.. the smell of her cigarette, she questions me too - and again a murmur, the wind enables the conversations again - and I never would have imagined it when I was younger - but the imprints of Sasha's lips and her absence have left in my body a sleek motion, a sway...