You Sing With a Certain Dramatic Flair

There are nestled in this country on the tourist highway well-travelled bits, a museum town here, a ruined fortress teetering on a gorge there. They are primped and on display for us, menus in English, fluent hostel staff, spools of veins and wire laying across the town the mosques, a ball of electricity rises above her skull keeping her balanced.

We are all American, in the end.



I marvel at the clear air, even in the heat, the light show over the fortress, the merchants selling bottles of water and t-shirts, the surly waitresses, the rubble reconstructed to what everyone thinks is its original form, the archaeologists drunk and hitting on their graduate students, the tally of bones that have accumulated here over the years. We pay to take photographs inside the little chapel on the crest of the hill.



The christ-figure is always recognizable in this context, and he is the greatest subject of art, cathedrals and tourist-photographs ever invented. Remove the head from the beast and the beast will roll on its back to show you its ribs, its hunger. Slip a few leva to a tour guide and she will tell you about the history of man in the starlight.



But it would all be nothing without the influence of the greatest artist of the 20th century, Walt Disney dreamed of lasers and talking animals and now this is what we've become, feeling more human packed in the darkness, the ancient fortress is now a space opera and our hearts are in our throats in ecstacy.

Collapsing on the Edge of Summer

Her prayers were answered by the sun god, breaking the colonists' backs on the shores of the James River, the goldhunters, the horror-writers. Her breath filled the world.

On the brightest, most crowded Bulgarian Black Sea beaches there are rusted post-communist playgrounds, rusted post-communist children hurling plastic bottles into the water, squatting on stretches of sand like Japanese secretaries staking out corporate plots of land for cherry-blossom viewing.

The weather descended on us as hot and lazy as a sweating ghost - an Englishman and two Americans, it surprised us and kept us up at night. I listened to the banal chatter in the cafe, the one not smoking taking the floor, the rest clutching their cigarettes.