John Shurna (24) Made History Yesterday As NU's All-time Top Scorer, Helping The Wildcats Beat Minnesota
John Shurna (24) made history yesterday as NU's all-time top scorer, helping the Wildcats beat Minnesota 64-53.
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“…and it was always without pretensions of loving or being loved although always in the hope of finding something that resembled love but without the problems of love.”
Love in The Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Excerpt
Archetypal city scene-setting, based largely on this Hyde Park/Shanghai hybrid of my imagination.
***
Bensonhurst was an analogous neighborhood as ever there was one. Along the route they walked each day, Roman recognized the residences of politicians and movie stars, gangbangers, university students and corporate warlords all situated within sugar-borrowing distance of each other. Where one red, white and green-clad street ended, another overlaid with idiographic signs declaring dim sum availability began. And while homeless peddlers of progressive rags lay sleeping in the alleys behind five-star restaurants, gated communities stood downwind of El Burrito Palace. Down in Bensonhurst, the squirrels and the pigeons had more meat on their bones than the people.
Roman inhaled the carcinogenic air of his home, exhaled noxious particles of himself. He recalled when he was younger, he would feel his way about Brooklyn in the dark, roaming the streets on Saturday nights binge-drinking, pot-smoking, painting ideological murals on the sides of cargo cars until the early hours of Kubla Khan. Consequently, he would spend most Sundays in bed with the curtains nailed shut, moaning and groaning to the ravages of pickaxe psychedelic organists on his nerves.
But then once he had grown up, had rebuilt his damaged synapses and experienced sufficient heartbreak, Roman woke before dawn most days and started recognizing the city for what it really was without cover of the euphemistic dark.
It was then he started to take notice of the layers upon layers of dust clinging to the sides of iconic skyscrapers, waterlogged American flags heavily hanging on their posts. He started seeing construction scaffolds on every corner, industrial backwash running in the gutters, factory emissions bleeding a graded wash into the empty expanses of the sky where webs of telephone wires, public transport cables, street lights and neon signs coiled like a great wire cage. He liked the idea of it all being a cage—the premise thus implied that people could fly if they wanted to.
Sonnets 1-3
Here you go, Deepayan and Kai – thanks for your kind words. These are from a longer narrative collection of sonnets called "The Storyville Fish and the Prince of Cats," a love story.
***
1
Deep in the lurid dark of New Orleans,
Its streets awash with tar and summer sweat,
An old composer rose from halfway dreams,
Awoken by the sound of a cornet.
He peered out into the lonely streets,
Discovering he no longer knew his town—
Once French provincial homes with drooping eaves
Now shotgun tenements of ill-renown.
Down on the corner beneath a lamppost
A coal-wagon boy relaxed on the curb
Where he played a long note, low and morose—
The saddest sound the old man ever heard.
“That’s just the way the music’s gone,” he said,
Fed his fish, fell asleep, died in his bed.
2
The movers arrived the following day
At the Karnofsky family’s front door.
They said, “The last great maestro passed away
Leaving you everything he had, no more.”
“The fish and its bowl aren’t worth a lot,
But the piano, it’s quite a treasure.”
Mrs. Karnofsky agreed with a nod
And invited the movers to enter.
They set the piano down in the hall
And then they handed the fishbowl over.
Left by herself to consider it all,
Mrs. Karnofsky searched for some closure.
“Grandfather didn’t have much in the end,
But for me, his piano and his friend.”
3
The Storyville Fish heard her think out loud,
And was amazed she had been called a friend.
Unsure whether to feel humbled or proud,
She found she simply could not comprehend.
“Old man lived alone
Heart bursting of things unsaid
Fish lived alone too.”
Thus pacified, the fish turned on her tail
And traveled round and around her glass room.
She never tired swimming the same trail
For it was the path of the sun and the moon.
This home was not much different than the last,
She thought, brushing a fin against the glass.
“Marie sometimes did more than merely write. In 1999, in East Timor, she was credited with saving the lives of 1,500 women and children who were besieged in a compound by Indonesian-backed forces. She refused to leave them, waving goodbye to 22 journalist colleagues as she stayed on with an unarmed UN force in order to help highlight their plight by reporting to the world, in her paper and on global television. The publicity was rewarded when they were evacuated to safety after four tense days.
This was the essence of Marie’s approach to reporting. She was not interested in the politics, strategy or weaponry; only the effects on the people she regarded as innocents. ‘These are people who have no voice,’ she said. ‘I feel I have a moral responsibility towards them, that it would be cowardly to ignore them. If journalists have a chance to save their lives, they should do so.’
The people of East Timor did not forget their saviour. At the end of her Sunday Times report about her Sri Lankan experience, she wrote: ‘What I want most, as soon as I get out of hospital, is a vodka martini and a cigarette.’ Later that week, having moved briefly to a New York hotel, she was woken by a room-service waiter bearing a tray with a huge bottle of vodka and all the ingredients for her drink of choice. She discovered it had been ‘fixed, God knows how, by the East Timor crowd, the people in the compound’.” - The Guardian’s Roy Greenslade, on journalist Marie Colvin, who was killed by shelling in Syria Wednesday.
[Photo: Marie Colvin in the A&E documentary “Bearing Witness,” on women in war zones. Credit: A&E Indie Films via NY Times]
