then I turned on the radio and heard nothing but evasiveness, the sort that exists close to lies, as if the national pastime were evasiveness. The Chief Commissioner of Police wanted to lie. You could hear it in his voice. He wanted to charge his accusers with lying, which is

I’m not going to attempt to provide a summary of twelve years at Cafe Brazil, 256 K’Rd., Newton, Auckland, and I hate the fact that I find myself incapable of making a full account, with particulars. Neither a brief eulogy nor a fat history will do. What is

Evasiveness. It’s a word that comes up early on in Norman Manea’s The Hooligan’s Return, with a special emphasis, in association with the work of Sebastian. (Strange how my favourite European writers hail from the Bukovina, portless, though it is: Paul Celan, for whom the place belongs

here I am in the process of dissolving from behind the coffee machine at Cafe Brazil, 256 K’Rd., at the commencement of the dissolution of the coffee machine and the cafe itself, processes that will achieve their full expression and reach completion on Sunday, September 30th, 2007.

Catatonic, snoring quietly, her large body unclothed, she lay upon or near a divan. At times her eyes were open though glazed, resembling those of a fish. Inquisitive blue-bottles, profiting from her total lack of self-consciousness, whiled away the summer afternoons in exploring what had long ceased to be her

At the same time that an author is designated, thought is subjected to an image and writing is made an activity different from life, having its end in itself … in order to serve ends against life. – Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, Continuum,