Shackled to the floor, peering through the bars.

My room has assumed the milieu of a prison. Redolent of mildew. Mosquitoes marching through steel grill that is not there. Us jailbirds know we need meet our quota lest we're sentenced to another heart-strangling semester in this austere, chanceless bunker. We work and work and workwork. Time tumbles on and exoneration nears. The pocks on the wall bring me all my glee for the moment.

Pock (a) - Mao

Pock (b) - Meiklejohn

Pock (c) - Optimus

Pock (d) - All you need is.

Pock (e) - Atom.

Penwrite/Dogfight

Doggedly surfing the crest of a tsunami of uni essays (which won't write themgoddamnselves), I lucked upon this paragraphic pearl- exemplar of a properly designed academic paragraph (as my peppy tutors would say):

It is not that Ms. Hermitt is not able to write, or is not, often, sort of amusing. Or her crazy adventures in Mexico, she notes, “‘Only eat food served to you in hotels,’ the travel book on Baja Mexico says. ‘And if you eat food from a street vendor, make sure you take pepto-bismol.’ These travel books make all street vendors seem EVIL. And then they expect you to down this ‘pink’ liquid called pepto-bismol which is full of all this chemicalized crap!” Hermitt’s problem is that she, like Jackman, has mistaken emotion and purity of intent for art. Wenclas has defended Hermitt’s work by saying, “There can be no rewrites.… Attempts to impose order—grammar, spelling, and logic—would cause the fragile bursts of immediacy to fall apart.” To that, one is tempted to argue that poiaurna fopiuay bnvmnnab.

Okay, I'll concede: it's all about that last sentence. We call that The Kicker.

Tom Bissell is my favourite. You can read his essay from which the above is borrowed over at The Believer. Or opt (b), an article illuminating the quirks and perils of finding a story in a war-zone when you are radically underprepared to experience a war-zone. Like, say, Afghanistan in '02.

May I suggest (in the meanwhile).

Some of this: Hope For Agoldensummer- Laying Down The Gun.

And this: La Rue Ketanou - La Fiancee De L'Eau.

And nothing less than spates of this: Nathan Fake - Long Sunny.

Fa la la, la laaa.