May 19, 2015 edition
A pimp, or someone looking like a pimp but dressed like Colonel Sanders from Kentucky Fried Chicken asks about God. "What does God look like? And what does He do?"
In Haruki Murakami's novel Kafka on the Shore (Umibe no Kafuka) the fictive Colonel leads Hoshino from the bordello to the edge of the woods. It is there that he suddenly poses this question. Hoshino is momentarily confused, and then replies, "Don't ask me. God's God. He's everywhere, watching what we do, judging whether it's good or bad."
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More Sidelines articles in other editions
May 12, 2015 edition
May 5, 2015 edition
At the age of 12 he already knew a lot about anger. And it was with a past like this that he came to Bandung in 1955. Richard Wright: the witness who had been oppressed since childhood, like the inhabitants of Africa and Asia in colonial times, and who eventually liberated themselves.
During those days, in the road once called the Grote Postweg (the Great Post Road), Wright, the black writer, saw something important in the life histories of people like him: "The despised, the insulted, the hurt, the dispossessedin short, the underdogs of the human race were meeting."
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April 28, 2015 edition
Born: 1927, died April 13, 2015
Gnter Grass read a poem. I heard him at a poetry gathering in Rotterdam in June 1973. He read slowly, as though every phrase burdened his jaw and made his sour face even sourer.
Nun zogen sie durch die Strassen, 3,800 Propheten...
Now they moved through the streets in procession,
3,800 prophets...
Now they moved through the streets in procession,
3,800 prophets...
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April 21, 2015 edition
Whenever someone says there is nothing universal in people of diverse backgrounds; whenever someone says once again that 'our values' differ from 'Western values' as far as the drive for justice and freedom is concerned, I reread Bung Karno's 1930s defense speech Indonesia Accuses! Then I read something else, for instance this time, Liao Yiwu.
One night in June 1989, Liao Yiwu, a Chinese poet from the Sichuan region, was startled to hear that thousands of students who had gathered in Tiananmen Square in Beijing and who were demanding that the ruling Communist Party establish democracy, were fired upon by the army.
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April 14, 2015 edition
How exhausting politics is. Particularly for those unable to endure in antagonism. Towards evening on April 5, 1794 in Paris, a revolutionary leader who had lost the struggle was dragged off to the guillotine. On the way to his beheading, he said, "Oh, it were better to be a poor fisherman than to meddle with the government of men."
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April 7, 2015 edition