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Spirit Man

October 14, 2015 By Edmund Pickett

(author’s note: I wrote this a long time ago, when I was in high school, in a small town. My English teacher said to write about a personal experience. I’m sure she was surprised but she didn’t rat me out to the principal. She gave me an A+)

Spirit Man
Once or twice a month I feel too despondent, angry or bored to sit still so I get drunk. Sometimes it helps. Last Monday night was one of these times, so I went looking for a bootlegger. A bootlegger can be anyone over twenty-one willing to buy liquor. Indians are the best choice because they don’t charge much and they never remember faces or ask for names.
The pool hall was my first stop. I was standing by the door checking everyone out and had just decided to look somewhere else when a drunk Indian stumbled out of the restroom. He stood swaying back and forth until he got his zipper up and staggered through the card room coming my way. When he passed the pool tables the younger kids poked him with their cues and taunted him by whooping and calling him chief. He ignored them and came over by me. He asked me if I had a cigarette and called me ‘sir.’ I gave him one and lit it. I opened the door and held it until he walked out and then I followed.
“Would you buy me some beer?” I asked.
He stood up straight and said in a dignified way, “That’d be okay.”
It was all very easy. First try. Sometimes you can hunt all night and not find a bootlegger. I was so happy with my good luck I agreed to give him a ride home, and since there was no one else around, I decided to get drunk with him. It was the strangest drunk I’ve ever been on.
He looked around warily for cops, and spying none, asked me if I had a car. I said it was behind the hotel. We started walking.
“I’m a army vet’ran; I like to take things careful,” he said.
He was already half drunk, so I nodded and said, “right.” We got in the car and I asked if the Bi-Rite Package store was okay. He mumbled something which sounded like yes, so I headed that way, taking back streets. If a cop sees you with an Indian in your car, he’ll turn on his light and make you pull over. While innocently checking your driver’s license, he’ll shine his flashlight in the back seat. If he doesn’t see anything, he’ll tail you until you ditch the Indian. I was taking the long way. To make conversation, I asked him where he had served in the army.
“Korea. I was too young for the second war, but two of my brothers got killed.”
I couldn’t imagine the drunk sitting beside me as a soldier, much less a U.S. soldier carrying a gun and wearing a uniform. We talked about Vietnam. He told me he was forty and married. I nodded approval.
By then we were at Bi-Rite. I gave him the money for a case of beer and a fifth of wine. He was gone about fifteen minutes. Cars drove in and out of the parking lot. I waved to minister’s wives and girlfriend’s mothers and prayed he wouldn’t come at the wrong time. Finally he came staggering back and put the case on the seat and crawled in. I headed out of town toward Chopping’s and turned off a dirt road to put three sixpacks in the trunk and the other in the glove box. When he figured out what I was doing he said, “I like you. You don’t take no chances.”
I didn’t say anything. I figured he was either dumb or simple. Most bootleggers don’t say anything. They buy and get out. Drunk old Indians don’t talk to white boys. It isn’t done. I didn’t think about it too much, though. I was too pleased at myself for having found a bootlegger and having gotten some beer so easily.
I opened a can and headed back into town. He asked me if he could take a shot of his wine. I told him to drink up and tell me where to take him. He said he lived twenty miles out on the reservation, but he only wanted to go to his sister’s house, which was about five miles. As we passed the shopping center, he took a big gulp of his wine and looked me in the eye. I didn’t know what was coming.
“I remember when none of this was here,” he said defiantly. “No buildings or nothing.’”
I didn’t know if he was mad or proud of his memory or what. “Me too,” I finally said. This seemed to satisfy him and he sat back in the seat and took another drink. We drove through town on Federal and were passing the radio station before he spoke again.
“I used to ride into town on a horse when I was a kid. It was real small then. Only a few houses.”
I remembered a photograph of Riverton taken from high school hill in 1940. The streets were unpaved and there were only a few big buildings around Main and Broadway. I could picture him as a twelve year old on a horse and I wondered what the reservation looked like in those days.
“I’d ride back home in the afternoon but I didn’t bring no scalps.”
I couldn’t believe it. I looked at him to see if he was joking. He was staring out the windshield blankly. He was ready to pass out. His eyes were glassy, and his fifth was about three quarters gone. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I was wondering if he had said what I thought he had when his lips started moving. It took a while for the words to come out.
“I used to sing a song. I shouldn’t have because I didn’t bring no scalps, but I sang it anyway.”
He began to sing the song. It was a rhythmic chant on about three notes, repeating over and over again, Yi yi yi yi, Yi yi yi y, and so on. I was stunned. I thought modern Indians were like white people more or less, but here was a live Indian crying in his beer because he didn’t bring no scalps and singing a warrior song. He finally stopped singing and resumed staring out the window. We were almost two miles out of town so I asked him if I had reached the turnoff. He mumbled and pointed straight ahead; I drove on.
I wanted to talk to him some more, but he looked as if he were going to sleep. I asked him if he had called his wife and told her he wouldn’t be home.
“Nah, I don’t have no wife. Got a thousand kids, though. My sisters and brothers are all married and they tease me about not having a wife. The sister’s house we’re going to is the one who’s got the son in the army. Just back from Vietnam, but he can only stay a few days. My nephew. They always tease me about not being married, but I tell them that I’m a Spirit Man. Spirit Men don’t have to get married. He’s a dog man, you know? He has a dog that tells him when the enemy is near. He doesn’t have a bow, just a dog. Whoa! Here, here.
I missed the road and had to back up. I turned into a dirt track and drove along for a few hundred yards until I came to a pastel blue split-level house that looked as if it had been transported entire from Logan Park. When I saw the kerosene lamps in the windows I looked around and noticed that there were no electric lines leading to the house. There was an outhouse off to the right. When we drove up, five or six little kids looked out the windows and quickly disappeared. The door opened and a young Indian about eighteen came out and looked in the window. When he recognized his uncle, he opened the door and helped him out. Before he closed the door, he said, “Thanks for bringing him home.” Then they went into the house.
I turned the car around and drove out the gate. I couldn’t make sense of anything. I was sure I hadn’t really heard him say those things. I kept seeing a young boy riding a horse and singing. And then the face of an old man with a broken nose and glazed eyes. I was so mixed up, I threw a half-full can of beer out the window. I was two miles from Fort Washakie when I realized I wasn’t going the right way. I came back to town stone sober.
I still think about that night and try to remember what happened clearly. I wish I hadn’t gotten drunk so I could remember everything. I remember the face—old, lined, with scars and the broken nose. Thinking about it gives me the same feeling I got that night when I discovered I was driving the wrong way at eighty miles an hour.

Filed Under: Articles & Essays

Charlie Hebdo Killers Following Muhammad’s Example

January 9, 2015 By Edmund Pickett

 

 By Edmund Pickett

 

Following the recent killing of twelve people at a satirical magazine in Paris a group of Muslim leaders in France issued a statement deploring all violence and terrorism. French government officials (who are not Muslim) launched a manhunt, but more or less apologized for tracking down the killers, by repeatedly emphasizing that they were not in a war of religion, even though no one had suggested that they were.

The killers themselves however, were fighting a war of religion. In fact they were following in the direct footsteps of Muhammad, who murdered two poets who wrote satirical poems about him. This is not secret information, nor is it a slander invented by opponents of Islam. The murder of the two poets, and Muhammad’s role in their deaths, are part of Muslim history, recorded by pious Muslims in the hadith, or the traditions of Muhammad’s life and his personal sayings. The hadith is Muslim holy scripture, second only to the Koran as the basis of Islam.

The story is simple, and for Muslim believers, presents no problem. When Muhammad was forced to flee Mecca because of persecution, he moved to Medina and managed to get himself appointed as arbitrator between the many warring clans in that city. There was a large Jewish community and he was hoping to be accepted as a Jewish prophet. At that time he taught his followers to pray facing Jerusalem. The Jews, however, refused to accept him as a prophet, since he was illiterate and his knowledge of their scriptures was superficial. After an elderly Jew, Abu Afak, wrote a poem satirizing him, Muhammad asked his followers for a volunteer to kill the man. This was done and afterwards Muhammad praised the killer. Then a Jewish woman, Asma bint Marwan, also wrote a disrespectful poem about Muhammad. He again asked for an assassin and one stepped forward. Muslim sources report that the murderer found her sleeping with one of her children in her arms. He removed the child and killed her. Again Muhammad praised his thug.

It is worth wondering why Muslims recorded these events, since they reveal their prophet to be thin-skinned, dictatorial and well, murderous. Of course 1400 years ago the tribes of Arabia did not recognize the concept of free speech. Leaders who allowed criticism lost face, and therefore lost their right to lead. The Muslims who recorded these murders probably thought that this was a high point of Muhammad’s style of leadership, one more master stroke on his way to the control of Arabia.

Of course those French Muslim leaders who recently condemned all violence in the name of religion would be very uncomfortable if anyone asked them any hard questions about Asma bint Marwan and Abu Afak. They would be uncomfortable because they have been taught since birth that Muhammad was the most perfect human being who ever lived, that he was also the most kind and compassionate person who ever lived. They cannot criticize Muhammad or their fellow Muslims will label them as apostates, traitors to the faith, who must then be killed. The other alternative would be to question the hadith, but these murders are recorded in several places by authors who are founding scholars of Islam. To say that part of the hadith is false stains the reputation of all the hadith and that could also be labeled as apostasy.

Unfortunately, no one in France will ask the leading Muslims there any uncomfortable questions. The simple truth is that there is an old, venerable and well-attested Islamic tradition of murdering satirical journalists. That tradition was started by Muhammad himself, but any French government official who even hinted at such an obvious fact would be accused of starting a war of religion.

 

 

About the author—Edmund Pickett is a novelist and poet. His latest novel is Burning Infidels, about Islamic terrorism.

 

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Swimming the Rio Grande

March 14, 2012 By Edmund Pickett

Almost Sundown – Three Miles to Gringo Land

I didn’t actually have to swim across the Rio Grande. I stepped off the bank into the shallow water and started to walk toward the US side. Of course I was ready to swim. Everything in my backpack was placed inside tightly closed plastic bags. As the water rose slowly up my thighs, I scanned the gringo bank, looking for any movement, but there was no moon and the starlight only gave me shadows. I expected at any minute to be stabbed by flashlight beams, to hear Border Patrol agents shouting at me in Spanish, but I only heard the water rippling over a gravel bank.

[Read more…] about Swimming the Rio Grande

Filed Under: Articles & Essays, My Novels Tagged With: Borderline Case, drug smuggling, edmund pickett, novel

My Library

June 8, 2009 By Edmund Pickett

In Czarist Russia there were officially only three classes of people: nobility, clergy, and peasants. By the end of the 19th century though, there were coming to be more and more individuals who didn’t fit into the recognized categories. The children of merchants for example, or Jews, those with some university education, or ethnic minorities… Quite a few people were falling between the cracks and they became known as razochinetski, meaning those of no clearly defined social class. The label could be derogatory. Sometimes the word just meant “middle-class intellectual.” The czarist officials didn’t trust these people because knowing their background didn’t tell you much about them. They might be either communists or nationalists. In an unsettling way, each razochinetz seemed to be self-defined.

Osip Mandelstam, the poet, proudly accepted the label and said that the biography of a razochinetz was his bookshelf. In other words, he was what he had read. In the United States, social classes are said to be fluid, but we still have razochinetski and a library can still serve as a biography of sorts, especially for self-educated people, who have complete freedom to choose what they read.

Nobody made me read any of the following books. It’s not a list of every book I’ve ever read, just those I still have copies of. Actually I don’t have them because they’re in storage in two different countries.
The first book I ever read was called “The Cozy Little Farm,” and I have a picture of myself holding it. The first adult book I read was “Edison” by Josephson. It was a bit over my head at age ten, but Edison was my hero and I still recall many scenes. One of the illustrations is a reproduction of a letter, showing Edison’s unique calligraphy, which he developed when he was a telegrapher. It was designed to be clear, beautiful and fast. I retrained myself to write in that style, and still do, more or less.

MY LIBRARY (What’s Left of It)

HISTORY

Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
The Peninsular War, Jac Weller
Ivan’s War, Catherine Merridale
A Nation Made by War, Geoffrey Perret
Eisenhower, Geoffrey Perret
The Forgotten Soldier, Guy Sajer
The Second World War, John Keegan
The Boer War, Thomas Pakenham
The Age of Jackson, Arthur M. Schlesinger
Stalin, The Court of the Red Czar, Simon S. Montefiore
Lincoln, Redeemer President, Alan Guelzo
The Impending Crisis, David M. Potter
A Narrative History of the Civil War, Shelby Foote
Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward S. Gibbon
Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose
The Reformation, Diarmuid MacCulloch
A Short History of the Argentines, Felix Luna
At Home Among the Patagonians, George Musters
The Thirty Years War, C.V. Wedgwood
Anabasis (The Upcountry March), Xenophon
The Conquest of Mexico, Bernal Diaz
The Conquest of Mexico, W.S. Prescott
Emperor of China, Jonathan Spence
The Command of the Ocean, N.A.M. Rodger
The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman
The Face of Battle, John Keegan
Maus I & II, Art Spiegelman
Harvest of Sorrow, Robert Conquest
Treason By The Book, Jonathan Spence
Annals of Imperial Rome, Tacitus trans. Grant
Army of the Caesars, Michael Grant
Adventures of Capt. Alonso Contreras, trans. Dallas
Memoirs, vol. I, George Kennan
The Pacific War—1931-1945, Saburo Ienaga
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence
Undaunted Courage, Stephen Ambrose

FICTION, (novels, stories, drama)

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
The Riverside Shakespeare (1 vol.)
A Dance to the Music of Time (12 vols.), Anthony Powell
Sixteen Plays, Henrik Ibsen trans. Michael Meyer
Plays of Moliere, trans. Richard Wilbur
Midaq Alley, Naguib Mahfouz
Palace Walk, Naguib Mahfouz
The Master & Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov
Aunt Julia & the Scriptwriter, Mario Vargas Llosa
Walls Rise Up, George Sessions Perry
Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Darkness At Noon, Arthur Koestler
The Third Bank of the River, Joao Guimaraes Rosa
Maiden, Cynthia Buchanan
Stories, Nikolai Gogol
Dead Souls, Nikolai Gogol
The Leopard, Giuseppe di Lampedusa
The Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. By Constance Garnett
The Plays of Chekhov, trans. by C. Garnett
New Grub Street, George Gissing
The Odd Women, George Gissing
Kim, Rudyard Kipling
Of Human Bondage, W. Somerset Maugham
Ashenden Stories, W. Somerset Maugham
Moon & Sixpence, W. Somerset Maugham
Child 44, Tom Rob Smith
The Secret Speech, Tom Rob Smith
Old Goriot, Balzac
Cousin Bette, Balzac
The Great Gatsby, F.Scott Fitzgerald
Tender Is The Night, F.Scott Fitzgerald
A Farewell to Arms, Ernest Hemingway
Sword of Honor, Evelyn Waugh
The Loved One, Evelyn Waugh
Brideshead Revisited, Evelyn Waugh
Under Western Eyes, Joseph Conrad
The Secret Agent, Joseph Conrad
Pride & Prejudice, Jane Austen
Emma, Jane Austen
Animal Farm, George Orwell
1984, George Orwell
The Sorrows of Young Werther, J.W. von Goethe
Mother Night, Kurt Vonnegut
The Good Soldier, Ford Madox Ford

BIOGRAPHY, AUTOBIOGRAPHY, MEMOIR

The Shorter Pepys, ed. Robert Latham
Pepys,The Unequalled Self, by Claire Tomalin
Mr. Pepys, Samuel Ollard
Goethe, 2 vols. (so far) by Nicholas Boyle
Orwell, Jeffrey Meyers
Edmund Wilson, Jeffrey Meyers
Ibsen, Michael Meyer
Edison, Matthew Josephson
Alexander Pope, Maynard Mack
Chekhov, Donald Rayfield
Chekhov, Henri Troyat
Letters of Chekhov, ed. by Simon Karlinsky & M.H. Heim
Wellington, The Years of the Sword, Antonia Fraser
Witness, Sam Tannenhaus
Eugene O’Neill (2 vols.), Louis Schaeffer
Hindo Holiday, J.R.Ackerly
Henry James, (1 vol.) Leon Edel
W.Somerset Maugham, Ted Morgan
Italian Journey, J.W. von Goethe
A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor
Between the Woods and the Water, Patrick Leigh Fermor
Roumeli, Patrick Leigh Fermor
Mani, Patrick Leigh Fermor
The Cretan Runner, George Psychoundakis
Daedalus Returned, Baron von der Heydte
Oscar, Peter J. Wilson
The Lives of Talleyrand, Crane Brinton
Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi
The Reawakening, Primo Levi
The Periodic Table, Primo Levi
Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey
The Double Life of Stephen Crane, Christopher Benfey
Isaiah Berlin, David Ignatieff
Spinoza, Nadler
Chaucer, John Gardner
Chaucer, Donald Howard
Whittaker Chambers, Sam Tannenhaus
The Baburnama, Sultan Muhammad Babur, ed. Thackston
The Quest for Corvo, A.J.A. Symons
Parallel Lives, Plutarch
Emperor of China, Jonathan Spence
The Long Walk, Slawomir Rawicz
Comrade Valentine, Richard E. Rubenstein
Lords of the Sea, John R. Hale
Coyotes, Ted Conover

POETRY

The Odes of Horace, ed. by McClatchy
The Odes of Horace, trans. James Michie
Horace in English, ed. D.S. Carne Ross
The Complete Odes & Epodes of Horace, trans. W.G. Shepherd
Complete Odes & Satires of Horace, trans. Sidney Alexander
Sonnets of Shakespeare, ed. Helen Vendler
Collected Poems of Richard Wilbur
Collected Poems of W.H. Auden
Collected Poems of William Butler Yeats
Poems, Robert Frost
A Net of Fireflies, trans. Harold Stewart
Poems of Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Poems of George Gordon, Lord Byron
Norton Anthology of Classical Literature, ed. Bernard Knox
Collected Poems, Czeslaw Milosz
Collected Poems of Houseman
Piers Plowman, Norton Edition
Poems of F.G. Tuckerman
Poems of Thomas Hardy
Poems of John Gay, 2 vols., ed. Dearing
Psalms of Sidney & Pembroke, ed. Rathnell
The Aeneid, Vergil trans. P.Dickinson
Complete Poetry of Mandelstam, trans. Raffel & Burago
Iliad, Homer trans. Fagles
The Divine Comedy, Dante trans. Ciardi
Complete Poems, Andrew Marvell
Duino Elegies & Sonnets to Orpheus, R.M. Rilke trans. Poulin
Faust, Goethe trans. Kaufman
Complete Poetry, Alexander Pope

ESSAYS, CRITICISM

The Captive Mind, Czeslaw Milosz
Poetic Meter & Poetic Form, Paul Fussel
Cultural Amnesia, Clive James
Forwords and Afterwords, W.H. Auden
Essays Ancient and Modern, Bernard Knox
Essays, Letters, Journalism (4 vols.), George Orwell
Less Than One, Joseph Brodsky
Intellectuals, Paul Johnson
The Sense of Reality, Isaiah Berlin
The Crooked Timber of Humanity, Isaiah Berlin
Patriotic Gore, Edmund Wilson
Axel’s Castle, Edmund Wilson
To The Finland Station, Edmund Wilson
Essays, Montaigne trans. Frame
The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, Lionel Trilling
Distant Neighbors, Alan Riding
Mexican Etiquette & Ethics, Boye de la Mente
Narcocorrido, Elijah Wald
To Keep The Ball Rolling, Anthony Powell
Miscellaneous Verdicts, Anthony Powell
Under Review, Anthony Powell
True Tales From Another Mexico, Sam Quinones

RELIGION, PHILOSOPHY

Jews, God & History, Max Dimont
Judaism, Roy Rosenberg
This Is My God, Wouk
Jews, Arthur Hertzberg
The Sabbath, A.J. Heschel
Farewell, España, Howard M. Sachar
The Essential Talmud, Adin Steinsaltz
A History of the Jews, Paul Johnson
The Gospel According to Jesus, Stephen Mitchell
The Book of Job, Stephen Mitchell
Jesus of Nazareth, J. Bornkamm

HISTORICAL FICTION

Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar
I, Claudius, Robert Graves
The Mask of Apollo, Mary Renault
The King Must Die, Mary Renault
Captain From Castille, Samuel Shellabarger

ENTERTAINMENTS (thrillers, mysteries, romances, adventure tales, etc.)

The Flashman series, George M. Fraser
The Travis McGee series, John D. McDonald
The Hornblower series, C.S. Forester
The Aubrey/Maturin series, Patrick O’Brian
The Bernie Rhodenbarr series, Lawrence Block
The Masters of Rome series, Colleen McCullough
The Sharpe series, Bernard Cornwell
87th Precinct series, Ed McBain
Arkady Renko series, Martin Cruz Smith
Rogue Male, Geoffrey Household
Scaramouche, Rafael Sabatini
Captain Blood, Rafael Sabatini
Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut
The Big Clock, Kenneth Fearing
Treasure Island, R.L. Stevenson
The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
Outsourced, R.J.Hillhouse
Con Ed, Mathew Klein
Citizen Vince, Jess Walter
The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers
The Faithful Spy, Alex Berenson
Six Suspects, Vikas Swarup
The Alibi, Joseph Kanon
The Club Dumas, Arturo Perez-Reverte
Captain Alatrice, Arturo Perez-Reverte

ISLAM

The Closed Circle, David Pryce-Jones
The Arab Mind, Raphael Patai
Why I Am Not A Muslim, Ibn Warraq
The Media Relations Dept. of Hizbollah
Wishes You A Happy Birthday, Neil MacFarquhar
The Rise, Coming Fall and Corruption
of Saudi Arabia, Said K. Aburish
The Two Faces of Islam, Stephen Schwartz
The Siege of Mecca, Yaroslav Trofimov
Islam, Robert Spencer
Terror’s Source, Vincenzo Olivetti
Hatred’s Kingdom, Dore Gold
The Looming Tower, Lawrence Wright
The 9/11 Commission Report
Understanding Arabs, Margaret Nydell
Princess, Jean Sasson
Sultana’s Daughters, Jean Sasson
Sultana’s Circle, Jean Sasson
Now They Call Me Infidel, Nonie Darwish
Perfect Soldiers, Terry McDermott
Islam and Terrorism, Mark Gabriel
Wahabism, A Critical Essay, Hamid Algar
Islam, A Short History, Karen Armstrong
The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsin Hamid
The Blood of Lambs, Kamal Saleem
Nadia’s Song, Soheir Kashoggi

Filed Under: Articles & Essays, Book Reviews Tagged With: edmund pickett, library

Non-Serious Post

June 4, 2009 By Edmund Pickett

No one can be serious all the time, not even me, so this post will consist of a couple of silly riddles, a cute animal picture, and a poem.

Question: What is a metaphor?
Answer: It’s for all those times when only a meta will do.

Question: What is a catastrophe?
Answer: A catastrophe is what you have to pay after the catastro.

As far as I know, those are original. They popped into my head while I was driving, but I might have heard them decades ago and they just decided to swim up to the surface of my consciousness. I’m sure there’s a website where you could solve the question.

Continuing my non-serious theme, here’s the cute animal picture. Can you identify the animal?

It’s a wild chinchilla. I took the photo in Machu Pichu. According to Wikipedia, they are crepuscular mammals, which I suppose means that they move around mainly at dusk. I snapped him around 11 a.m., so this guy was up very early. He was sitting in a gap in the ruins caused by an earthquake, about 15 ft. (5 meters) away, and didn’t seem to mind a bunch of tourists oohing and ahhing over him. The Incas are world famous for their large irregular stone construction techniques, but they also used coursed stone, with equal sized blocks, for some important buildings, though as you can see here, it is not as stable. The buildings made of irregular fitted blocks have not shifted at all.

This is still a fairly short post, so I will bulk it up with a poem from my archives. The poem could be considered serious, but it’s short.

Your Poised Hand

1
These clothes my former lover made
Fit even better as they fade.

2
There’s frequently a lot of dust
in what we think is solid sand.
In finding out you never trust
your eye or how it feels in hand.
To quench such curiosity,
fling it to the wind! You’ll see
the powder, born in falling grit,
billow, and abandon it.
Then you’ll know exactly just
how much rock and how much dust
were in that pile of so-called sand,
lately lying in your poised hand.

3
Exactly what you had will then
be known, and never known again.
The clothes she made are wearing thin.

© 2009 Edmund Pickett

(This poem may be copied or forwarded, as long as you retain the copyright notice and author’s name.)

Filed Under: Articles & Essays Tagged With: chinchilla, poem, riddles, Your Poised Hand

Part 4, Books on Islam

June 1, 2009 By Edmund Pickett

In preparation for writing a novel about Islamic terror, I began reading books about Islam, terror, Arab culture, etc. I stopped counting at thiry-five. I didn’t keep a record of the bad ones. The essential ones I have been writing about in the first three parts of “Books On Islam,” but I’m not done. I just haven’t had the time to write reviews worthy of all the books I want to talk about. I have already spent far more time than I expected in setting up this blog and writing all the material already posted, and my novel is way behind schedule.

Of the following books, the ones marked with diamonds (♦) are the best in my opinion, and if I can find the time, I will write longer reviews of them. This is not a complete list of all the books I have read on this subject, by any means. These are just the books I remembered to write a note to myself about.

NON-FICTION

♦ The Truth About Muhammad – Robert Spencer
♦ The Arab Mind – Raphael Patai
♦ Infidel – Ayan Hirsi Ali
♦ The Media Relations Dept. of Hisbollah Wishes You A Happy Birthday – Neil MacFarquhar
♦ Perfect Soldiers – Terry McDermott
♦ The Looming Tower – Lawrence Wright
♦ Inside The Jihad – Omar Nasiri
♦ Now They Call Me Infidel – Nonie Darwish
♦ The 9/11 Commission Report
♦ Princess – Jean Sasson
♦ Sultana’s Circle – Jean Sasson
♦ Sultana’s Daughters – Jean Sasson
– Understanding Arabs – Margaret Nydell
– Journey of the Jihadist – Fawaz Gerges
– See No Evil – Robert Baer
– Sleeping With The Devil – Robert Baer
– Islam and Terrorism – Mark A. Gabriel
– The Far Enemy – Fawaz Gerges
– My Year Inside Radical Islam – David Garstenstein Ross

FICTION

♦ Midaq Alley – Naguib Mahfouz
♦ Palace Walk – Naguib Mahfouz
– Nadia’s Song – Suheir Kashoggi

Filed Under: Books on Islam, Islam

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