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‘We Must Use Everything We See And Hear’ Dutch composer-filmmaker Michel van der Aa’s The Book of Sand is a digital, interactive song cycle created to live online.

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To me, the greatest pleasure of writing is not what it’s about, but the inner music that words make.

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Babies have this nothing-can-harm-me and nothing-can-touch-me attitude towards the world. Ernest Hemingway felt this way for some time. I think it’s a bit ridiculous.

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The funny thing about the assumption that 25 is a threshold into quarter-life is that it’s only true if you live to be 100, and really, who wants that? Besides, 25 is middle aged in some places–Uganda, Ethiopia, and my own broken home-nation of Somalia to name a few. But whichever way I slice it, a good chunk of my life is gone.

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The other night, using my cell phone’s handy calculator function, I determined I had 676 months left to live, presuming lung cancer or a man willing to kill me for the unregistered Panera card I have in my pocket don’t drag me to the grave earlier than the average American lifespan would dictate.

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An idea comes over me (oh, god, I love that expression almost as much as I love that sensation — the erotics of being entangled, enmeshed, permeated, penetrated by an idea). It takes possession. And suddenly it — or is it I? — begin making connections between this and that. It — or is it I? — begin rereading the world, seeing it again, seeing it anew.