Publication news: Out of the Wilds - Superpresent Magazine

 Hello everyone

A US magazine has just published a piece of mine that centers on the Dayaks of Borneo. Some of you will remember those folk from schoolbooks back, way back in the day.

Bite-sized flash touch under 1k words. See how you like it, freely available here (p. 69) —

https://superpresent.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/V4N3-pdf.pdf

All best

Pavle

Eyeful

 

Strange bird that optometrist, finding it exceedingly difficult to look a man in the eye. Cornered by his apparatus. Rapid anticipation in the converse — a firing range, watch out those bullets whizzing overhead. Does he shave the scone every morning? Mustard trousers he had worn on the last appointment, and not outside the realms the one before that four years ago. Wednesdays maybe... Would not be too difficult to check. Tall, good trim. Gay you’d guess, without the protective pics with his daughters over the desk. In the papers after one of those sudden tragic losses there would be no way back here, no braving it and continuing for this eye doc. Good finally to at least manage the quip with the Westcoast receptionist in his hearing. Biden? With Bernie outta the picture?… She decided she would let it blow over… Oh, shelter in place, for now?… (Plenty supercell in those gathering clouds of course, no joke.)

Sinophile (lateAug24) ✅

 

Blasted again in the lane tonight by the advertising meteor on the side of the truck. There was a strip show on offer a few blocks away if you had nothing better to do. Truly made you wince and shield the eyes. How did others sit unflinching? (Other days it was the giant construction vehicles, with the worry of a disaffected driver at the wheel. Innumerable reasons for disaffection right now.) The Asian girls entering the cafe were far more alluring than whatever that dimly glimpsed image showed on the truck; even in the case of often fashionably dressed girls, whose inner beauty was sometimes masked. Later in the evening up Swanston one of the older female homeless had gathered a strange circle around her. Was it three pair of young Asians, lads with their girls? A Christian group perhaps.; there had been many examples of street missionary activity of that kind up on the Equator. The group sat in a semicircle around the woman, who had her back against the wall of the shop behind. The woman was addressing the circle, which sat quietly listening. Earlier on the lane at the usual outdoor table a long piece on ABC had reported the Pentagon propaganda against the Chinese during the roll out of the vax, which had resulted in an unknown number of deaths, in the Philippines in particular. That central stretch of Swanston from Victoria down to Bourke and even Collins Streets had in latter years become heavily Chinese; a recent feature were the buskers drawing an audience for lounge numbers in Mandarin. It might become difficult now to co-opt significant numbers of the expats even with the most sophisticated disinformation.