story: How to Talk to Girls at Parties
author: Neil Gaiman
year: 2007
where: kitchen table in front of half-finished buildings and an artificial billabong (again)
note: Inspired to read this after reading Billy Stevenson’s review of the film version
a line: “She began to whisper something in my ear. It’s the strangest thing about poetry — you can tell it’s poetry, even if you don’t speak the language. You can hear Homer’s Greek without understanding a word, and you still know it’s poetry. I’ve heard Polish poetry, and Inuit poetry, and I knew what it was without knowing. Her whisper was like that. I didn’t know the language, but her words washed through me, perfect, and in my mind’s eye I saw towers of glass and diamond; and people with eyes of the palest green; and, unstoppable, beneath every syllable, I could feel the relentless advance of the ocean.”
samantha Neugebauer 