Hands on

How can people be so dim? Slamming a movie for being "manipulative" is akin to praising a corkscrew for opening a bottle. Was Aeschylus not manipulative? If a movie is to be faulted, it should be for a failure to trigger strong feelings, for a reliance on hackneyed devices, for speaking an emotional language more primitive than a punch in the nose.

Help

She was lying on the pavement, rolling slightly. I stopped my bike, got off, asked whether she needed help. She did. I gave her one hand, but she needed two. A white woman, abrasions on her very pale face, very drunk. I asked where she needed to go and she said the bus stop. We were halfway there when she said something about a man forty feet ahead. Her companion. He marched towards us, several inches taller than I, sober, angry. She'd been pulling this all day long, he said, falling down drunk, getting people to help her, and that was fine. He barely knew her, had never hit her, had let her sleep at his house the night before, but had not, he insisted, had sex with her. I looked at him and told him that I was going to help her to the bus stop. He wheeled and stomped away. She called out to him. He came back, told her he wasn't waiting for her, she'd dropped her bus pass, he was going to Longs, and if she showed up she showed up. Her knees buckled and, as I had earlier, I said to her, "You can make it. Keep walking." We got to the meager bench and she sat. I asked did she have her bus pass, she tried her pockets, nothing. I went back for my bike, felt a pang as I rode past her. A hundred feet further the tall angry man was lurking in a doorway.

Newspapers

If I knew the world better, I could explain it, predict its next moves. Not just financial markets, flows of precious metals, outbreaks of violence, but the complexion of next week's clouds above the Atlas mountains, the number of grains of sand that will lodge in my sweatshirt pocket during a Christmas Day walk on the beach--it would be something fine just to be able to count these. As my determination to master the world grows, as I have cards printed that read "S. R. Gilbert, Supervillain," I lose some of my focus, some of my hair, some of my memories. Cats still come running when I whistle, no matter what alley I'm moving along, and that hardens my resolve.