Bruno Cooke's Blog, page 4

Glad for Company

Fatma gathers her strength. She points with prideat the fruits of her labour: üzüm, elma, şeftali;and sighs, long-eyed, when I ask her about her çoçuk, her children. Her husband, too, is gone – she points at the sky, mimes sleeping; we understand the word Allāh and join the dots.  When the nearby mosque transmits its call her eyes well up. Saltwater rises from the deepto fill the lines that extend …

The Best Kind

It’s a big update: Laura and I are in Athens, preparing to set sail for Rhodes (last minute change of plan – the best kind), [EDIT: that ship has now sailed. We’re in Fethiye.] where we’ll stay a night before stepping aboard our connection to Fethiye, on the Turkish coast. But first a few words on Greece, and all the revelry I, and we, enjoyed …

Buko King

What became of Buko King? Whose flesh-white teeth once sliced like knives through husk;who enraptured the Internet for… days, years if you add up theseconds; who’d do the thing for tourists, for a price,and whoever paid him got to eat the meat. Shredded trousers now hang limp about him. His teeth, unstained despite years of Marlboro smoke, are fewer. He spins his yarns for the local boys, hacks …

Wild Council

We camped in a low heavy field: dark trees, thistles, thorns, air as damp as cloth. The bikesleaned softly into acquiescent bark.Spiders watched us shit in holes we dug. Wet earth and tent pegs: the rituals of homestart with its creation, metal in the mud.Fabric floats on top with curved supports whileunderneath, worms and beetles plot. In the morning these cocoons will be broken.Villages will be razed, articles …

Bounties Innumerable

There is also LOTS OF GOOD STUFF. Sicily is where my Archaeological Tour of the Mediterranean really kicked off. First I saw the Doric temple of Segesta. There were two German cyclists there too, equally drenched from the day’s endless rain, but both smiling, happy to be doing. Then it was south to Selinunte, where a similar temple was built at roughly the same time. …

A Sicilian, a Maltese and a Calabrian drive *into* a Bar

Almost daily, while cycling in Sicily and Calabria – less so in Basilicata, in southeastern Italy, but still pretty regularly – something would happen that would make me think Fuck Italian Drivers. Some days many times. Maybe one would brush past me going round a sharp bend on a high mountain road or on a single lane past roadworks, not actually touching me but no …

îles de Beauté

The thing with Corsica, though, is that it’s so goddamn beautiful that it doesn’t really matter where you are. The bottles of wine it makes advertise themselves as being produced in the île de Beauté, I mean come on.  So I docked in at Propriano at 6am or so and headed for the nearest campsite thinking, if there’s a spanner in the works of my …

I Probably Was An Idiot

Well and so. The first day is in some ways the easiest, and in others one of the hardest. Leaving the comforts of home behind – and I really had been luxuriating among them, during those last few days – has its drawbacks. Goodbye, massive bed. Goodbye sofa. Farewell television and movie time, with a soupçon of whiskey if you’re in the mood. Goodbye, sweet …

A Day at the Beach

Almost but not quite shielded from view by the rays of sunlight reflected by the glassy sea, the woman in pink bent over and stroked the chest of her man under his blue Berghaus T-shirt, neck bent double, his jaw, in profile, showing just softly the movements of his tongue, and of the closing, opening, closing of the space in between the insides of their …

Blood red rock / Statu Frances assassinu

Purple-yellow, richly rising miniature colossus;red isle bursting, bathed in wine and fish. Fish for days,fish for supper. Fir trees arched to horizontal,blown by lurching sea winds, tugged by the rootbut holding fast. Bonaparte’s birthplace, thistles thick as fists,islet torn apart in recent years: assassination;two decades behind bars; a taste of freedom. Fish and wine.Messages sprayed in black on roadside barriers and walls,threats, perhaps, or warnings—rousse …