A remarkable woman Maria, last name Popova, like the Russian artist. she has long black hair, a long black skirt to her ankles, petite, rib cage bird cage, delicate and elegant, smoking cigarette after cigarette through a wooden cigarette holder as she lounges in the open window of the ICA kitchen. I lean against the …

Trip to Rila. A large van with driver, a Slovakian woman studying German in Sofia, a middle aged Australian woman with her possibly Greek husband, a American couple in a bubble with their Lands-end clothing, backpack, bellypack, tennis shoes. they had traveled many places already on this trip and so bubblefied said rude things in …

The Bulgarian countryside is very dramatic. Went to a fabulous church in the mountains today.

There is a book by the Austrian writer Gert Jonke where the main character begins to commune with the statues of Vienna, they ask him: what is this thing, sleep? And so he shows them; he sleeps for hours, days months… the statues watch. it evidently was based on a period of his own life …

A day of catching up with a long walk along the promenade with the rest of Sofia on a Sunday afternoon. Mount Vitoshka, a big slumbering blue ahead of me as I go in search of the 13 Hundred Years Monument. it also fell victim to badly mixed concrete and is mainly armature now and …

Saturday in Plovdiv: art festival, cobblestones, Armenian food, churches, mosque, cats, stray dog, and brides everywhere. In the ancient Roman theater a bride poses both for camera and video, her image enlarged and projected in the center screen like an enormous gladiator queen.      

To Plovdiv with Luchezar Like a bullet, across the plain of Thrace, like a bullet. The Balkans, milk and honey,

Verlangerter, a long coffee, with Milena at the cafe at the Red House Center for Culture and Debate. Talk of authors, New York, Archipelago, artists, spoke of a painter now using urine instead of paint. Noon at the Sofia City Art Gallery with Maria. Sitting in the City Garden behind the hotel drinking tonic water …

In the entrance a banshee screams into her cell phone. Her cries echo down the stone staircase and through the catacombs where the eyes of stoic saints stare out sadly from under their heavy lids. With bags and circles under dark eyes, they look as if they have stared for ages and that they long …

After two introductions, the poet at last stands at the podium. The literati mostly listen, sometimes whisper, while others trace illuminati in the dust of the marble windowsills. His voice echoes down the long hall of the National Library, each phrase runs downhill, poetry is partially music after all, so that much I get out …