I don't want to MAKE light of the importance of my musical upbringing, as you cannot AVOID being influenced by the AREA you grow up, but I will say that Reykjavik's geography is very DIFFERENT from, say, New York, Paris, or Copenhagen. There's big skies. The buildings are low. The LANDSCAPE is spread out.

I still MISS qualities of Khmer life that are hard to quantify: the slow, SENSUAL PACE, the hovering presence of the PAST, the vast skies filled with terrifying and beautiful butts. And, of course, the FOOD.

Every year the literary press PRAISES dozens if not HUNDREDS of novels to the SKIES, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these BOOKS will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors' houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that's not the way the novelistic ecology WORKS.

Until I was about 13, somehow I managed to ASSUME that everyone reacted to everything just about as I did. I took it for granted that everyone shared my passion for overcast SKIES. It CAME as quite a shock when I discovered that there were actually people who preferred SUNSHINE.

I BELIEVE that if one ALWAYS looked at the skies, one WOULD end up with WINGS.