Music Articles (Lyrics)
Rather, I take Montes’s interest in a revised écriture féminine to be an acknowledgment that one can find strength in fluidity. In focusing on this significant period in the cultural history of the Bronx, Montes reckons with one of her own sites of origin as well as the borough’s resonating iconography, its artists and vanguards,
Continue reading “Two Places at Once”: On Lara Mimosa Montes’s “THRESHOLES”
What has that discourse really done for people, for artists? I think a book you’d find interesting in relation to this question came from a CUNY colleague, Matt Brim. At a certain point, that’s a question of method. It’s a realistic answer to your question, which is to say that the gap of what I
Continue reading When Art Is Life, but All Life Is Work: A Conversation with Leigh Claire La Berge
Motion and speed and random-seeming connections aren’t the only items in Morton’s poetic tool kit. Is it just me or is there something about riding a train. Once we arrive at the passage beginning “after years / of starting out,” though, Stevens’s voice morphs into something younger, rawer, more direct. A charred field, a swan.
Continue reading Train of Thought: On Matt Morton’s “Improvisation Without Accompaniment”
From ALQ’s Crime Issue: Meet the Banu Sasan Brad Fox called in from lockdown in Peru to read from — and discuss — his translation (or recovery? or adaptation?) of Abu Dulaf’s “Song of the Banu Sasan”: He and ArabLit Quarterly editor-in-chief M Lynx Qualey discussed the charlatanism (both real and invented)
Continue reading From ALQ’s Crime Issue: Meet the Banu Sasan
But anthropocentrism’s grip is loosening. All living things are in some way connected, even those we cannot see, and humans have no special dispensation among life’s many forms. The coronavirus has given us a bitter foretaste of life gone awry on the exquisite and delicate planet in Bill Anders’s photo. Conjuring an image that bespeaks
Has the pandemic changed the way we see dystopian fiction? But realistic depictions of our current moment that include, say, climate change and the weakening of democracy — just two of the issues we’re struggling with — demand that the characters react to these things. In an earlier work, Tiger Writing: Art, Culture, and the Interdependent
Continue reading Horror Has Become Normal: An Interview with Gish Jen
Other literary events will include spoken-word performances by Lisa Luxx, a poet and social activist of British Syrian heritage who is the LAAF 2020 Artist-in-residence, as well as a workshop with award-winning Palestinian-American author Ibtisam Barakat, winner of this year’s Sheikh Zayed Book Award in the “children’s literature” category, and an evening with Arabist Tim
Continue reading Liverpool Arab Arts Festival Starts Tomorrow, Online
They grapple with the self and consciousness, each demanding to know, while unable to answer whether the self is anything more than a meat puppet. He uses the Brainio invention. There is something deeply sad and absurd in this: the indispensable beauty of all of Kaufman’s work is his ability to reveal anguish and absurdity
Continue reading Strange Cosmic Entertainment: On Charlie Kaufman’s “Antkind”
More importantly, it has connected for me my three literary cultures: the contemporary humanities, pre-modern Arabic adab, and classical Chinese wen. This is the type of transformation that offers entry points into a three-way inter-temporal as well as inter-cultural conversations. Issues of transmission, the movement of stories through space and time? This modernized ideal man-woman
Continue reading Wen-chin Ouyang on Bringing Together Arabic أدب and Chinese 文
Al-Suwaidi has said it was inspired by his hometown’s oral culture and people he knew when growing up in Ras al-Khaima. After it initially became known in Beirut…it spread to Cairo and then to Iraq. Thani Al-Suwaidi was born in the Ras al-Khaima area of the Emirates in the summer of 1966 and
Continue reading Emirati Author Thani Al Suwaidi, Author of ‘The Deisel,’ Dies at 54
The increased responsibility to manage our homes-turned-offices and the push to work harder at jobs that are increasingly precarious may “help the company prosper,” but it doesn’t spark joy. Throughout, she also reassures us that achieving Pinterest-style minimalism will, in fact, bring the domestic bliss we hope for. Kondo’s popularity might, at least partially, be
As his father waits in the car, the narrator stands alone, unsure, his life at a crossroads. And, like Salinger’s novel, The Drive reveals the fault lines in a national narrative. Assulin’s novel created a stir upon its publication in Israel because, although Israeli writers have long criticized the military for its incursions into Lebanon,
Continue reading Israel’s Holden Caulfield: On Yair Assulin’s “The Drive”
ES: Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with an idea in my head. My old friend Awad Awad gently and wisely advised me to save the dirty stuff for later, so my first idea became episode 39. Emily Selove: The idea for a Popeye and Curly cartoon strip came
Continue reading Summer of Lock-in Lit: Cartooning with Popeye & Curly
Clayton County, the landmark Supreme Court case that firmed up protections against employment discrimination for LGBTQ workers under the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Cervini discusses how Kameny would have seen this moment in history and how his early work demonstrates at once the decades of struggle that have brought the freedoms of our moment as
/ The stealing away of one’s / self kind of language.” While the poem charts the deprivations of having one’s self “stolen” by the language of service work, it ultimately celebrates what McIntyre calls “my type a Langwige.” Through this sustained attention to these writers’ complex imaginative acts, Nowak’s passionate and galvanizing essays direct practitioners,
Continue reading First-Person Plural: On Mark Nowak’s “Social Poetics”
From the moment Valéry first entered the symbolist orbit of Stéphane Mallarmé at age 19, his brilliance was evident. Ideas may seem perfect when isolated from the tides of life, but in living, both ideas and the idea of perfection are under constant assault. Since the primary aim of this book is to offer a
Do not talk about the erosion of civil liberties.” But Washington Director Laura Murphy asked Romero, “If we don’t speak up now, when are we going to speak up? The ACLU’s own Freedom of Information request unearthed a trove of documents which, according to Executive Director Neier, “contained correspondence from ACLU officials to their contacts
“A pair cannot be changed once the project has commenced, and it is each pair’s responsibility to ensure that they work well together to produce the project outcomes. “Must be available to participate in the project during the dates specified in the Open Call. “Creative possibilities of digital technologies and collaboration across borders are at
Continue reading Sunday Submissions: Last Day to Apply for ‘Connect ME Digital Residency’
Consider this example, from a paragraph about the importance of looking “beyond differences”: “The point is this: there are ways to converse with people about important things in ways that maximize the likelihood that they listen to you … and maybe, with some luck and a lot of effort and time, possibly change their mind.”
It’s not nostalgia, but mind (as Bateson defines it, with its connection to the entire surrounding social system) that’s at stake. We got rid of those old fashions for good reasons. It’s like Sartre’s bad faith — the existential crisis we create by lying to ourselves — but on a much larger, systematic level. D.