Music Articles (Lyrics)
O’Hara lays this out in his tongue-in-cheek manifesto, “Personism,” in which he advocates for a poetry that eschews the idea of a general audience and addresses itself to one person instead. The central hook for the piece is the idea that Dimitrov started the salon, at least partially, to cruise. Time slides through the flesh.
Continue reading “I Need You to Check Your Eyes”: Alex Dimitrov Gets Intimate
In an email newsletter, PalFest organizers said: “PalFest is unable to get to Gaza because of Israel and Egypt’s ongoing siege of the Strip.” You can also follow @PalFest, from this weekend, for details on the writers’ crossing into the West Bank from Jordan. In addition to events in four cities, the international group
Elkins had hired them to examine satellite imagery of the earth taken from space, and they believed they had detected unnatural features in a remote, unexplored valley called Target One, or T1 for short. Nonfiction writers are always looking for someone else to finance their research! I had to wait for the story to develop
Continue reading The Lost City of the Monkey God, or Close Enough
MAY 10, 2017 IN 2017, calling climate change a “catastrophe” just proves you read the news. This is the close of Baumgart’s personal journey (followed only by a fact- and stats-driven epilogue) — his vision of the road forward: “Only desert.” Perhaps he inherited his bleak outlook from his mother. But it also explains why
Listening to the recordings of the live broadcasts from Moscow, you hear an inimitable talent cresting at a moment of rarefied discovery. The bookend to Cliburn’s ticker-tape parade comes when, at 53, he appeared at Mikhail Gorbachev’s visit to the White House for a “Washington Summit,” in 1987. He canceled as many recitals as he
Continue reading The American Sputnik: Van Cliburn Heats Up the Cold War
You can also read a number of Kerbaj’s comix on Words Without Borders. Drawn and written in English, French, and Arabic, Beirut Won’t Cry shows us how an artist views the world and everything in it — his relationships, his family, and his creative pursuits — as it crumbles violently around him. Meanwhile,
Continue reading Coming in August: Mazen Kerbaj’s ‘Beirut Won’t Cry,’ Finally in English
As he speaks of an archaeological find in the desert, he shares an oddity: the Kushites — conquered by Egypt — adopted the Egyptian painting style, and in doing so, they ended up depicting their enemies just as the Egyptians had once depicted the Kushites themselves. No transformation happens because of a kiss. The story
The modern European sentence has a history of transformation that’s as complex as it is long, but a shortened and sinfully simplistic, potted version might look something like this: Departing from the serpentine textures of Renaissance stylists like Thomas Browne and Robert Burton, the sentence underwent a process of refinement, if not shortening, which culminated,
Continue reading One Sentence on Top of Another: On László Krasznahorkai’s “The Last Wolf”
To coincide with Palestinian artist Larissa Sensor’s exhibition at Bluecoat, “In the Future, They Ate from the Finest Porcelain,” Comma Press asks three Palestinian fiction writers: What might a new wave Palestinian science fiction look like? The event — set for June 14 — comes just a month before Mo’min Swaitat’s play
Continue reading ‘We the Aliens,’ ‘Nakba + 100,’ and Palestinian Science Fictions
MAY 8, 2017 TWO STUDENTS ARE ROLLING a large barrel — not a keg, but a real wooden barrel — down the street as I write this. On my ever-expanding list of strange sightings, barrel rolling doesn’t even crack the top 100, not after spending nearly 20 years on various college campuses as a student,
(She places her feminist character Mary Datchet in a Bloomsbury bedsit in her novel Night and Day). Elkin’s offering is a welcome rejoinder to the stock image of the flâneur with his cane, top hat, and ease, thanks to her consideration of a variety of smart and fascinating women. Taking the metro with that same
What are your thoughts on this, especially when thinking about the violence of cityscapes? That’s a kind of collapse, a ruination — materially, in Ballard’s own novels, it translates into endless visions of ruined cityscapes. The “Book” is always and inherently to-come. Every great city, at least when it writes itself, seems to anticipate its
As the evening came on, the six candles burst suddenly alight. I was ravenous, and he encouraged me as I devoured every book that came into my hands. Some I flitted through like a spooked sparrow, for others, though, I chose the bird’s-eye view and passed by at a distance. And so it was. Up
Continue reading An Excerpt from Mansoura Ez Eldin’s ‘Emerald Mountain’
She spent nearly four years in China. Zhang’s lens zooms in and out, balancing Lotus and Bing’s personal lives with critiques of the sociopolitical climate as a whole. These expressions — like “Her Beauty Outshines the Moon and Puts the Flowers to Shame” and “Heaven is High and the Emperor is Far Away” — offer
“How about if the three of us agree to have post-gender relations?” proposes Meng Sheng, to Lazi’s delight. It liked to eat with a sharpened straw that it plunged into the top of the can and used to siphon food. The denser strand follows the intuitive arc of university life in a rhythm reminiscent of
Continue reading Consider the Crocodile: Qiu Miaojin’s Lesbian Bestiary
Ricoeur was not an apologist for suspicion, but instead a defender of humanism, one who saw opposing ideas or ideals not in terms of dichotomies, but in terms of dialectics. An international school dedicated to pacifist ideals, the Collège Cévenol — still open these many years — is nestled in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, the Protestant village
Continue reading The Fragility of Politics: What Paul Ricoeur Can Teach Us About the French Election
(For a corrective, I advise reading Georges Dreyfus’s remarkable philosophical memoir The Sound of Two Hands Clapping.) But Empson’s instincts are generally sure-footed enough that he manages a respectable comparative study even in the face of large knowledge gaps. As John Haffenden’s biography chronicles, Empson had had a mild Anglican upbringing which did not take
Continue reading The Soul of the Body: William Empson’s “The Face of the Buddha”
Transference is published through the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Western Michigan University. The journal Transference is currently inviting submissions of Arabic poetry translated into English: They’re also interested in poems from the Chinese, French, Old French, German, Classical Greek, Latin, or Japanese. It’s currently edited by David Kutzko
Sonia looks at the television blankly in the first two panels, then in the third looks with the same wordless blankness at the viewer, or perhaps Kristen. This is a riveting use of memoir. Inside the cathedral, Seth, an urban explorer from the real world who was hit by a train and died while photographing
Half of the crowd was in half-naked costume, and half of those who weren’t were doing the full Monty. I would affirm that The People’s Police is a continuous pleasure to read were it not for the poor production values that persistently hobble the story. Still an unregenerate hippie at age 77, Spinrad revels in