0-The University of California Book of North African Literature
1-Exile is My Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader edited & translated by Pierre Joris
2-Pierre Joris: Cartographies of the In-Between edited by Peter Cockelbergh
3-Paul Celan: The Meridian Final Version—Drafts—Materials
Justifying the Margins (Essays)
Laurie Price’s review on Amazon: Exile is My Trade: A Habib Tengour Reader, edited & translated by Pierre Joris (Black Widow Press Modern Poetry 2012) (Paperback) To this reader, Exile Is My Trade turned out to be a truly surprising and affecting volume of poetry and essays to come out of North Africa. The writing is modern [...]
Entries Tagged as 'Essays'
Tengour’s “Exile is my Trade” Reviewed
March 5th, 2013 · 1 Comment · Algeria, Arab Culture, Essays, Literature, Poetics, Poetry, Translation
Tags: Habib Tengour
Eric Mottram on Triggernometry (5)
December 31st, 2012 · 1 Comment · Cultural Studies, Essays
So Nomadics will ring the year out with the final installment of EM’s essay “The Persuasive Lips.” Apologies for leaving the footnotes in a mess, but I simply don’t have the time to reformat these right now. Tomorrow will be another day, we hope. V Samuel R. Delany understands more of the myth in his novel [...]
Tags: Eric Mottram
Eric Mottram on Triggernometry (3)
December 28th, 2012 · No Comments · Cultural Studies, Essays
III Walter Prescott Webb’s The Great Plains described the development of the cattle kingdoms of the American West and of the cowboy who worked the ranches and ranges. The Homestead Law of 1862, the invention of barbed wire in 1874, and the advent of the windmill, the railway, artificial irrigation systems, and the automobile combined [...]
Tags: Eric Mottram
Eric Mottram on Triggernometry (2)
December 27th, 2012 · 1 Comment · Cultural Studies, Essays
Enough readers have suggested I continue posting Eric Mottram’s essay, “Persuasive Lips,” so I will — it will take 5 installments all in all. Here, the second part: II The technological morality of gangster and police movies provides a full iconography from the Thirties onwards. The obvious symbolism of black and white shirts is there [...]
Tags: Eric Mottram
Eric Mottram on Triggernometry
December 26th, 2012 · 2 Comments · Criticism, Cultural Studies, Essays
That lethal all-American gun pathology has obviously been on my mind these last weeks. Two expressions from long ago kept coming back: “triggernometry” and “persuasive lips” — eventually they brought me back to Eric Mottram’s 1976 essay, “The Persuasive Lips” which opened his excellent 1989 collection of cultural criticism essays called Blood on the Nash Ambassador [...]
Tags: Eric Mottram
Jean Bollack (1923-2012)
December 7th, 2012 · No Comments · Criticism, Cultural Studies, Essays, Homage, Intellectuals, Language, Literature, Obituaries, Paul Celan, Translation
When I think of Jean Bollack — philologist, philosopher, hermeneut, translator, commentator, friend to Paul Celan & irritant to many — the first word that comes to mind is “décrasser,” a French term that means to clean, to scrub or more powerfully, to scour, even dip into a bath of acid to remove the accumulated gangue of lazy [...]
Tags: Jean Bollack
On Collaboration
November 5th, 2012 · No Comments · Essays
Very pleased that Jerome Rothenberg posted a text of mine you can check out on his blog: Poems and Poetics: Pierre Joris: From “Double-Gazing Semes after … By Jerome Rothenberg [What follows is the opening of Pierre Joris's introduction to Synopticon: A Collaborative Poetics by Louis Armand & John Kinsella (Litteraria Pragensia, 2012). That my [...]
Tags: Jerome Rothenberg
Avnery on Syria
August 11th, 2012 · 2 Comments · "Arab Spring", Essays, Politics, Syria
As usual, Avnery’s takes are fascinating & excellent food for the intelletto. This week the topic is Syria: Uri Avnery August 11, 2012 Bloody Spring) ON A flight to London in 1961, I had a unique experience. On the way, the plane made a stop in Athens and a group of Arabs joined us. That [...]
Tags: Uri Avnery
On Celan’s Meridian
June 25th, 2012 · 1 Comment · Essays, Poetics, Poetry, Translation
My conversation from earlier this year with Leonard Schwartz on translating Paul Celan’s Meridian first heard on his Cross Cultural Poetics radio program is now available via PennSound here as Episode #253: “Celan/Bronk,” 2012: Joris discusses his translation strategy in Paul Celan’s The Meridian: Final Version — Drafts — Materials (Stanford University Press) (30:09)
Tags: Paul Celan
The death of American Secularism
May 8th, 2012 · No Comments · Agitprop, Essays, Secularism
Last night’s analysis via reductio ad absurdum by Jon Stewart of the Greek elections results (how two dead & defeated ideologies, Nazism & Communism, are making major comebacks in 2012), made me think that a similar take on the dead & defeated ideology Christianity represents (well, in Europe at least, where it is not in power except for [...]