Author: Pierre Joris

Ali Farka Touré (1939-2006)

The great Malian musician Ali Farka Touré has called it quits. No more talking in Timbouktou. The NYT obit is here. And listen to Niafunke and Radio Mali. Africa is indeed blue this morning.

Poem du Jour

From: Meditations on the Forty Stations of Al-Hallaj 8. Avidity (sharah) with Anouar Brahem on Oud (extract from “Qaf,” on the cd Barzakh)

Chris Knight, the Origins of Culture & Chomsky

I didn’t know anything about the British anthropologist Chris Knight, until I came across an interview with him on ReadySteadyBook, Mark Thwaite’s excellent blog. I haven’t yet gotten to Knight’s book, Blood Relations: Menstruation...

NYC Weekend & Rhizome-trees

Spending the weekend in NY, family biz, plus some intensive ashtanga sessions with Manju Jois, plus some fun & friends. So, first stop coming into the city yesterday was the A.I.R. gallery for a...

Silencing Rachel Corrie

Alison Croggon, poet, playwright, novelist, blogger and editor from Down Below just alerted some of us to what looks like a rather nasty — but yawningly predictable — bit of censorship happening on (or...

Burroughs Hangs with Kerouac Again

An exegesis of Burroughs’ novel The Soft Machine, a calligraphic painting of his used for the novel’s dust jacket, and a photograph of his typewriter. The William S. Burroughs Archive, The Henry W. and...

The animal in Derrida

A year and a half after his death, a new book by Jacques Derrida has been published which reviewer Didier Eribon calls “fulminating” in his review for the French weekly Le Nouvel Observateur. “L’Animal...

eia wasser regnet schlaf

Elisabeth Borchers is eighty today. She came to fame with her first publication, a poem called “eia wasser regnet schlaf” in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in 1960, because the poem started a scandal that...