Check out the amazing array of photos (& texts) with which Tom Clark has been documenting the disastrous history (and its remaining beauty & humanity) we are living through, stuck in, throttled by, day in day out, on his “Beyond the Pale” blog. It has become a daily moment of reflection for me.
Jan Herman’s new memoir & his take on it, from his blog: March 23, 2015 by Here’s what happened: I was invited to speak about “little magazines and William S. Burroughs” on a panel with Jed Birmingham and Charles Plymell at the 2014 Burroughs Centennial Conference hosted in New York City by the Center for the Humanities. After my talk, Steve Clay came up to me and asked to … Read more ‘Fugitive Literature’: Granary Books Has Done the Deed
I am in the process of nomadizing, i.e. moving my blog-tent from one host to another. This will involve any number of unknown mawaqif — rests, stations, stoppings — in the great unknown Gobi desert hinterland of cyberspace. I do not know how great the ziyafah — hospitality in Arabic — along the road will be, but I do hope that I will re-emerge by the end of the … Read more Nomadizing, not Site-Seeing
Started a post last month as the translation of a note on translation from Pierre Assouline’s blog La République des Lettres. Got side-tracked, but here it is, with another couple notes on recent matters of translation that have come to my attention: Auteur et traducteur fifty/fifty Philippe Claudel’s novel Le Rapport de Brodeck was given the annual Independent Foreign Fiction Prize awarded by the British daily paper to a … Read more Translation Matters
At Drouot’s in Paris (the French equivalent of Sothby’s or Christie’s) a big literary sale has just taken place: The manuscript of Jacques Prévert’s “Quai des brumes” (the 150-page scenario of the film directed by Marcel Carné in 1938) was bought by the “musée des lettres et manuscripts” on boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris for 557,640 euros. The manuscript of what may be Prévert most famous song lyrics, “Feuilles mortes” … Read more Two or Three French Takes
Via Reporters Without Borders, here are the opening paras of an article on growing internet censorship in a range of countries. You can read the full piece here. The fight for free access to information is being played out to an ever greater extent on the Internet. The emerging general trend is that a growing number of countries are attemptimg to tighten their control of the Net, but at … Read more Web 2.0 versus Control 2.0
A quiet evening spent looking out at the wintery landscape here in Brooklyn while spending time online, nomadically moving from one site to another, finally reading Le Monde’s political pages, then its book section keeping Pierre Assouline’s blog La république des livres for last, which in turn led me to a strange and marvelous blog the last post of which opened with the Avercamp winter landscape reproduced above. The … Read more Winter, Sebald, Norwich, Poetry Marathon, Soju, & more