Posts Tagged ‘migrant’
MOBILITY AND ROOTEDNESS
This Friday, in St. Louis, courtesy of Ignacio Infante and the Washington University Center for the Humanities: Mobility and Rootedness in Literature Symposium February 8, 2013 – 10:00am Umrath Hall, Umrath Lounge Keynote Address: “Writing in Translation” Rebecca Walkowitz, Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University, Walter Jackson Bate Fellow, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Followed [...]
FIRST FIGS
And the seasons begin to cycle as each day brings another spur for vulnerability, another adieu and another resolution to self vis-a-vis composer Paul of the bidirectionality of time in circles.
TEXTURE
For the moment, in sandstone: and a circle commemorating the full lunar eclipse and the changefulness toward the pain and toward the bright unknown it brings.
REMAINS/CHANGE
“Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga come è, bisogna che tutto cambi.” “If we want everything to remain as it is, everything must change.” Citation (Il gattopardo) ringing in consciousness departing from Sicily, trumpets of flora over the 16th-century ramparts. A friendly, yet most aware pair of landlords, now, the proprietaria denim-vested.
TOWN PRIDE
“Non ci passa una lira,” says the lady we meet surveying her high plaza with diamond facade from the waist up, and who justifies our afternoon chocolates by identifying us as her “children” to a daughter several minutes later. Not a cent passes through here yet everywhere—pizzerias, baseball caps, banks—is the immense unidentified Hellenistic goddess [...]
DESUETUDE
A fancied word so unfortunate in animation: in the woods punctuated by grazing fields for horses lined by modern sewers, the farthest reaches of the Aqua Paola (e Traiana), great outmoded infrastructural gift, at a tilt, leaking sporadic showers, and in expected picturesque disrepair: contemporary Ruskins our hunters from England hastening to capture the destruction [...]
HOUSING SOLUTION IN ROME
Among the only feasible options in the historical center: just outside the Borgo, or the area of the Vatican, adjacent to the hospital set up for pilgrims: bright & with a view for as long as they’ll allow it (law banning mobile homes on the Janiculum in momentum).
WRITING AS DRAWING
And drawing as writing in the work of William Kentridge: the potential, I surmise in listening to this brilliant lecture and conversation, to reintroduce provisionality to a stultifying historical record, just as it’s constantly introduced to the Johannesburg landscape of burnt felt (charcoal terrain that draws itself) and mounds of hollow-fallout in crusades for gold: [...]
A LANGUAGE FOR EVERY LATITUDE: ROSSELLI CONVENINGS AT BARNARD/COLUMBIA
I am finishing the lecture I’ve written on Amelia Rosselli’s composition of a cubic stanza, or chamber, as receptacle for a post-Fascist poetics—to be delivered this Friday into Saturday at the conference on her work. Those in New York City, please join us uptown from that frenzied Square for discussions of a poet who dreamt [...]
X LOCUS NARRATIVE LOOP @ SOUNDCLOUD
A conversation-poem on national, cultural, linguistic and psychological dislocation created by Jennifer Scappettone—installed in the gravelly space inside a moat of liquid loggia projections and sculpted ambient fountain/fowl for X Locus, a collaboration between Scappettone, Paul Rudy, and Stephen Mueller and Ersela Kripa (AGENCY Architecture), held at the courtyard of the American Academy in Rome [...]
CO-LOCUS IN ROME
Adrian Van Allen photographs a seemingly unphotographable installation (“questo happening” Stefano calls it), ours, last night—X LOCUS: with the mounting of tramonto the invisible becoming visible, but only by a third of the quadrant: witnessing as if detached with anxiety over the hegemony of vision the vernissage crowd seeking, drinking, confused, drifting, circulating with the [...]
X LOCUS
On Thursday, April 28 at 8 PM in the cortile of the McKim, Mead and White Building at the American Academy in Rome, there will be an opening reception for a collaborative installation titled X LOCUS, featuring environmental media by Founders Rome Prize winners in Architecture Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller, sound by Elliott Carter [...]
O RESTLESS MARBLE DEAD-FOR-SALE
“DIIS MANIBUS / To the spirits of the departed,” begins the lapidary message, marking the place, now our decor, of the woman making her deathbed and that of her nurse, securing her surname by reserving some space in the tomb as well for her slaves, anxious to underscore the sacred laws as she ends, “IT [...]
ELLIS ISLAND & BACK
If only the latterday racists who pasted up the thankfully worn & bleaching anti-immigration posters in the neighborhood would take a look at The Emigrants depicted in 1895 by Angiolo Tommasi waiting to embark in Genova (at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna)—however romantic, in its display of backs and packages at large a later version [...]
PROSERPINING
From Rome’s high galleries of modern art this morning I am whisked back to my 20-year-old encounter with the near godlette of spring in a Morgantina cistern, via two images of melancholy Persephone with her condemning pomegranate seed in fugues from the underworld. One of them, by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, is accompanied by an Italian [...]
STANZA AS JAIL OR A BALL
“Stanza as Prison, Homicile, Cube, Sphere: Emilio Villa, Amelia Rosselli, and the Spaces of Post-Fascist Ytalyan Poetry” is the name of the talk I delivered tonight at the American Academy in Rome. Such rare pleasure to present, incommensurately perhaps given the material of dislocation, to a room full of neighbors, however hailing from the strange. [...]
TAKE THAT, LATIN
in phonemic translation from translation out of a notebook running circles round the “past”‘s totem and taboo by Emilio Villa, taking inspiration from the delirium of the book et ab hic et ab hoc: batabìk batabòk patabot babeek babohk betock, betel & from the “here & from this re” lied book, The narrative Hoo— Hook
BOOKS AS BALLS
Why shouldn’t poems roll across the floor? From Emilio Villa’s The Rolling Balls: Hydrological Antistructures, With 6 Silkscreens (Rome: Edar, 1969), in collaboration with Silvio Craia and Giorgio Cegna….
TIME’S SMOKINESS
And a picture of shifting into impatience, from imperial, now national, projection to wily individual fi in the face of entropy. “But when he came to the Forum of Trajan, a creation which in my view has no like under the cope of heaven and which even the gods themselves must agree to admire, [Constantius [...]
PUNCTUM
As planes and trams move one through shifting tablesettings of alliances, in advance of a celebrated guest of the state cancelling flights, the street glimpsed in transit reliable as ever in rendering the difference in any e pluribus unum eloquent.
POETRY AND KULCHUR
And being asked to answer, amidst collaborative conversation with Dubravka Djuric, for “American poetry,” against the charge that it wants to impose and disperse breakage of beauty, make a mess: at the Belgrade Cultural Center, listening by turns appreciative and curious, and in some corner of the theater, residually suspicious, mindful of the NATO bombings. [...]
ON THE USE AND ABUSE OF ANACHRONISM
And the claim to the spoils of a remote culture randomly assigned to the present by way of geographical coordinates: sesquicentennial of an Italy far from seamlessly united makes national lollipop of Trajan’s column of 113, remembering distant triumph in the Dacian wars.
BARRIER BEACH
Its plastics in the off-season left orphan, mute against the Adriatic without their hippies.