Nicholas Laughlin's blog etc.

2011-12-14T12:15:00.001-04:00

boundless and contagious

2011-12-10T10:17:00.001-04:00

Some time alone

2011-12-08T17:21:00.000-04:00

“Enduring trove of wars”

2011-12-02T15:12:00.000-04:00

One more time

In my other life
my hands don’t shake.

2011-11-20T18:12:00.001-04:00

And I am a fool

(Some days it’s like this.)

2011-11-19T10:27:00.001-04:00

It is hard to say

2011-11-18T22:30:00.000-04:00

In the end

Time is the condition of delightfulness and of perishing both.

— Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

2011-11-09T16:41:00.000-04:00

APT No. 1, “Republic”

“... everybody chicken think they could just walk in my yard, as if my yard is a republic.”

—V.S. Naipaul, The Suffrage of Elvira

2011-11-05T13:25:00.000-04:00

A difficult position

“I can’t quite accept what seems to be a fairly conventional notion of poetry as that which bolsters us up in what we already know. I am less interested in that than in poetry that puts us in a difficult position and makes us think about how things are.”

—Paul Muldoon, quoted in a review of Maggot by Nick Laird, in The New York Review of Books, 23 June, 2011.

2011-10-28T13:21:00.000-04:00

The thing is

All I can say is what I can say.
———————————————
What I can say is all I can say.

2011-10-27T14:40:00.000-04:00

Totally / Trusted- / targets’

2011-10-26T16:37:00.000-04:00

“Gone”

Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it.

— Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet

2011-10-24T19:10:00.000-04:00

higher states of / jackpot

2011-10-23T15:17:00.004-04:00

YES TIL NO / YES TIL NOW

Ink on card, applied with hand-cut rubber stamps, double-sided.

2011-10-21T12:34:00.000-04:00

The map reader

Where next? Looking down from the top of the Eugen-Keidel Tower on the summit of Schauinsland, near Freiburg im Breisgau; 5 October, 2011.

2011-08-31T20:10:00.000-04:00

Today

I am thinking about all the different meanings of “forged”, the first word in the national anthem of Trinidad and Tobago.

2011-08-23T15:13:00.003-04:00

The right to question

“[Attorney general Anand] Ramlogan said citizens’ rights are not suspended during a State of Emergency, but rather the police’s powers are bolstered.

“‘It is not that your Constitutional rights are suspended,’ he said.”

— “Cops can arrest without charge”, by Andre Bagoo;
Trinidad and Tobago Newsday, 23 August, 2011

“Ramlogan said the public’s constitutional rights have not been suspended in the situation.”

— “The war is on ...”, by Gail Alexander;
Trinidad and Tobago Guardian, 23 August, 2011

Trinidad and Tobago is in a state of emergency, a constitutionally defined legal situation in which basic civil rights may be temporarily curtailed or suspended in the interest of public order and safety. The government says this “very decisive action” is necessary to deal with violent crime and gang activity, which have proliferated alarmingly over the past decade.

This is a strategy some prominent citizens have recommended in the past, and many now agree that drastic action is justified, with two recent murder sprees adduced as evidence that gang-related killings are out of control. The government says the police need additional powers of search, arrest, and detention, and the state of emergency also makes it possible for the Defence Force to exercise police powers. It has also made it possible to declare a nighttime curfew in “hotspot” areas, which include Port of Spain, its closest suburbs, San Fernando, Arima, and Chaguanas.

Ordinary Trinidadians have been most immediately affected by the curfew, which disrupts our daily activities and economic productivity. And the authorities maintain that, the curfew aside (a major aside), “law-abiding” citizens will not be affected by the state of emergency. But this is a deliberate obfuscation of the scope of the Emergency Powers Regulations now in force, which suspend or curtail habeas corpus and our rights to free movement, expression, assembly, association, and privacy — for all citizens, not only “criminal elements”.

“Ramlogan said in the last nine years the country was in an ‘undeclared state of emergency’ and people have used self-imposed curfews to stay safe.”

— “AG vows to make country safe again”, by Renuka Singh;
Trinidad Express, 22 August, 2011

I have no legal training whatsoever, but I understand this: democracy requires negotiating a balance between individual rights and needs and a community’s common good. Every society grapples with this negotiation in its own way, according to its circumstances, and the process is continuous (because history is restless). This balance is expressed in written laws and unwritten conventions, in which every citizen has a vital interest. In a healthy democracy, citizens recognise and assert this interest, and any change in that balance between individual rights and the common good should be accompanied by vigorous and informed debate. A healthy democracy requires dissent.

It also requires that citizens ask questions. So here are some of mine.

Why is the attorney general — a very smart man and clearly also a smartman, as all lawyers perhaps must be — actively misleading the public about the extent to which the “fundamental rights and freedoms” recognised in section 4 of the constitution have been derogated by the Emergency Powers Regulations? It is simply not true that “the public’s constitutional rights have not been suspended”. Temporarily suspending or limiting constitutional rights — shifting the balance between citizens and authorities — is the whole point of the regulations.

Why did the government declare the state of emergency in the absence of the commissioner of police and his deputy, considering that the Emergency Regulations give the commissioner significant and augmented powers of discretion over citizens’ rights? Whether or not you agree that a foreign citizen should have been appointed commissioner, whether you think he has done a good or bad job, it ought to concern us that the government did not request the commissioner’s immediate return under these extraordinary circumstances.

Why — if the objective of the state of the emergency is to give the police temporary special powers to round up illegal arms and disrupt gang activity — were the Emergency Powers Regulations not drafted more narrowly so as to impinge on as few basic rights as possible? What does a ban on public meetings “held for the purpose of the transaction of matters of public interest or for the discussion of such matters” have to do with rooting out crime? Or a ban on “any document ... likely ... to cause disaffection or discontent among persons”? Many works of literature make me feel disaffected or discontented. Are novels to be confiscated? The regulations are drafted with sufficient breadth that the authorities may forbid almost all forms of expression. Do circumstances really justify such broad powers?

The authorities assure us that the police and Defence Force will operate within strict guidelines and with respect for citizens, and that the state of emergency will last no longer than absolutely necessary. Maybe — I hope — these assurances are reliable. They also say these extreme steps are in the interest of public safety. But I feel dreadfully and profoundly unsafe knowing that so many of my basic civil rights have been derogated, with no certainty about when they will be restored.

These rights only exist because of a hard-won consensus on human nature and our moral obligations to each other that has taken centuries to thrash out — in philosophical treatises, political tracts, and theological texts, in legislation and judicial rulings from many jurisdictions, in confrontations between citizens and their rulers, and in the everyday actions of ordinary people. They can continue to exist only if citizens are vigilant, informed, and unafraid to exercise their duty to ask questions and express dissent to the governments they elect to serve them.

2011-08-20T11:40:00.001-04:00

The man who kept a diary of mistakes he was yet to make, accidents yet to take him by surprise. —Hope for the future.

2011-08-13T13:24:00.000-04:00

Another brief definition of the novel

Some people are less boring than others.

2011-05-10T20:06:00.001-04:00

The rest of my life

Yeah:

2011-04-02T22:18:00.000-04:00

Eleven of the strange years of my life.

2011-03-24T15:59:00.001-04:00

“What if we asked how we want to read and write?”

Blogs are a received digital format that’s not necessarily well-suited to the rapid exchange of complex intellectual ideas.... They are the accidents of a handful of simple software infrastructures built to allow individuals to update webpages in a diary-like format, but one with no logical end.... I wonder what a writing and discussion system would look like if it were designed more deliberately for the sorts of complex, ongoing, often heated conversation that now takes place poorly on blogs. This is a question that might apply to subjects far beyond philosophy, of course, but perhaps the philosopher’s native tools would have special properties, features of particular use and native purpose. What if we asked how we want to read and write rather than just making the best of the media we randomly inherit, whether from the nineteenth century or the twenty-first? I wish these were the sorts of questions so-called digital humanists considered, rather than figuring out how to pay homage to the latest received web app or to build new tools to do the same old work. But as I recently argued, a real digital humanism isn’t one that’s digital, but one that’s concerned with the present and the future. A part of that concern involves considering the way we want to interact with one another and the world as scholars, and to intervene in that process by making it happen. Such a question is far more interesting and productive than debating the relative merits of blogs or online journals, acts that amount to celebrations of how little has really changed.

— Ian Bogost, from his post “Beyond Blogs: How do scholars want to read and write?”.

2011-03-18T13:04:00.001-04:00

Oops

I collapse on a settee and accidentally write three erotic short stories that will be falsely attributed to Michel Houellebecq by Le Monde.

— Perhaps my favourite sentence this week, from David Orr’s “Not At All Unusual Day in Culture”.

2011-03-17T14:08:00.001-04:00

“I was asked to address wedding invitations”

When I was in high school, I chanted Thomas Wolfe and burned as I thought Pater demanded and threatened the world as a good Nietzschean should. Then, at college, in a single day I decided to change my handwriting . . . which meant, I realized later, a change in the making of the words which even then were all of me I cared to have admired. It was a really odd decision. Funny. Strange. I sat down with the greatest deliberation and thought how I would make each letter of the alphabet from that moment on. A strange thing to do. Really strange. And for years I carefully wrote in this new hand; I wrote everything — marginal notes, reminders, messages — in a hand that was very Germanic and stiff. It had a certain artificial elegance, and from time to time I was asked to address wedding invitations, but when I look at that hand now I am dismayed, if not a little frightened, it is so much like strands of barbed wire. Well, that change of script was a response to my family situation and in particular to my parents. I fled an emotional problem and hid myself behind a wall of arbitrary formality. Nevertheless, I think that if I eventually write anything which has any enduring merit, it will be in part because of that odd alteration.

— William Gass, interviewed by Thomas LeClair in The Paris Review, 1977.

2011-03-12T18:07:00.000-04:00

Another brief definition of the novel

Things tend to go wrong.

2011-03-07T09:54:00.000-04:00

Dozens? hundreds?

The research suggests that 93% of all humanities articles go uncited. Though it is likely impossible to measure, this statistic leads me to wonder how often the typical humanities article is even read. Obviously all articles are read by someone: editors, reviewers, etc. Does the typical humanities article have a readership in the dozens? the hundreds? Certainly not more than that.... It would seem to me that the average academic (or academic journal) seeks to avoid exposure. Publishing an article in the "Journal of narrowly-focused humanities studies" is a good way to hide. Those who do manage to find you will probably be sympathetic. Plus you always have the shield of peer-review: clearly someone thought what you said was ok. Even if someone disagrees with you, the differences will likely be on details that very few people will know or care about. Besides, by the time that person manages to write and publish a response, your article is in the distant past. In any case, this almost never happens. Since 93% of humanities articles are never cited you can safely publish with the assumption that no one will ever mention your article again. Phew!... To think about such matters from the perspective of assemblage theory, we should be able to see that the material and expressive segments of a journal serve a strong, territorializing function, reaffirming the boundaries of discipline and the identities of participants. Sitting behind a paywall, available primarily through academic libraries, one can be fairly certain that no one will even accidentally encounter the text (and even if they did, the discourse would likely turn them away). There are good reasons for doing this kind of writing, but I would suggest that it is not the only kind of writing humanists should do. On the other hand, the functionality of the blog has a strong, deterritorializing function. It is designed to carry the media away via RSS feeds, to go viral via Twitter and Facebook, and so on. It is public and available via Google. And while its discourse can be variable, and potentially as esoteric as any journal article, the culture of blogging in general invites participation and sharing.

— Alex Reid, “On the value of academic blogging”.

2011-02-28T11:04:00.001-04:00

No excuse

I simply don’t understand why anyone engaged in intellectual work should choose to restrict access to their ideas to a privileged audience. Perhaps I feel so strongly about this because I am myself situated outside the academy. I’m not naive — of course I understand that intellectual and indeed creative economies depend in part on people paying for books, journal subscriptions, and so on. But I believe that any scholar whose work is directly or indirectly supported by public funding should feel an ethical obligation to make the products of that work broadly accessible. The obligation is particularly acute in the Caribbean, where excellent libraries and bookshops are few. In the year 2011, anyone who can use a basic word processor can set up a simple website. There’s no excuse for not using the medium to advance the democracy of ideas.

— That’s me, singing an old song, in a conversation with Kelly Baker Josephs (“The Democracy of Ideas”) published in the February 2011 sx salon.

It appears in a special discussion section on “Caribbean Arts and Culture Online”, which also includes contributions by Geoffrey Philp, Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Ivette Romero-Cesareo, Frederic Marc, and Edwin STATS Houghton and Rishi Bonneville.

2011-02-25T11:01:00.000-04:00

Small / champions

2011-02-23T22:58:00.002-04:00

Les maîtres

Who established the Truths governing Art? Who? The Masters. They had no right to do so and it is dishonest to concede this power to them.

— Erik Satie, from a text written on the cover of the manuscript notebook for Mort de Socrate.

2011-02-16T11:08:00.001-04:00

Tomorrow and the world

Some further thoughts on reading Martin Carter and watching recent events in Egypt, published this week in the CRB.

2011-02-11T16:48:00.001-04:00

Notes on Egypt

I switched off Al Jazeera and ignored Twitter for fifteen minutes, trying to get something written, and I missed it. By the time I plugged back in, people were already celebrating in the streets of Cairo.

•

As I type this, it’s more than three hours since Hosni Mubarak’s resignation-by-proxy. Right now I’m watching and hearing hundreds of thousands of people — millions, for all I know — singing and dancing, waving flags, setting off fireworks and aerosol torches. I am six thousand miles away, and finding it hard to get back to work.

•

The Wall Street Journal reporter Tamer El-Ghobashy, via Twitter:

soldier, away from crowds, on cell phone, crying: "mom, i want to celebrate with the people"

•

Martin Carter: “Mankind is breeding heroes every day.”

•

The Jamaican writer Marlon James, via Facebook:

“I never thought in my lifetime that these words would mean anything to me, but goddamn it, Power To The People.”

•

Al Jazeera reporter Jamal Elshayyal, on the celebrations in Alexandria:

“... every meaning of the word hope.”

•

I find myself thinking that the nearest equivalent to this mass euphoria that I’ve ever seen in my own country was when Trinidad and Tobago qualified for the 2006 FIFA World Cup. I ponder this. I think about all the ways that my country is nothing like Egypt. I think about why I’ve been so anxiously, obsessively following events six thousand miles away over the past eighteen days. I think about my own jadedness and alienation from the political realities of my here and now.

•

I think about Martin Carter’s phrase, “a free community of valid persons,” and its four difficult words. Free. Community. Valid. Persons.

•

Freedom, community, validity, and personhood are all hard work.

•

Six thousand miles away, it is hard to get back to work.

2011-02-10T22:38:00.001-04:00

The right to the unknown

don't know what will happen. pre #Jan25 I could predict tomorrow will be like today and yesterday, we revolt to gain the right to unkown

— Alaa Abd El Fattah, @alaa

2011-02-10T13:46:00.000-04:00

Da, chital

There’s a way in Russian of saying that you’ve read something without specifying that you've completed it. Think about how nice a distinction that would be to have at one’s fingertips! Did you read that book? Yes, I did. (Da, chital, which, I suppose, if you want to get technical, would mean something like, “Yes, I engaged in the activity of reading,” without particular reference to one stage of it or another, especially its completion.)

— Russell Scott Valentino, at the Iowa Review blog.

2011-01-26T10:06:00.000-04:00

Domesticate the demon

Virginia Woolf has that great line in The Common Reader, that try as we might to read impartially, “there is always a demon in us who whispers, ‘I hate, I love.’” I’ve always hoped that it might be possible to domesticate the demon, and that if we can understand what in us quickens or recoils and why, some larger truth can be extracted — even if it’s just about our own tastes. How do I know if I have accomplished this? I don‘t.

— Parul Sehgal, interviewed by Scott McLemee.

2011-01-23T16:28:00.000-04:00

Why

Only because I am a bad swimmer.

Only because I cannot draw.

Only because I cannot walk a tightrope.

2011-01-14T12:39:00.001-04:00

A brief definition of the novel

Some things can be helped, other things can’t be helped.

2011-01-13T10:04:00.000-04:00

In other words

All my best lines are mistakes.

2011-01-01T09:06:00.000-04:00

At the turn of the year

2010-12-22T13:09:00.002-04:00

To: communications@foreign.gov.tt

Re: trinidad and tobago abstention in UN human rights vote

Sent: Wednesday 22 December, 2010, 1.08 pm

Hon. Minister of Foreign Affairs
Dr. Surujrattan Rambachan

Dear Minister Rambachan,

I am writing to register my profound disappointment and indeed anger at Trinidad and Tobago's abstention in an important human rights vote in the United Nations General Assembly yesterday.

As you must be aware, on 21 December, 2010, the UN General Assembly voted on an important amendment to a resolution condemning extrajudicial, summary, or arbitrary executions. This amendment, as described in UN document A/65/L.53, restores a reference to sexual orientation in the list of groups of people particularly targeted in extrajudicial killings. It recognises that in many parts of the world people are under extraordinary threat of violence because of their sexual orientation, and urges UN members to take necessary legal and judicial measures to protect all citizens.

The amendment was passed by the General Assembly by a vote of 93 to 55, with 27 abstentions. Trinidad and Tobago was one of the abstaining nations.

As a citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, I am deeply disturbed that my country failed in its responsibility to take a stand on this very basic question of human rights.

I would like to believe that the government of Trinidad and Tobago is committed to creating a safer and more just and tolerant society for all citizens. Yesterday's abstention forces me to question that commitment. I hope you will take the time to respond to this email and explain this very disappointing decision.

Yours faithfully,

Nicholas Laughlin
Diego Martin

2010-12-19T15:23:00.000-04:00

The perils of foreign travel

He goes to a Russian tragedy in five acts by mistake....

— Lydia Davis, “Lord Royston’s Tour”.

2010-12-01T11:32:00.001-04:00

It took me so long to realise

There are too many poems in the world, and not enough poetry.

2010-11-04T17:38:00.000-04:00

“It was going to be extraordinary”

Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green colour-blind. “Blue is the richest colour for me — I can see all of blue.” Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is. A Mark Zuckerberg Production indeed! We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?

— Zadie Smith, reviewing The Social Network, dir. David Fincher, and You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto, by Jaron Lanier, in the New York Review of Books.

2010-10-24T22:53:00.001-04:00

Plot and character

CABRERA INFANTE There is an important parodic strain that runs through most of my favorite English writers: Swift, Sterne, even Lewis Carroll. In fact, the three could be said to have written a single book, with chapters called A Tale of a Tub, Sentimental Journey, and Sylvie and Bruno. Their remote ancestor is the Satyricon, with which they share a will to fragmentation and black humour. INTERVIEWER None seems terribly concerned with plot, or, for that matter, character. CABRERA INFANTE I don’t know what plot and character are. Dickens created all possible (and impossible) characters, so that takes care of character. And plot, for me, belongs in mystery stories and movies. I am concerned with literary space, which is language, and not literary time. When we talk about character, we inevitably drift toward psychology: Choderlos Laclos was the first and the last to use it properly.

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante, interviewed by Alfred MacAdam in Paris Review, Spring 1983.

2010-10-23T17:55:00.000-04:00

Repent it, acrobat.

2010-10-10T11:29:00.000-04:00

I do not know why yet I live to say, “This thing’s to do”

2010-09-22T14:26:00.001-04:00

Next best thing

“The next best thing to having your stuff burned, if you’re ambivalent, is giving it to some guy who gives it to some lady who gives it to her daughters who keep it in an apartment full of cats, right?”

— From Elif Batuman’s article “Kafka’s Last Trial”, in the New York Times Magazine.

2010-09-20T10:51:00.000-04:00

Meaning yes, message no

INTERVIEWER When you say that sometimes you think your poetry is weird, what do you mean exactly? ASHBERY Every once in a while I will pick up a page and it has something, but what is it? It seems so unlike what poetry “as we know it” is. But at other moments I feel very much at home with it. It’s a question of a sudden feeling of unsureness at what I am doing, wondering why I am writing the way I am, and also not feeling the urge to write in another way. INTERVIEWER Is the issue of meaning or message something that is uppermost in your mind when you write? ASHBERY Meaning yes, but message no. I think my poems mean what they say, and whatever might be implicit within a particular passage, but there is no message, nothing I want to tell the world particularly except what I am thinking when I am writing.

— John Ashbery, interviewed by Peter A. Stitt in Paris Review, Winter 1983.

2010-09-19T11:58:00.000-04:00

Flag Project, Ebony G. Patterson

Flag Project (work in progress), by Ebony G. Patterson. From Shot in Kingston: The Digital Scene, an exhibition of digital photo- and video-based work by younger Jamaican artists, part of Alice Yard’s 4x4 anniversary programme. Photograph by Rodell Warner.

2010-09-18T14:00:00.000-04:00

On “systemic indelibility”

Imagine that you are struck with a curious and rather outlandish thought that you don’t necessarily want to defend for the rest of your life but nonetheless feel compelled to share — if only to see how others react. You write an impassioned paragraph detailing your idea but pause before posting the entry online. Without an editor, you are the sole judge of the quality of your work, and you are aware that by hitting the “publish” button, you would be subjecting yourself to possibly harsh, often anonymous criticism. You must take into account the Internet’s systemic indelibility: that henceforth your entire intellectual stance could be defined by a single, possibly ill-conceived argument. So you vacillate between killing the conversation before it begins or risking becoming “misrepresented and burned”.... Inevitably, this ends in some form of self-censorship. Not every form of online self-censorship is necessarily harmful — if people stopped documenting such things as the intimate details of their breakfast, society would hardly be worse off — but aside from oversharing, what will happen to plain sharing? Withholding inane tweets or provocative photos is one thing, but what will become of intelligent exchange and thoughtful conversation?

— Atossa Abrahamian on the epistemic consequences of a medium that “never forgives, and never forgets.”

2010-09-06T12:00:00.003-04:00

“What’s valid?”

Boscoe Holder — artist, musician, dancer, raconteur, and a man who squeezed more pleasure out of life than most — died in 2007. He left behind several outrageous novels’ worth of stories and memories, and — more important — a large and crucial body of work, including hundreds of paintings and drawings in his studio.

Earlier this year, several of Holder’s portraits were included in an exhibition in Berlin co-curated by Peter Doig, the British artist who now lives in Trinidad, and the American writer Hilton Als. A few days ago, the New York Review of Books blog posted a conversation with Doig, Als, and the artist Angus Cook on “Discovering the Art of Boscoe Holder, Trinidadian Master”, accompanied by images of fourteen paintings.

I’m glad to think that Holder’s work may be reaching new and wider audiences, but reading this conversation left me bemused and bothered at statements such as:

Peter Doig: ...The drawback of Boscoe having lived and worked in Trinidad is that there is so little kept history — there’s almost no public archiving. It’s hard to know where all the Boscoe paintings are. The Caribbean being what it is, sadly, there’s not much interest in history. I mean, sometimes for good reason — people like to forget history. People like to knock down old colonial buildings. Get rid of them, you know, who cares? Nothing is under preservation order. The weather destroys things. Photos disappear into the sunlight, books get eaten by all sorts of insects and stuff. I mean, everything there is kind of temporal, really. The forests and the jungle take over.... Hilton Als: I’ve been dreaming, literally, since last night, of the next show that I want to do with you. And we have to do it, and it’ll be called “After Rousseau.” And it’ll be Caribbean art, which no one ever shows, because they always think it’s, like, parasols and beach scenes. But it will be not just a show of paintings, but all sorts of things, like newspapers, all the shit that gets disappeared.... That’s what’s interesting to me, that it would be not just painting, but about the whole idea of reclaiming the past from the Caribbean, which is apt to destroy it.

I responded at the NYRB blog with this comment:

•

It’s pleasing to see a significant Trinidadian artist receiving critical attention and appreciation. (And I suppose the four small, unsigned Boscoe drawings I own are now worth a bit more than they were a few days ago.) But aspects of this conversation perturb me.

Words are slippery. They can mean different and unexpected things in different contexts. “Discovering”, in the Caribbean, is a heavily freighted word. Here in Trinidad and Tobago, we used to have a public holiday called Discovery Day, commemorating the occasion in 1498 when Columbus turned up off the south coast of Trinidad. We took Discovery Day off our calendar twenty-five years ago, but the notion of the Caribbean as a landscape ripe for discovery endures.

And I’m disturbed by statements like “there’s not much interest in history” and “everything there is kind of temporal, really”; and “the whole idea of reclaiming the past from the Caribbean, which is apt to destroy it.” Perhaps one ought not take casual conversational remarks too seriously, but these raise crucial and troubling questions about autonomy; about who has the right (or the resources) to claim or “reclaim” the past; and about what the late Trinidadian philosopher Lloyd Best called epistemic sovereignty.

This conversation also raises questions about what “history” means, and to whom, and who gets to write the definition. Someone who was born and has always lived in the Caribbean, like me, might think we are frequently over-burdened by a history that includes five centuries of colonial and neo-colonial exploitation. (I refer readers who don’t understand what I’m talking about to Derek Walcott’s poem “The Sea Is History”, as good a primer as any.)

I too worry about historic preservation in my country, the status of our archives, museums, and libraries, and the under-funding and -staffing of most public institutions charged with stewardship of our heritage. But I also worry that this state of affairs leaves the Caribbean vulnerable to external agents with their own concerns and priorities. I don’t espouse a crude cultural nationalism, or discount the often valuable work of foreign researchers, archivists, and collectors. And “outside” perspectives have their own validity. But there is a very long history of the Caribbean’s social and cultural complexities being represented by foreign voices. Caribbean artists, writers, thinkers, and citizens grapple with the challenge and the imperative to describe and define our own reality in and on our own terms.

Finally, I’m entirely puzzled by Hilton Als’s statement that “no one ever shows” Caribbean art “because they always think it’s, like, parasols and beach scenes.” Caribbean artists working in every conceivable medium — hardly just topographical painting — show in galleries and museums all over the world, even if they don’t always achieve the publicity or financial success of some of their North American and European contemporaries. In close proximity to Als in New York, and just in recent years, important shows of contemporary Caribbean artists have run at the Brooklyn Museum (Infinite Island, 2007-2008) and Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut (Rockstone and Bootheel, 2009-2010). A retrospective on the Puerto Rican artist Rafael Ferrer just closed at El Museo del Barrio. El Museo is collaborating with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Bronx Museum to organise a major tripartite Caribbean show to open in late 2011. These are only the first examples that come to mind.

As Peter Doig aptly says: “it makes you think, well, actually, what’s valid?”

2010-09-05T19:07:00.001-04:00

The world’s strange bounty, no. 4

Spectators of the Apollo 11 launch on a beach near the NASA Kennedy Space Centre, 16 July, 1969. Copyright-free image posted at Flickr by NASA.

2010-08-25T12:32:00.000-04:00

“Play it, here I am!”

2010-08-24T23:32:00.000-04:00

When the devil calls

Be ever engaged, so that whenever the devil calls he may find you occupied.

— St. Jerome, Letter 125

2010-08-22T19:27:00.000-04:00

People who write novels

... people who write novels only write them when they have very little else to write. Any number of people who write novels no doubt taking their work quite seriously, in fact.

— David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress, p. 229 (Dalkey Archive edition).

2010-08-21T23:50:00.001-04:00

“Tarde, uma nuvem rósea lenta e transparente”

Villa-Lobos: Bachiana Brasileira No. 5 for soprano and orchestra of violoncelli.

2010-08-20T13:35:00.001-04:00

“How fortunate the specialist!”

A traveller who has just arrived in a country where everything is new to him is held up by the difficulty of making up his mind. How fortunate the sociologist who is interested only in manners and customs; the painter who cares only for the country’s aspect; the naturalist who occupies himself with insects or plants! How fortunate the specialist!... If I had a second life, I could be happy spending it merely in the study of white ants.
— André Gide, Travels in the Congo, trans. Dorothy Bussy, p. 12 (Modern Age edition, 1937).

2010-08-19T18:27:00.000-04:00

The world’s strange bounty, no. 3

From the September-October 1934 issue of Albums du Crocodile, on “Tatouages du ‘Milieu’”, assembled by Jean Lacassagne.

2010-08-18T20:31:00.001-04:00

Poetry and innocence

Innocent fun. I’d like to stress the innocence. Hours go by and nobody’s been harmed. The neighbours don’t even know you’re at home.

— James Merrill on the fun of poetry (from a 1991 interview with Thomas Bolt, published in BOMB.)

2010-08-18T11:20:00.002-04:00

“More demanding than most of what passes for scholarship”

The year after the publication of Romantic Image, Kermode became professor of English at Manchester University, where he worked until 1965. From then on, he gave much of his energy to the writing of reviews and essays. Some of those from the late 1950s and the 60s were collected and published in Puzzles and Epiphanies (1962) and Continuities (1968). It is strange to think that the New Statesman and the Spectator once published pieces as freighted with reading as these. Kermode himself wrote in the introduction to the latter volume that any literary journalism that was able to satisfy non-specialist interests “without loss of intellectual integrity” was “more demanding than most of what passes for scholarship”.

— R.I.P. Frank Kermode (1919–2010), one of the few contemporary literary scholars with a genuine sense of the duties of a public intellectual, and one of the very few I actually enjoyed reading.

2010-08-16T16:45:00.000-04:00

On being a free man

I’ve not been humiliated by employment, in my own eyes.

— V.S. Naipaul, interviewed on BBC TV in 1994.

2010-08-15T15:11:00.001-04:00

On asceticism

I have never understood asceticism. I have always thought it proceeded from lack of sensuousness, lack of vitality. I’ve never realised that there is a form of asceticism — consisting in simplifying one’s needs and seeking to take a more active role in satisfying them — which is precisely a more developed kind of sensuousness.

— Susan Sontag, Journals, vol. 1, p. 280.

2010-08-13T13:13:00.005-04:00

The world’s strange bounty, no. 2

Cassava plant with sphinx moth and tree boa, engraving by Maria Sibylla Merian, from Metamorphosis Insectorum Surinamensium (1705). Courtesy the Göttinger Digitalisierungszentrum.

2010-08-12T14:00:00.002-04:00

’Ous kai dire ça vrai

Si mwen di ’ous ça fait mwen la peine
’Ous kai dire ça vrai.
Si mwen di ’ous ça penetrait mwen
’Ous peut dire ça vrai.
Ces mamailles actuellement
Pas ka faire l’amour z’autres pour un rien.

2010-08-12T11:16:00.000-04:00

Mental events

Sort of as a result of the interdependence of life and intellectual work, ideas (understood simply as creativity in one’s discipline) rarely occur from pure concentration on the abstracted problems of intellectual work. A sort of decollage, if you will, a thinking by analogy and intuition, the cross-classification of life and work, produces the best ideas. I find this concept easier to grasp in terms of a conjuncture. At any given moment the combination of the books you are reading, the environment you are in, the emotional sensations you are experiencing, the intentions that impel you to think, are utterly unique. And ideas are the mental events that result from such conjunctures.

— From Robert Minto’s reflections on C. Wright Mills’s essay “On Intellectual Craftmanship”.

2010-08-10T18:10:00.006-04:00

“With you giving them the real stuff”

“I must let you know how much I have been enjoying your broadcast.... I was awfully surprised when you said that it was the first time you stood before a mike. And would you believe me that there are still many fellowes [sic] around who in spite of going to the talkies so often do not understand some of the Americans and English people when they speak, but with you giving them the real stuff you can imagine how they enjoy it all.”

This is a fan letter written to my grandfather Ken Laughlin (the letter misspells his name) by E.C. Lyons of Woodford Lodge, Chaguanas, Trinidad, on 26 January, 1937.

My grandfather was a sports journalist for over sixty years. When his weekly programme Ken Laughlin on Sport went off the air in the mid 1990s, it was the longest running radio programme in Trinidad and Tobago, and possibly in the southern Caribbean. In January 1937, he gave the first live radio commentary on a cricket match in the West Indies. It was an intercolonial game, Trinidad vs. Barbados, at the Queen’s Park Oval. He was twenty-three. E.C. Lyons’s letter is one of several congratulating my grandfather on this pioneering broadcast.

(Note that the letter is dated 1936, but this is clearly an error. All the other correspondence relating to this broadcast is dated January or February 1937.)

I’d guess that over the decades he must have got many more letters from listeners in different parts of the Caribbean, but it was this batch, from the very start of his career, that my grandfather decided to save. After he died in 2001, I found them in a box of documents and memorabilia that came into my hands. I’d lost track of them a while back, but found the letters again yesterday (while searching for something else, naturally), and decided to scan a few of them and post them online in my little Flickr family archive. Some of the other fan letters came from San Fernando, Moruga, and Georgetown, British Guiana.

I posted links to the letters on my Facebook page, and got a few comments, including one asking whether the letters were important enough to be archived, and how I planned to preserve them. Well, they’re already in an archive: mine, and scanning and uploading them is one form of preservation. I’m pretty much a pack-rat, and a good couple dozen shelf-feet of documents of all kinds are filed away across several rooms of my house, in different degrees of sortedness — everything from family papers like these letters (or like my other grandfather’s certificates of discharge from the Royal Canadian Steamship Company) to correspondence with friends and colleagues to newspaper clippings on subjects that interest me; also exhibition catalogues, theatre programmes, set lists from jointpop concerts, handwritten notes from Alice Yard meetings, maps of just about every country and city I’ve visited, and masses of material related to the various magazines and other publishing projects I’ve worked on over the years.

This isn’t terribly unusual. I imagine most people working in publishing or in vaguely literary pursuits have similar personal archives. These dozens of feet of boxes and files are obviously important to me, and I hope some of the material I’m so carefully holding on to will turn out to be important to other people in the future. But I also know that my most important archive is one that can’t fit in boxes and manila folders — it’s the online archive anyone can access by typing my name into a search engine.

I can control only some aspects of this. And that’s exactly why I’ve kept this blog going for nearly eight years (and counting), why I have my own website, why I post images to Flickr and share thoughts and links at Twitter. “If it’s not on the web, it doesn’t exist.” Does anyone still remember who specifically first had this insight? Probably not, because it’s so irrefutably apt a summary of how we understand knowledge and our access to it in the Internet age that it might as well be a collective expression of faith. So why wouldn’t I want to use these various media to profess my version of myself, my thoughts, my hopes, anxieties, and dreams?

(A kind of digression: an archive is a record. It is also an assertion — of existence, of significance. It is evidence. It is a model for categorising and understanding the world. It can even be a creative undertaking, a work of art. And while historically the fact of being archived has often been a form of validation — this is important because it is in the archive, that is not and may be discarded and forgotten — cheap online storage available to (theoretically, almost) everybody forces us now to reconsider what an archive is, and again makes it possible for “anyone” to be an archivist, so that personal archives are easy to both assemble and make publicly accessible. The ability to make a public archive has radically expanded.)

In my mind, this is also tied up with bigger ideas of self-determination. Naturally, this is because I’m from a part of the world that historically has been described, portrayed, and defined overwhelmingly through stories told by people from elsewhere: stories about what the Caribbean, the tropics, and small island societies are and should be. I’ve never seen a pirate ship and never worn a grass skirt and, thanks, I do speak fairly good English, even if my accent amuses you. I live in a middle-class suburb of a medium-size city in a largely industrialised country that happens to be a small tropical Caribbean island. Many of my friends are writers, artists, and thinkers working hard to understand themselves as individuals, ourselves as a society, trying to understand what concepts like nation, culture, and history really mean, trying to imagine and build individual and collective futures. Whether or not we acknowledge the lines of succession, many of us are engaged in what the late Lloyd Best repeatedly described as the imperative to comprehend ourselves on and in our own terms. An essential aspect of this process is making sure my — our — ideas, stories, images, and languages are also represented in the global conversation and the global archive of the web. Because if we’re not there, we don’t exist.

It may seem that I’ve strayed a long way from my grandfather’s fan letters. There’s a specific reason I chose E.C. Lyons’s letter to open this post. This is the bit of that letter that I specially like:

... would you believe me that there are still many fellowes around who in spite of going to the talkies so often do not understand some of the Americans and English people when they speak, but with you giving them the real stuff you can imagine how they enjoy it all.

I’m moved by the suggestion that my grandfather’s voice — a Trinidadian voice, speaking Trinidadian English, and expressing a Trinidadian reality — was more meaningful to those listeners in Woodford Lodge seventy-three years ago than the voices of “the Americans and English people” who otherwise occupied the airwaves. It helps me understand the part he played in the still-incomplete epistemological enterprise Best described, and maybe it helps me understand the part I’m playing, or trying to play.

So, yes: these letters are important enough to be archived. They exist physically in my personal archive, and now they exist digitally — epistemologically — if necessary, defiantly — in the archive of the world.

2010-08-09T14:30:00.002-04:00

“Each traveller hopes”

And each traveller hopes: “Let me be far from any Physician.”

— W.H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, Letters from Iceland.

2010-08-08T15:29:00.000-04:00

Raspberry Bourrée

&amp;amp;lt;a href="http://goodevening.bandcamp.com/track/raspberry-bourr-e"&amp;amp;gt;Raspberry Bourrée by Good Evening&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;

Helping to keep my chin up this overcast Sunday.

2010-08-08T13:29:00.001-04:00

The world’s strange bounty, no. 1

Glass models of microscopic organisms in the Natural History Museum, Vienna. Photographed in 2007 by Curious Expeditions and posted at Flickr under a Creative Commons license.

2010-08-07T11:32:00.001-04:00

“The task of a lifetime”

I will do anything to avoid boredom. It is the task of a lifetime. You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinitives and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.

— Anne Carson, introduction to “Short Talks”.

2010-08-06T16:47:00.001-04:00

“But not for me”

The previous post has put me in mind of this:

2010-08-06T14:22:00.002-04:00

“But not for us”

— From Marmaduke, by Franz Kafka, at We Who Are About to Die.

2010-08-05T23:54:00.001-04:00

“A patriot of your apartment”

When you are a writer, you are a patriot of your apartment. Sometimes your study is more important than the country you are living in.

— Adam Zagajewski, profiled by Arthur Lubow in the Spring 2010 Threepenny Review.

2010-08-03T00:52:00.001-04:00

Gadé couman la mizè fini pou nous

An nous dansé Congo,
An nous dansé Pétro,
Papa bon Dié di nan ciel la mizè fini pou nous.

2010-06-10T11:21:00.001-04:00

Letters to Cicero

Yesterday or maybe the day before, I was reading through my notes from the interview that never was, when I came across a passage, one of Markson’s captured anecdotes. It was in Reader’s Block, and I had marked it with three asterisks — my highest rating, given to those parts I absolutely needed to ask Markson about. “Petrarch sometimes wrote letters to long-dead authors,” Markson writes. “He was also a dedicated hunter of classic manuscripts. Once, after discovering some previously unknown works of Cicero, he wrote Cicero the news.” Reading that again, I thought that maybe art is, in the end, like so many letters to Cicero, notes addressed to the dead, to one’s ancestors and betters, or simply to those one had in mind while working.

— From Paul Maliszewski’s tribute to David Markson in n+1.

2010-06-08T12:29:00.003-04:00

Love and fear

Jonathan Santlofer: Did you have any training, any art education? Peter Schjeldahl: No, none. Jonathan Santlofer: So all of the art history that you bring into the writing you’ve learned or read on your own — things that you bring to it, interpret for a particular piece. Peter Schjeldahl: Yeah, and this is true, by the way, of Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg, too. The idea of going to school to be an art critic is a very crazy idea. I educated myself in public, which is a very painful way to learn — by writing and then discovering that I don’t know what the fuck I’m talking about. But you remember the lessons vividly. Also, everything I’ve learned about art was (a) because I was actually interested, or (b) I was actually interested in covering my ass because of what I was writing about. Love and fear, the two strongest emotions we have. It all starts with emotion.

— From “Mask of the critic”, an interview published in Guernica in January 2006.

2010-03-27T20:01:00.001-04:00

Town on Keate Street

Broadsides from the third issue of Town, posted on Keate Street, opposite Memorial Park, Port of Spain; 27 March, 2010

2010-03-07T11:38:00.003-04:00

The flight of the cobo

My Carnival Monday placard from the band Cobo Town, proudly carried through the streets of Port of Spain nearly three weeks ago. The face of Calder “Cobo” Hart — head of the powerful state construction agency Udecott, widely suspected of massive financial improprieties and thought by some to be Prime Minister Patrick Manning’s bagman, subject of investigation by the Uff commission of enquiry — replaced the national coat of arms in the middle of a giant $100 bill.

Last night the news broke that Hart, formerly protected by Manning, was forced to resign from Udecott and his positions at other state agencies, and has fled the country with his family. This morning everybody asking how many blue notes this cobo managed to pack in his luggage.

Photo by Georgia Popplewell.

2010-03-04T10:42:00.000-04:00

Overheard

On the pool terrace of the Torarica Hotel, Paramaribo, Suriname; 24 February, 2010:

“Dutch people don’t get a hangover from Parbo. So we can drink as much as we want. It’s because it’s made from rice.”

2010-03-02T20:04:00.001-04:00

Town in Paramaribo

Broadsides from the third issue of Town on Kleine Waterstraat in Paramaribo; 26 February, 2010. This issue of Town engages with the Paramaribo SPAN project

2010-02-06T10:19:00.001-04:00

“The rabbit of the Andes and the rabbit of Sar-e-Sang...”

Four poems, published in the February issue of Blackbox Manifold.

2010-02-01T17:59:00.002-04:00

On not being elsewhere

I came of age in the 1980s, which with adult hindsight I can see was a very pessimistic time for Caribbean people of my parents' generation, but I remember as a schoolchild thinking that people who "went away to live" were specially lucky, even if it was an eventuality I couldn't imagine for myself. Had I gone to university abroad, it's likely I wouldn't have come back to Trinidad, not to live. I still can't decide whether that would have been a better thing. Having reached my mid-30s, having never lived anywhere else, I'm now fairly certain I'll stay here. But that's something I still think about often — almost every time I travel to the U.S. or Britain, I spend a good chunk of my time trying to imagine an alternative life there. I think that for many Caribbean people of my generation and approximate background — middle class, relatively well-educated — the question of going or staying remains acute. Sitting here in Diego Martin, west of Port of Spain, it seems to me that in 2010 the literary and intellectual traffic within the Caribbean — and between the region and North America and Europe — is still directed mainly by agents physically located outside the Caribbean itself. Most of our intellectuals and writers are elsewhere. Almost all our books are published elsewhere.... I don't mean to set up a binary opposition between here and there, local and diaspora, us and them, because of course the reality is far more complex. There is conversation and exchange and movement between all these nodes, and they are often fruitful. But aspects of the situation are depressing. For the better part of five centuries the Caribbean was devoted to producing raw materials to enrich already wealthy countries further north. Now sometimes it feels like we're producing cultural raw materials to be turned into books, films, lectures, etc. by intellectual agents in New York or London or Toronto.

I've long admired Scott McLemee's elegant, erudite, and incisive critical writing. We've corresponded, very occasionally and briefly, in the seven-odd years since he reviewed Letters from London, the book of C.L.R. James's early essays I edited. (Among other things, Scott is one of the nicer and more sensible Jamesians around.) I was surprised when he emailed nearly a fortnight ago asking if I'd do an interview for "Intellectual Affairs", his weekly column in Inside Higher Ed. The provocation for the piece was Haiti — specifically, the way the 12 January earthquake was being discussed in the Caribbean, and what this might suggest about cultural and historical attitudes, as well as the current state of Caribbean intellectual life. Hardly narrow matters, and inevitably messy.

Over the course of a few days, Scott emailed me two or three difficult questions, which I answered with deliberate speed. I typed quickly, didn't revise or polish, didn't specially try for nuance. The result — gently tidied up by Scott, and published last Wednesday — is here.

Our conversation begins and ends with Haiti, but digresses down some of the anxious paths my thoughts seem to trace these days. Re-reading it afterwards, I wondered if I should have tried to be less pessimistic, more tactful. But I think it accurately captures something of my state of mind this last year or two. Something of my mental grappling with — for? — context and relevance.

2010-01-28T15:28:00.002-04:00

A brief personal note

Even now, almost eighteen years later, I can’t say exactly why: but it was “Seymour: An Introduction”, read when I was sixteen years old, that first made me want to write.

I think the appropriate word is “goddam”.

2009-12-21T12:30:00.001-04:00

“Spaciousness, intimacy, and silence”

Define happiness, someone asked me recently. Absorption, I said instantly (it was an e-mail interview), and anything that gives me an inner life and a sense of spaciousness, intimacy and silence. The world is much better for many of us now than it was 10 years ago, and I never could have dreamed so many of us would have so many kinds of diversion, excitement and information at our fingertips. But information cannot teach the use of information. And diversion doesn’t teach us concentration. Imagine a seven-hour-long heart-to-heart with someone who’s been saving up all her life for what she’s about to whisper in your ear. The medium that has been dying the whole century may be one way we can rebel against the hidden dictatorship of Right Now.

— Pico Iyer on “the tyranny of the moment” in the Los Angeles Times.

2009-11-13T19:47:00.001-04:00

Slipping down the slope

Since the Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago doesn't currently have a website, I've decided to post this statement, just received by email from the MATT executive:

It was with shock and dismay that the media association learned of the recommendations of the Privileges Committee of the House of Representatives with regard to Mr Andre Bagoo of the Newsday newspaper. On finding Mr Bagoo guilty of an offence, the committee recommended not only that the newspaper publish an apology, but also that Mr Bagoo be banned from the media gallery of Parliament until the end of the session. Matt considers this an unjustifiably harsh and highly unusual punishment. Mr Bagoo had been accused by Information Minister Neil Parsanlal of committing a contempt of Parliament by publishing the proceedings of the Privileges Committee in another matter before those proceedings had been reported to the House. The association admits that this publication by Newsday was indeed in breach of the Standing Orders of Parliament. However, in previous cases involving breaches of privilege--including the case prematurely reported by Mr Bagoo, which involved Udecott--once the accused party apologises for the offence, he or she is almost invariably let off and no further action taken. It should be noted that the editor in chief of Newsday, Ms Therese Mills, appeared before the committee and apologised for breaching the Standing Orders. In addition, in a minority report, three members of the committee disagreed with the recommendations and argued that banning a reporter contravened the constitutionally enshrined freedom of the press. They asked that members of the House reject either the entire report or that recommendation. Matt endorses this call, and now awaits with apprehension the committee’s findings in the case of two other journalists also sent to the Privileges Committee. In light of the recommendations in the case of Mr Bagoo, Matt notes with grave concern that a pattern may be emerging of attempted intimidation, by way of the Privileges Committee, of journalists whose reporting may have embarrassed or offended the Government.

2009-11-10T12:29:00.002-04:00

Dear Aunt Jobiska

Off the roots. Come on, join
Perhaps—I gripped the chair more tighdy
African temper in amour

For his Aunt Jobiska said, “No harm”
They sailed away in a Sieve, they did
Return hot joy time!
No brakes in amour

— A found poem, if you will: my favourite spam email subject lines from the past week. Apologies to Edward Lear clearly required.

2009-10-25T10:21:00.001-04:00

“It’s quite practical”

I have no use for the idea that what needs to be written will get written. I am fully aware that if practical circumstances allowed, I’d write more, and of better quality, that now probably won’t get written. I don’t mean this to sound mystical. It’s quite practical really. I think many good writers never make it and much good writing is lost or undone.

— My friend, collaborator, and co-editor Vahni Capildeo, interviewed today at the newish arts blog PLEASURE (first of a series of interviews with Trinidadian artists called “This/discourse/has/no/start(middle)nd”).

2009-10-21T19:16:00.004-04:00

The day they “beautified” Hope

The spot where Tragarete Road meets Dundonald Street and Richmond Street is one of Port of Spain's in-between zones: just a little too far north to be downtown, too far east to be Woodbrook or Newtown — a neighbourhood that doesn't really have a name. One corner of the intersection is occupied by a gas station, another by a car dealership, a third by the old Strand cinema. Because the street grids to the north and south aren't quite aligned, in the intersection itself is a little traffic island, grassed over and roughly triangular. Thousands of people drive or walk past this place on an average weekday.

I'd wager not many pause to look at the piece of public art in the middle of the traffic island: a concrete sculpture, perhaps twenty feet tall, abstract in form. From a narrow base it widens into an organic diamond-like shape with an oval void at its centre, womb- or egg-like, then it tapers upwards into a kind of spire. I've often thought of it as a giant needle, its eye framing the view down Richmond Street to the sea. Perhaps thirty years ago, when it was still new, this object stood out in the city's bustle. Nowadays it recedes into the chaos of billboards and traffic.

This is Spirit of Hope, a work by the late Patrick Chu Foon (1931-1998), the artist responsible for many of Port of Spain's public sculptures, from the walking Gandhi (1969) in Kew Place to the Tribute to the Steelband Movement (1972) in Tamarind Square to Lord Kitchener (1994) outside the Harvard Club in St. James.

Spirit of Hope was installed in 1971, less than a decade after Independence and a year after the Black Power Uprising that expressed wide public discontent with Trinidad and Tobago's political and economic leadership. It was not a terribly hopeful point in Trinidad's recent history, to say the least, and I wonder if Chu Foon's sculpture was the manifestation of a genuine optimism or idealism, of an ironic detachment, or of an artist's inward-turning in the face of social breakdown and despair.

I thought of this today when I got a phone call from my friend Christopher Cozier, who had just driven down Tragarete Road and noticed that someone had painted over the sculpture in a shade of pastel green.

Georgia Popplewell and I decided to see this for ourselves. We drove into town, parked on Fraser Street, and walked round the corner. Spirit of Hope stood there looking sheepish in its new coat of hospital-wall green. No doubt some civic or corporate entity had decided this isolated object, rather dingy-looking after thirty-eight years in the car exhaust fumes, needed sprucing up. Except the paint ran out before the workmen finished their assignment, or else their ladder wasn't tall enough: the pale green stopped a good four feet below the tip of the spire. It's anyone's guess whether they'll return to finish the job.

I don't know what's worse: this act of vandalisation in the name of philistine "beautification"; or the fact that it was probably the result of considered good intentions (of the kind that pave the proverbial road to perdition); or even the fact that I feel slightly guilty bothering about the whole thing, in the midst of a prolonged nationwide social collapse with far more urgent symptoms. Why am I troubling myself about an obscure piece of public sculpture instead of picketing Whitehall or UDECOTT or the EMA or the office of the Leader of the Opposition or the constituency office of the MP I didn't vote for?

Maybe because this too is a telling symptom. It tells me how unaware we are, as citizens, of the civic spaces we live and work in, and how irresponsibly we behave towards them. It tells me how little respect we have for the work of our artists and thinkers, and how eagerly the powers-that-be package that work in more palatable forms. It tells me we're far too fond of quick, superficial solutions to our problems. Sculpture looking dirty? It would be hard work to research the artist's medium and methods, come up with a serious restoration plan, strip away older layers of unsympathetic paint, and rethink the architecture of that intersection to give the piece context, relevance, poise. Much easier to buy a tin of green paint.

Much easier to pay a few hundred million dollars to drop some big skyscrapers into Port of Spain — look, we have tall buildings, just like Miami! — than to think about the real strengths and flaws of our urban infrastructure, how to preserve the former and fix the latter. (Who cares if downtown still floods if it rains too hard for too long?) Easier to buy a giant blimp to hover over the country like the Eye of Sauron than to understand and address the real social inequalities that drive the crime and murder rate. Easier to erect a prime ministerial palace, it seems, than to build schools and put equipment into hospitals.

So this is what we do with the Spirit of Hope when it starts to look dingy: give it a cheap coat of paint, don't even bother to finish the job properly, throw up three-four advertising signs around it, and congratulate ourselves on "beautifying" the city — secure in the knowledge that almost nobody will notice.

2009-10-17T16:56:00.000-04:00

Town on lower George Street

Broadsides from the first issue of Town, posted on the old Angostura Building, lower George Street, Port of Spain; 17 October, 2009

2009-10-16T12:22:00.004-04:00

No license, no registration

Yesterday, Wesley Gibbings, president of the Association of Caribbean Media Workers (ACM), sent the following message to media associations around the region:

This is to advise of the imminent introduction of a Model Professional Services Bill to Caricom member states which calls for, among other things, the registration and licensing of media workers. The bill is meant to 'regularise' and harmonise standards among professionals in a wide range of categories under the ambit of the CSME. The subject was raised at a CSME workshop in St Lucia on October 12 by Caricom officials. I have already advised that this matter is not subject to negotiation. It is a well-established fact that the licensing of journalists constitutes an outright threat to freedom of the press and other rights. There is also a growing body of international judicial precedents which determines its unlawful nature. The ACM is moving quickly to nip this in the bud. We are inviting a senior Caricom official to discuss this matter with us at the forthcoming conference and fifth biennial general meeting in Grenada on December 10-12. Hopefully, the outcome will be a very clear message to have this withdrawn as a proposal to Caricom member states. This is dangerous territory and I am urging all of us to use the tools at our disposal to publicise this issue and to act decisively to ensure the model Bill, especially as it relates to media workers, does not reach anywhere near our parliaments. We will be mobilising international support for the campaign.

Georgia Popplewell links to a copy of the draft bill here. She urges her readers to publicise this issue, and I want to do the same. (Georgia also notes that the Media Association of Trinidad and Tobago, which forwarded Gibbings's message to its members last night via Facebook, does not have a "proper, public-facing web site" — their blog hasn't been updated since May 2007 — which, for a group of media professionals in AD 2009, is almost unbelievable. I want to add that although the ACM does have an informative website, they are yet to post anything about the Model Professionals Bill there.)

I also want to urge interested readers — and I hope you are all interested, not to mention alarmed at the possibility of regional legislation for registering journalists — to read the draft bill. It is meant to apply to a wide range of professions, but it takes no account of the circumstances and principles that make, say, medicine or engineering different to journalism. The draft bill, which is meant to be adopted by all Caricom states and leaves various blanks to be filled by respective governments, if applied to journalists and media workers, would:

= set up a professional council with some members chosen by media workers and some appointed by the government — the proportions of one to the other are left to individual governments;

= require all media workers to apply to that council for registration;

= further require all media workers to apply and pay for an annual license to practise their profession, with the fee to be determined by individual governments;

= require media workers to "display such License in a place in the facility where he operates, that is normally accessible to the public";

= forbid unlicensed persons from practising journalism, on pain of "summary conviction to a fine of [ ] or to imprisonment for [#] years". (Imagine the glee with which the Trinidad and Tobago Cabinet would fill in those blanks.)

With a few simple manipulations, this bill could essentially give Caricom governments the power to determine who can and cannot practise journalism. And it leaves citizen journalists — who the Caribbean mainstream media still don't quite understand or respect — in limbo. Would I be legally required to apply for registration and a license to continue writing on this blog? I don't "cover" "news" per se, but I have reported and commented on current events in the past, and insist on the right to do so in the future. Does that make me a journalist under the terms of the bill?

I don't have court clothes, and I don't intend to buy any. Please spread the word about this misguided piece of possible legislation and let's make it clear to Caricom that, as Gibbings writes, "this matter is not subject to negotiation."

2009-10-13T09:45:00.003-04:00

Urbi et orbi

The corner of Abercromby Street and Hart Street, Port of Spain

A new project, but one I’ve been turning over in my head for some time: Town, a modest literary magazine, publishing poems, very short prose, and images in broadside editions, and also (of course) online.

This is partly (I will admit) a response to my continued anxiety and uncertainty about the future of the CRB; partly a way to experiment with different ways of no-budget, non-profit literary publishing; partly an opportunity to make things, attractive physical objects—in this case, simple 8½ x 11-inch broadsides run off on ordinary office equipment (huge thanks to my friend Sean Leonard for his help with this). We’ve printed a few dozen copies of each broadside, and begun posting them around Port of Spain on walls, fences, lampposts, and elsewhere.

I asked my friends Anu Lakhan and Vahni Capildeo, brilliant writers both, to be my co-editors. We agreed to include one poem by each of us in the first issue—if we’re going to ask other writers to let us stick their work up on public walls, we thought, we should be willing to do the same with our own. We also included a wry and very short fable by Kelvin Christopher James, a Trinidadian writer based in New York (whose work I’d previously published in the CRB), and three beautiful, haunting images by Nikolai Noel (1, 2, 3), excerpted from a larger work in progress.

Town launched last week: Anu and I traipsed round Port of Spain on Friday with a sheaf of broadsides and a roll of masking tape. We hope people will be surprised, perhaps delighted, perhaps confused by these fragments of poetry and art scattered through the city’s urban topography. We hope people will like them enough to steal the broadsides and take them home (by Saturday night one was already missing from the hoarding outside QRC). Those who don’t live or work in Port of Spain can read the full contents of the magazine at our website, and if you like what you find there, you can download PDFs of the broadsides, print them from your desktop, and post them wherever you please.

More about the hows and whys of Town here. Find out how to contribute here. See images of the broadsides posted around Port of Spain and elsewhere here. The first issue is all-Trinidadian, but for future issues there is no geographical restriction on contributing writers and artists: we simply want to publish good work, whether its effect is to surprise, to delight, or to confuse.

And here is my own contribution to the first issue of Town: a poem called “A Place to Start”.

Outside QRC, Maraval Road, Port of Spain

2009-10-05T18:13:00.000-04:00

Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ch. 2

His life was not very exotic, but he hoped his mind was.

2009-10-02T11:24:00.002-04:00

The Englishman

Annai, March 2005

The Englishman had two sons, both by his Brazilian first wife, who was now dead. The elder son, he said, was twenty or twenty-one. He was in London, a student, studying film. The Englishman’s voice softened when he spoke of this elder son. There was a photograph of him in the library of the ranch house, a black-and-white photograph in a silver frame. It was a formal portrait, taken in a studio. The son — his features delicate, his hair neatly parted in an old-fashioned style, his mouth barely smiling — looked something like a film-star of the 1930s. There was a soft sheen about him, almost like a halo, a silvery bloom like the manifestation of something like sanctity.

This son, the Englishman said, would be returning to the ranch in July with some of his film-school friends. They would have their cameras, their equipment. They would make a film about South America, travelling south by motorcycle, or perhaps Land Rover. He was a hard-working boy, the Englishman said, with two jobs in London to pay for his studies. And though he didn’t say it, it was clear this elder son would return to the ranch only for short visits. He had grown up here, but his life was now elsewhere, in the city his father had fled forty years before. The soft silvery halo of his black-and-white portrait somehow confirmed this, was somehow a sign of his translation into that city, that life across the ocean.

The Englishman’s younger son was named George. Or perhaps it was Jorge. But everyone called him Georgie — or “Jargie”, which is how it sounds in a Guyanese accent. Jargie looked nothing like his brother. His black hair was long and shaggy, and he had a scraggly beard. One of his front teeth was chipped. He had a dark tan. He rarely looked anyone in the eye, and he said little, at least while his father was nearby. He may have been nineteen or twenty, but he looked older. He had the heaviness of gesture of a man of thirty, easy in the ways of the world, but when he spoke it was like a boy, with a note of sullenness. He often seemed unwashed, at all hours, as though he had just been labouring at some heavy job involving dirt and grease.

Jargie seemed angry when his father was nearby, and eager to be somewhere else, at some task. The Englishman didn’t seem to notice this. “A good son, a faithful son,” the Englishman said. “I couldn’t ask for a more faithful son,” but when he spoke to Jargie it was in questions and orders.

“The plane came in this morning. Did it bring our package? Yes? Did you check it? No? So how are we to know what message to send back? You must check it at once, and come to my office to tell me if the part is there. Without it, how will we fix the second truck? Good? Off you go, then.”

Jargie replied in grunts, and hardly raised his eyes from the ground. He strode off.

“I couldn’t ask for a more faithful son.”

Later, driving the Land Rover, with his father back at the ranch, Jargie spoke confidently, almost boastfully, of his work at the ranch, the vehicles, the horses. The men of the village seemed to like him but also to be a little afraid of him. You could tell by the way Jargie spoke to them that he was proud of this.

He never mentioned his brother.

2009-09-23T12:48:00.000-04:00

Days of labour, nights of writing

"Most interventions frame the poor as objects of the discourse of  digital access, and they are rarely seen as the subject of digital  imaginaries. How do we think of the space created by ICT as one that  expands not just the material conditions but also breaks the divide  between those entitled to the world of thought, and those entitled to  the world of work?...

"We all lead intellectual lives, but the distribution of opportunities  to lead an intellectual life is unequal, and we need to think through  the history of materiality also as the history of conditions which  divide people on the basis of those who think and those who work, or  the division of time between the days of labour and the nights of  writing."

-- Lawrence Liang, from "Access Beyond Developmentalism: Technology and the Intellectual Life of the Poor"

2009-09-07T16:56:00.000-04:00

2009-08-23T11:11:00.001-04:00

“Before this was a poem it was a question”

“Here Is the Poem”, published today in tongues of the ocean.

2009-08-17T16:55:00.001-04:00

Thinking aloud

Poetry ought to concern itself with the truth.

There are other things to do with the truth than tell it.

A lie does concern itself with the truth.

2009-08-10T19:12:00.000-04:00

“A memory of anticipation”

What should young or emerging poets be doing that you don’t see them engaged in at present?

The basic mesmeric quality of poetry is rhythm. And rhythm means memory. I don’t think a lot of young writers write for memory.

Do you mean that they don’t write so they will be remembered?

No. The thing about a poem when it’s good is that you can feel as if you know it as you read it. So there is a memory of anticipation that is confirmed by the poem. And I think a couple of generations have been lost through a kind of anarchic attitude to meter that tells the young poet to “go ahead” because they might have an interesting personality, etc. etc.

-- Derek Walcott, interviewed in the August 2009 issue of The Wolf.

2009-08-07T12:35:00.000-04:00

Amours de voyage, pt. 1

Night after night I dream of journeys,
I never know the names of these cities,
or my companions, or what are my duties....

*

"I came all this bloody way
to be mocked by the border guards."
"That accent--he tries too hard."

*

Enclosed: a little crocodile
preserved in native brandy.
Three bees pickled in wine.
Forty-odd new species of fish,
none of them yet named.

*

"I was brought up to speak and write the English tongue."

2009-08-02T20:32:00.000-04:00

Another geographical mystery

How many islands were lost to mildewing maps?

2009-08-01T16:23:00.002-04:00

Things people leave behind in books

= Receipt for "1 knife", Curaçao, 1971
= letter beginning "Dearest David, / I am returning the beautiful necklace you gave me", 2000
= ticket to a dinner and dance hosted by the Dreizpitzer Bowling Club, the Bronx, 1966
= note explaining that a "MINI JOB-- / is any job--project regardless of how frequently it should be done that takes / 10 minutes or less / to complete"
= photograph of a bush-pig

Etc.

(Things I have found in books: Christmas cards; a cinema ticket; a photograph of a Barbados hotel, c. 1940; a letter written from the United Nations conference in San Francisco in 1945; a somewhat famous poet's British Airways boarding pass; a banknote; several squashed insects.)

(Things I know I've left in books: bus and train tickets; magazine subscription cards; book review notes; newspaper clippings; a paper napkin with someone's phone number written on it; ivy leaves from Drumcliff churchyard, co. Sligo, Ireland.)