“Each traveller hopes”

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

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

Raspberry Bourrée



Helping to keep my chin up this overcast Sunday.

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.

“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”.

“But not for me”

The previous post has put me in mind of this:

“But not for us”

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

“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.

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.

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.

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.

Town on Keate Street



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

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.

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.”

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

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

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

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.

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”.

“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.

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.

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.