Category: in ramallah running

on the comma, between ramallah and running and everything else

gmaLeave a comment

In Ramallah, Running due Feb. 28th 2012

Gertrude Stein didn’t think much of commas, you remember? I think a lot of Gertrude’s work and Gertrude herself, as Fruit Store regulars will know, but disagree with her about the comma.

Commas break-up, complicate, deepen, add dimension to statements and any prose that takes ‘sense’ for granted. They elucidate, make-difficult, render actual complexity. The comma in In Ramallah, Running does these and many other things for me…

Above is a graphic rendering of a tiny part of the cover-image of the book [actual cover image coming soon], in which the sticking-out comma sticks out!

Commas are inconvenient, never quite fit, force you to notice that which you might not, condense and disrupt [presumed, heh Adania?] sense, etc. They are abyss and peak, add crucial [a]rhythms and make for the elliptical.

Writing without these things is almost literally nothing…

on translated by, biggin’ japan at cca kitakyushu until 20 jan 2012

gmaLeave a comment

Translated By – London 2011

Translated By, Shumon and Charles’ exhibition of audio recordings of writing about place by a range of writers including myself, with a short excerpt from In Ramallah, Running  in the form of cut-together running texts, is currently on show at CCA KITAKYUSHU Ogura Gallery December 12, 2011 – January 20, 2012. Continue reading “on translated by, biggin’ japan at cca kitakyushu until 20 jan 2012” →

on paul noble, font of … etc. – more on nobson at gagosian to dec 17

gma2 Comments

more…

Returning for a longer look at Paul Noble’s current exhibition, I realise that Nobson is more prominent in the show than I’d understood. Also, that my sense that deserts had bloomed is probably more revealing of my baseline bounce into every morning as a blind optimist than the actuality! That is; yes there are trees, plants and they emerge from the desert but that doesn’t quite conjugate the verb ‘to bloom’. Plus, my eyes lied to me in identifying clusters of rocks -which I know peculiarly well, given their relationship to images in In Ramallah, Running– as bushes, trees, verdancy! Continue reading “on paul noble, font of … etc. – more on nobson at gagosian to dec 17” →

on paul noble, font of wonderment at gagosian britannia street nov 10 – dec 17

gma1 Comment

Font by Paul Noble [close up] [Ph. Guy Mannes-Abbott]

I want to flag up Paul Noble’s new show at Gagosian Gallery which opened last night, Thursday, and is on until December 17th. I approached it with an unusual degree of pleasurable anticipation to see both artist and art works which in Paul come together in very particular ways. The show was buzzing, the work a triumph. I’ll write something more exact in time, but for now I urge you to go. There is an ‘old’ PN from the ’90s I think but many of these new drawings -ranging from big to absolutely huge, not least Welcome to Nobson itself which is 4 or 5 metres square- have a transformative verdancy to them. Bleak and funny dystopian cityscapes and stone strewn deserts are made to bloom here alongside monumental pink marble poops! No-one can or does do what Paul achieves to such mesmerising effect.

on my review of mourid barghouti’s i was born there… in today’s Independent

gmaLeave a comment

Screenshot 2018-03-12 10.30.56

MB by Rex Features The Independent
Horror, and happiness: Mourid Barghouti ( Rex Features )

I Was Born There, I Was Born Here,

By Mourid Barghouti, trans. Humphrey Davies

GUY MANNES-ABBOTT | FRIDAY 04 NOVEMBER 2011

 

Mourid Barghouti’s first volume of memoir, I Saw Ramallah, is a classic of the genre and a uniquely clear-eyed account of returning home after 30 years of serial expulsion. Barghouti is also the poet of displacement in general as well as its specific Palestinian form. In between the first and this second volume of memoir came Midnight & Other Poems – a first selection from many volumes of his poetry.

I Saw Ramallah wove a life of enforced absences into a moment of return to that city and the author’s home village of Deir Ghassanah in 1996, with prose of poetic concision. It ended with Barghouti recrossing an indelibly memorialised bridge over the Jordan river to collect a permit for his son Tamim, so they could return together. “He will see it. He will see me in it, and we shall ask all the questions after that.”

I Was Born… is that collection of “questions” Continue reading “on my review of mourid barghouti’s i was born there… in today’s Independent” →

on mourid barghouti’s i was born there, i was born here due 7 Nov in UK

gmaLeave a comment

Deir Ghassanah from the restored ‘ruins of al Khawas’ tomb & masjid [Ph. G Mannes-Abbott 2010]

The much anticipated arrival in English of a second volume of Mourid Barghouti’s memoirs is now close enough to touch… Indeed, I have it here in my happy fingers. My efforts to try to read it in Arabic, with only a basic grasp of the language, met an honourable end without ever getting close to the uniquely precise presence of its author in his words…

Publication of I Was Born There, I was Born Here is November 7th and Mourid will be appearing at Oxford University, the Bristol Festival of Ideas, and London’s Southbank Centre. I’m reserving comment on the book for reasons that will become clear, but if you’ve never seen Mourid’s words come to life in his voice right in front of you then waste no time in getting hold of a seat or a ticket at these events… Continue reading “on mourid barghouti’s i was born there, i was born here due 7 Nov in UK” →

on a hand made dummy of in ramallah, running -pre design meet

gma2 Comments

My hand-made and -cut rough mock-up of In Ramallah, Running this night…

I can’t  resist sharing my pleasure at having assembled all the elements of In Ramallah, Running in hard form for the first time tonight in preparation for a big design and layout meeting tomorrow. It’s very strange to materialise something that has existed in my mind as a project and proposal, then a place and people as well as a piece of my own inevitably elliptical work, before becoming a project once more with a range of very special people responding to and contributing work to the book, for all of that to eventually come together from all over the world and now to have a dummy of it in my fingers and see that it is pretty much as conceived -albeit only held together by a single bulldog clip- except that it’s so much better in actuality! Continue reading “on a hand made dummy of in ramallah, running -pre design meet” →

on ‘in ramallah, running’ -it’s official; publication is [NOT!] february 2012 [UPDATED]

gma3 Comments

‘In Ramallah, Running 2010′ by Guy Mannes-Abbott

Manuscript in first draft, 5 of 14 scrolls/parts

In Ramallah, Running is now contracted to appear in February/March 2012 with Black Dog, more details/announcements to follow [24.04.2012 UPDATE: publication pushed back into summer 2012, watch for update very soon].

I’m very happy because the book was conceived and developed independently and will appear within the kind of urgent time frame that is appropriate to its subject and hard to achieve without compromise -or at all. I finished my 20,000 word series of e.things -a unique conjuring of place as well as the people of Ramallah and almost the whole open-air camp that is Ramallah District- in mid-September 2010 [after my Residency at al Qattan Foundation in Ramallah]. The series is made up of fourteen parts, alternating running within the limits of the city and walking out from it to, along, beyond and off limits, discovering how mobile they are. How they really work.

e.things as a form were crucial to this project because they’re the only way I could say what needed to be said. Often exhibited or published in a visual art context [with the best visual minds of my generation!], they’ve grown into a highly singular body of texts; the shortest of which is a single line called ‘go’ from 1997, the longest is this series; In Ramallah, Running. Continue reading “on ‘in ramallah, running’ -it’s official; publication is [NOT!] february 2012 [UPDATED]” →