note_18 On the work Abu Dhabi banned from Sharjah (Biennial) 2019? #DXB

March 20, 2019July 8, 2019 gmaLeave a comment

Gold-tips in Abu Dhabi’s Emirates Palace Marina (GM-A, 2013).

(EXTRACT)

IMBECILIC CONTINGENT INTRUSION(4)*

Everything we know about ourselves and our various shared and not well-shared histories affirms that systems of hermetic control never work for long, that consolidation hastens collapse. The more autocratic the regime, the messier the collapse. I will leave all of that to time, which will operate unerringly.

Meanwhile, to demonstrate a simple truth, we are going to plant a forest in DXB’s Terminal 3. It’s easy. Those of us who know the place will return from various ports in carefully staged flights that betray no joint venture. We will all be either prevented from getting on a flight, stopped at and detained at DXB, or held in the Deportees Room for some hours. Two of us at least will get in—to the airport, not the country!—and overlap in the Room on ROLEX time. We will take our allotted hour to find food in the Terminal and head up to our Costa rendezvous. We will have seeds of trees with us. We will be carrying gorgeous presentation boxes of fertilised roals or figs, like the kind from Aliya Dates Farm that I recall from a leather-lined yacht in Abu Dhabi’s Palace Marina.

Gifts, you see. Gifts of the Rolla tree, the put-upon-banyans, these potent embodiments of hopes, wishes and dreams for change. Continue reading “note_18 On the work Abu Dhabi banned from Sharjah (Biennial) 2019? #DXB” →

note_17 On Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work; ‘Undead, what and who will you defend and nurture as your world drowns?’

March 7, 2019January 20, 2020 gma1 Comment

Death is Hard Work, Khaled Khalifa

(Trans; Leri Price. Pub/UK; Faber)

By Guy Mannes-Abbott

“Death had become hard work. Just as hard as living, in Bolbol’s view.” Abdel Latif al-Salim’s youngest son has promised, “in a rare moment of courage”, to honour his father’s dying wish to be buried with his sister Layla. The retired teacher and belated rebel died of natural causes in a hospital in Damascus when nothing else is natural in the middle of Syria’s uprising. Bolbol triggers the 400 kilometre drive north into Aleppo’s hinterlands, which takes 3 torturous days and ends with maggots climbing the windows of the family minibus.

Death is Hard Work is a huge novel of just 180 pages and the third of Khaled Khalifa’s to appear in English, courtesy of their translator Leri Price. In Praise of Hatred (2008) and No Knives in the Kitchens of this City (2013) were each short-listed for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction, with the latter winning a prestigious Mahfouz Medal, and arrived in English in 2014 and 2016 respectively. They were preceded by two further novels, while their author has also written for television in Damascus, where he lives to this day.

Khalifa captured a freighted immobility in all this which his new novel disperses with ferocious intent.

Continue reading “note_17 On Khaled Khalifa’s Death is Hard Work; ‘Undead, what and who will you defend and nurture as your world drowns?’” →

note_16 #Rivering 2014-2019 (scraps, almost there…)

March 6, 2019 gmaLeave a comment

Screenshot 2019-03-05 11.29.32

Rivering the Roding started in the mud above; September 2014, as you can see if you scroll to the bottom (this one of many* returns!). These tweets are obviously incidental scraps but they do suggest or ghost if not exactly tell a story (again; bottom up). It’s a story about London, thinking like a river, which requires articulation (#rivering) and for me to show what such ‘thinking’ might be. I am coming in to land (circling back and now very close to the muddy confluence), and yes, you can start to hold your breath. Please 😉 Continue reading “note_16 #Rivering 2014-2019 (scraps, almost there…)” →

note_15 On M G Llansol’s The Geography of Rebels in Graz; any place for a nonviolent image?

February 22, 2019July 24, 2020 gma1 Comment

From the Portuguese original of Llansol’s Geography of Rebels

In lieu of writing critically about Maria Gabriela Llansol’s first ever publication in English; The Geography of Rebels, from Houston’s Deep Vellum, I’m posting this sly reference (below, plus). However, as I said re Mallo, these and some of 2019’s forthcoming books (mostly in translation), call out for serious, passionate, engaged, authoritative responses from writers. I hear the call and am going to be responding again after a long interlude.

Spend a life attempting to capture the resistant poetics of your existence (what/why else?) and you do gain special access to other writing. You can see right through most of it -line by smooth paragraph by over-recognisable page- but also locate magic; know, observe or instinctively recognise how it is done. It’s all in the writing. If you make original sentences or pages, then you know about each word, each in between, and all their potentialities. The call is urgent. Books pages tend to agree on what is important, especially viz work in translation, exceptions are treasured like monsoon rain. I almost always felt differently (2019: Khaled Khalifa, Enrique Vila-Matas, Anne Boyer, Saidiya Hartman, Ariella Aisha Azoulay, Yasser Elsheshtawy, but also E J Burnett, Laura Beatty, etc.); a significant motivator in paying attention to awkwardness, the resistant or ‘difficult’, complex or subtle, and the ‘foreign’. No apologies. Continue reading “note_15 On M G Llansol’s The Geography of Rebels in Graz; any place for a nonviolent image?” →

note_14 On reading Agustin Fernandez Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy in DXB’s Deportees’ Room

January 16, 2019January 21, 2019 gma2 Comments

img_0010_immigrationinvestigationsharp_sheikhs_officebackground_crop low

DUBAI INTERNATIONAL (DXB) Connecting the World

As Nocilla Lab, the third part of Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy is published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in the UK, I kick myself for not conjuring the time to review it or celebrate the Trilogy in critique. Also for not yet even trying to read Mallo’s more recent Trilogía de la guerra (Seix Barral, 2018) in its original, despite it appearing last summer. I’m buried, properly, in my own manuscript (RR) which is very close to completion. Horizons lift in 2019 and I will be writing shorter critical pieces, once more, amongst other things…

Mallo’s Dream and Experience are as good as each other in the suggestive vitality of their fragmentary form. They possess rare degrees of necessity and are, in the best sense, a minor literature, which means that you’ve not been reading at all if you’ve not read them yet! Put aside the Jo(h)nathan-literature, knowing you’ll miss nothing if you return to it in the future. Nocilla Lab works towards graphic elements in my 2009 Punto de lecture edition, which I struggled to bring alive with my old (LA) Spanish…

I was (re-)reading Mallo en route to a Residency in Sharjah, January-February 2017, and resisting the serial, fragmentary, and fictive, as ways to make the book I would start writing when I returned home two months later (with further Porting residencies scheduled for Aug 2017 and Feb-Mar 2018). It was not that a series of fragmentary texts with rhythmic associations would not be a natural way for me to write my river (an actual river, more of which to come). Continue reading “note_14 On reading Agustin Fernandez Mallo’s Nocilla Trilogy in DXB’s Deportees’ Room” →

note_13.1 Les Chiens Nauman/ tears in the rain in the context of catastrophe/ DG-F TH.2058

June 11, 2018September 26, 2018 gmaLeave a comment

My young connoisseur -or collector of urgent life-impressions and artful invention- has begun school-life so close to the TM that a liquid-chocolate balm combined with ‘two rooms’ has become a fixture in our lives. In the process, he has elevated El Anatsui to quite a pedestal, but I continue trying my best to broaden his horizons. Bruce’s revolving head, tick, Bruce’s Violent Incident, getting there, Bruce’s dogs, well; there’s time…

Of course, these are not Les Chiens de Nauman. But those in the Art Room selection reminded me recently of their spirited precedents in Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s TH.2058. I was led there by a number of things; my own work-in-progress (articulating or #Rivering the Roding), and thus echoes of the river-beggaring I did floodplain-to-floodplain in Rotterdam; a ruined world of mud to be embraced with curiosity, reminded of that when receiving Defne Ayas’ archive of her WdeW years; Blessing and Transgressing; A Live Institute, which includes that first use of ‘rivering’ as a way of trying to articulate muddy-footed actualities with urgent recognitions of coming urban life, by a recent taste of DG-F’s work which reminded me of how much there is to enjoy and admire in it (esp. with a clear view of its span), close rubbing-ups against Vila-Matas (about whom much more some day, the writerly intimacies are too elemental. Dostoevsky once more or less literally saved-by-enabling my life, a very long time ago. V-M is a similar interior intimate on an extremely short list). They, as you know, have been working together since 2007 (when only Bartleby & Co, perhaps Montano too had been translated into English), and so I found myself thinking about TH.2058, a work that has remained with me more as a puzzle, or query, than a settled memory, or answer. Continue reading “note_13.1 Les Chiens Nauman/ tears in the rain in the context of catastrophe/ DG-F TH.2058” →

note_05.1 Angela Carter on Wilson Harris “the Guyanese William Blake”, 1985

May 1, 2018May 1, 2018 gmaLeave a comment

Angela Carter and Grace Paley on the Tube, c.1987. Ph ©KateWebb

“KW: Will you start by giving me your impression of Wilson?

AC: He’s got these curious hooded eyes, he never looks at you straight. And this wonderful sing-song voice, this vatic, musical accent. He’s very impressive. But I don’t want to give you the wrong impression because he’s not like John Berger: it’s obvious that he never set out to be impressive. I can only say about his presence that when he said to me about my son, “You have a wonderful little boy”, I felt it was some kind of blessing.

KW: Why do you think he’s such an important writer?

AC: Until very recently there was nobody writing anything remotely like him in Britain, nobody writing fiction with that particular kind of poetic intensity …

Continue reading →

note_12 Kandahari Cramps? A human fly linking Busheyr, Bandar Abbas, Bhuj in Kachhch and Dubai -of course…

April 9, 2018June 23, 2018 gmaLeave a comment

Desert Terror

Creech Air Force Base, Nevada, 45 miles N of Las Vegas, home of the MQ1 Predator Drone

Five years after writing this short story, Buzz, Buzz, Buzzzzz, it feels timely to share it here (below). It describes drone flights over Herat, Khorasan and Iran’s central plateau across to Bushehr and Bandar Abbas where the drone tracks back east again. I wrote it in the voice of the drone (mad thought obviously), which begins in the kind of (monstrously violent/ deeply racist) formulaic AI-speak of its makers -also in Nevada- but changes when brought down to earth in Iran, as the RQ-170 actually was, where it encounters people and place, face-to-face…

Commissioned in London, written and submitted from Bhuj in Kachhch in December through January 2012-13 -where I was also in March 2003, incidentally, when the declining US Imperium unleashed shock ‘n awe/invasion ‘n occupation on Iraq, making the ground move where I was standing too- to be published and launched at Dubai in March 2013. Continue reading “note_12 Kandahari Cramps? A human fly linking Busheyr, Bandar Abbas, Bhuj in Kachhch and Dubai -of course…” →

note_09 “It may require courage (but) take these marvelous essays to heart” Mezzaterra, Ahdaf Soueif

April 4, 2018August 16, 2018 gmaLeave a comment

Take these essays at difficult things inside you, let them pulse through your body and mind. And to your heart, yes. It may require more courage – in Britain, in English- than even I conceived in the last months of 2004. Courage and none at all, because these are a range of essays -as the short review below makes very clear.

I’ve been trying to develop a measure of truth in the context of the Persian Gulf and the regime in Abu Dhabi in as universal way as possible from an inventorised location in London and in English. I settled on a millennium-old measure from an Arabic treatise on taste. More on that in links to publications to come, but it reminds me of the increasing difficulty of being able to recognise a Palestinian right to exist in Britain or in English. Continue reading “note_09 “It may require courage (but) take these marvelous essays to heart” Mezzaterra, Ahdaf Soueif” →

note_08 From Shumon Basar’s superhuman Couples Format; me on Gertrude & Alice #passionloveandwork

March 28, 2018 gma1 Comment

Shumon Basar | Couple Format: The Identity Between Love and Work

“What was the identity between love and work,

or, the love found in working together?”

“Let’s draw focus on their passion: the love and work. The following is from Diana Souhami’s glorious book Gertrude and Alice:

‘“Our pleasure is to do every day the work of that day,’ wrote Gertrude, ‘to cut our hair and not want blue eyes and to be reasonable and obedient … Every day we get up and say we are awake today …’

… So we circle back to The Autobiography of Alice B.Toklas, which wasn’t of course an autobiography. What was it? […] Primarily, it was also an autobiography, but not of Alice. It was a biography: not one authored from outside, but from inside, albeit in another’s voice… I linger with this because while this is one of the most conventional prose-like works of Gertrude’s it is also properly strange. That is, Gertrude adopted Alice’s recognizable voice, exorcising as many Gertrudisms as she could identify, though not all, to write a memoir of her own life and times.”

-extracted from my text/talk COUPLING | Gertrude and Alice | July 2016.

Click through for links to Shumon’s piece and the Superhumanity project above and for the recording of the original event on G&E and Marina Abramovic and Ulay click my Readings_Talks button (where you can click on through to see/hear the other Couple Formats too).