MEMBER BLOG TAG: brossard
| Thursday, May 7, 2009 1:40PM | | | | What's Taboo | Tags: Salwa Al Neimi, Zsófia Bán, Nicole Brossard, Rakesh Satyal, politics, religion, sex, Koran, Bible, language, holocaust
| | | | Salwa Al Neimi, born in Syria but lives in France and writes in Arabic, Zsófia Bán from Hungary, Nicole Brossard from Canada, and Rakesh Satyal born in the US to Indian parents, met to tell an audience about taboos. They generally agreed that religion, politics and sex were dangerous, particularly if one did not represent the prevailing religious, political or sexual orientation.
Although the Jewish Bible describes the body as being good and mentions functions of the body in frank terms, Al Neimi has been censored for using Arabic, the language of the Koran, when writing about the erotic. Bán and Satyal found that otherness in sexuality was taboo. Satyal said that he wrote the book he needed as a child and didn’t... | | | | | | | Thursday, April 30, 2009 3:12PM | | | | Nicole Brossard Represents! | Tags: Nicole Brossard, Narcís Comadira, Salman Rushdie, Edwidge Danticat
| | | Poets are an often marginalized tribe. Not very many people read poetry anymore, despite the fact that everyone seems to be writing it. Part of the marginalization is caused by the fact that, as a form of entertainment, poetry does not so easily lend itself to the activity of becoming "absorbed" to borrow Charles Bernstein's term, or to the activity of becoming distracted. Novels and films offer the reader the former, while television and the internet offer the latter.
And off to the side a bit from these forms of entertainment, there's poetry, whose brevity would seem ready-made for the present culture of the short attention span, but whose foregrounding of non-narrative elements of language like sound and wordplay require that the reader engage... | | | | | | | Thursday, April 30, 2009 9:54AM | | | | A Taste of This, A Taste of That | Tags: Readings, Nadas, Rushdie, Brossard
| | | Evolution/Revolution. PEN’s opening reading event. It’s called a feast, but it is better to imagine a tasting. Think of a group of incredible chefs who have assembled delicious dishes, but you are only allowed two bites of each. Joy and frustration at once. It reminded me a little of a dance performance I saw a couple weeks ago at Galapagos: 60x60, sixty choreographers given one minute each, one dance blending into the next, each with different moods and attitudes. This was last night.
And PEN does this wonderful thing: each writer reads in his native tongue, which is so respectful, and the words are spilled in English on two screens. Although I was seated up front (coincidentally next to the warm... | | | | | |
|
|
