Nuweiba: back-blog:broken

These are also for uberdot, who, yesterday, asked:

Is it Poetry’s affinity with the broken/or yours?

Nuweiba: Back-blog

I told uberdot there are no daffodils in the Sinai, but that I would seek the psychic equivalent when I was in Nuweiba in April. These are the results, plus a few miscellaneous, posted much later, from the rain, in Berlin.

Coriander spinach, African restaurants in Upper Egypt, etc.

Tonight I made sauteed spinach with crushed coriander seeds, a dish that D and El discovered in an African restaurant in upper Egypt, on their recent visit here. That revelation occurred on the only one of the *three* trips to Luxor that launched from my Salamlek pad, in the last six weeks in which I *didn’t* participate. Cat and I actually visited that same restaurant on a subsequent trip, but the spinach dish was not on offer.

I had been fasting since sunrise in solidarity with the Zimbawe hunger strike, so was slightly delirious while cooking. The smell of the fresh ground coriander seeds is intoxicating, surprisingly lemony . I couldn’t keep my nose out of the pestle. The restaurant from which we got the inspiration is called Oasis and is on the East Bank kind of around the corner, (off the corniche) from the Mercure hotel.
BUT the better African restaurant, for food, price and view is the Africa Restaurant, which is on a rooftop (with view of the Nile) on the West Bank. It’s in the little village of Gezira, on what would have to be called the main drag (i.e., it’s the only drag.) Here’s Cat enjoying the way too ample spread:

Light through the tunnels?

Felt a little hopeful when I heard yesterday that Abbas will make a previously unscheduled stop in Cairo tomorrow in response to developments in talks with Hamas. It would certainly be in everyone’s best interest to come up with a solid agreement for a long term cease fire, that includes an opening of Gaza’s borders (with some satisfactory plan for monitoring/preventing arms trafficking) BEFORE or (insh’allah) instead of Netanyahu’s election.

Eagleton @ AUC

Terry Eagleton loomed large during graduate school, but I confess I haven’t read anything he’s written since then, or had any dreams about him. It was, however, surprisingly entertaining to see and hear him last night deliver the The Edward Said Memorial Lecture, “Terror and Tragedy,” before a giant banner of Said’s handsome visage in the fabulous Oriental Hall at the AUC downtown campus. (Photo by Aras Ozgun–or, probably–he took some pictures with his camera and so did I, but its likely that the legible ones were his.)

I think that what Eagleton said about terror and tragedy was not unlike what Susan Sontag and other American intellectuals said in the immediate wake of 9/11 (for which they were completely trounced)–i.e. that it might be a good moment for the US take a look at the man in the mirror (“…transcend darkness by the courage of the act of acknowledgement…”) Sontag, of course, was far more gutsy, saying what she did, how and when, but Eagleton’s talk benefitted from time and distance, an elegant interweaving of the modern concept of terror as a political act, with notions of the sublime and the effective invocation of a chorus line of tragic figures, political theorists, and rock stars of the western canon: from Marx to Michael Jackson, King Lear to Edmund Burke, Beckett to Brecht, Nietzsche to Madonna, Freud to Faust, Aristotle to Adorno, Oedipus, Jesus, Schopenheur, Acquinas, Hegel and Pinochet.

Crayon 5: On Beauty

The new Crayon has been released. My poem, *subliminal city* appears there and my review of Kass Fleischer’s book, Accidental Species, from Chax Press. Here’s a full list of contributors: Beverly Dahlen, Kristen Gallagher, Joe Amato, Chris Daniels, Cecilia Vicuña, Nicole Brossard, Rob Halpern, Julie Patton, Robert Kocik, Carolee Schneemann, Sawako Nakayasu, Kristin Prevallet, Brenda Iijima, Steve Benson, Laynie Browne, Diane Ward, Thom Donovan, Alan Davies, Lisa Robertson, Michal Lando, Peter O’Leary, P. Inman, Jonathan Skinner, Andrew Klobucar, Alan Prohm, Linh Dinh, Belle Gironda, Roberto Harrison, Andrew Levy, Corey Mead, Ruth Danon, David Pavelich, John Shoptaw, Laura Sims, Sally Van Doren, Dan Machlin, Robin Tremblay-McGaw, Tom Hibbard, Stephen Vincent, Martine Bellen, Kass Fleisher, Chris Alexander, Matthias Regan, Pete Smith, Pat Reed, Judith Goldman.

It can be ordered through SPD–the link to Crayon above will take you there. Andrew sent the flyer, which is posted as a thumbnail above (not sure why it looks solarized) but I missed the launch party in New York by an ocean and a continent. Wish I could have been there to hear the latest on the workings of the Phoneme Choir (some of the earliest meetings of which I attended in a vault in the basement of a Wall street building–when Daria Fain and Robert Kocik had an LMCC Swing Space residency and built a makeshift anechoic darkroom there. ) Sorry also to have missed Julie Patton, after being so inspired by her performance at The Stone this summer.

In particular, I would have loved to hear the conversation about “Beauty, Ethics and the Political Body”–since I’ve had related (I think) questions on my mind. Living in a megalopolis in a “developing country” I’m experiencing and thinking a lot about tensions between my own desires for and expectations about urban aesthetics and the realities of a city that has no apparent plan or policies to deal with its ever expanding population and the concomitant inequalities. There are varieties of beauty here, everywhere, and some of them are typical examples of urban architectural achievement. But, many of these are also soot-stained, neglected, sometimes even abandoned, or simply so entangled with the ever shifting fortunes of the city: the rise and fall of various, dynasties, the changing path of the Nile, colonialism, the local politics of the last century–that its hard to simply experience them as “beautiful” or even to understand anymore, what that means.

I’m with you, if you find the “developing world” terminology confusing but Egypt does not really qualify as “Third World” but falls somewhere in the middle of those countries ranked as having “medium” human development indexes–a list that includes mostly African countries, as well as some from south and Central America, some from the Middle East and some from South and Central Asia. Egypt is ranked slightly above India but below the Palestinian Authority, Jamaica, and Nicaragua, for example.

Lot’s more to say about this (and I’m hoping that there are recordings of the Crayon event that will possibly pop up on the Penn Sound site–but, now I have to get some work done so I can go out this evening. Terry Eagleton is giving the Edward Said Memorial Lecture tonight at the downtown campus on “Tragedy and Terror.” No further clues, beyond the title, as to what he will talk about. I’ll report back.

IDEO: “Let chairs arrange themselves…”

For the last couple of weeks, I have gone down on Frday or Saturday to the Institute Dominicain d’etudes Orientales (IDEO), to meet with my friend John, a Cairene poet and journalist.  John and I have been sharing work, introducing each other to poets from our respective cultures and talking about some possible translations of some of the many untranslated Middle Eastern poets.

The institute itself  a peaceful place, with a fabulous library that is dedicated primarily to research in Arabic and Islamic studies. It is located in a working classs neighborhood of Cairo, a shortish walk from the Ghamra subway stop, past the abandoned (and, not atypical of Cairo, dishevelled and pollution stained) Sakakini Palace (my photo below) and just beyond Midan al-Geish. I took the photo above in the gardens at the monestery, which, along with the general vibe at IDEO, reminded me of that line from Lori Anderson-Moseman’s poem, quoted in the subject of this posting. Last week when I visited, John and I had lunch with the visiting researchers and the monks where conversations took place in Arabic, French and English, sometimes all three finding there way into a single sentence.

Sakakini Palace