#TejuCole

Posted by & filed under Writing.

T.Cole_cr Retha Ferguson

My piece on the ways in which Teju Cole on social media sites makes writing and creativity take place in new ways:

Everyone understands the idea of prompts. The use of #hashtags on Twitter, in my opinion, offers the most succinct example of incitement to writing. The novelist and photographer Teju Cole has used Twitter #hashtags to provoke public writing and image-making among his 190,000 followers. This exercise can become an extraordinarily creative, collaborative act. Cole is on a temporary (or maybe permanent) break from Twitter, but even as I started writing this post I saw that he was producing a new set of essays on Instagram, reposting photographs of the Mona Lisa taken by visitors to the Louvre, and accompanying them with his analysis of social photography, the ritual function of icons, and the optical qualities of digital compression.

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Of Academic Interest

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I asked the well-known philosopher Judith Butler to unpack for me the phrase “academic interest.”  Here is the piece I wrote for The Chronicle’s Lingua Franca:

In a video that is available online, you can watch Judith Butler, philosopher and winner of a bad writing award, speaking to a crowd at Occupy Wall Street. It is a short speech, pointed and incantatory, and Butler is brilliant.

A wonderful innovation of the Occupy Wall Street movement was the use of the human microphone — the name given to the body of the audience repeating, amplifying, each statement made by the speaker. This practice was probably introduced because there was a ban on the use of megaphones. During Butler’s speech, the repetition by the human microphone helps. It produces for us the image of her words being taken up by the public (so that we see philosophy as a public act) and we, her listeners, also get a chance to think through her words in the process. Critics of the Occupy Movement, Butler says, either claim that the protesters have no demands or that their impossible demands are just not practical. And she then adds, “If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible.”

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Teachable Moment

Posted by & filed under Criticism.

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I have written a piece about Claudia Rankine and how she creates teachable moments; for instance, in her commentary on what commentators say about Serena Williams. More generally, the piece is about academe and race:

Everything in American public life, when it comes to race relations, serves as a frame for a history of violence and degrading humiliation. And yet, what is inspiriting about Rankine’s latest volume of poetry is its deep investment in the teachable moment. The teachable moment in Citizen doesn’t involve sharing beer. Instead, we watch the poet flinch, or introduce a pause, or post a rebuke. The teachable moment here often simply resides in asking What did you say?

One of the pieces in Citizen begins thus:

You are in the dark, in the car, watching the black-tarred
street being swallowed by speed; he tells you his dean
is making him hire a person of color when there are so
many great writers out there.

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Photo of Serena Williams from here

Yaddo

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From my latest The Bookist column “What Is It, Dear Heart?”:

I am at Yaddo writing a novel about the messiness of love. Yaddo is an artist colony in Saratoga Springs, New York. I have been here for a month. I write every day, I walk in the woods, and before I go to bed each night I read a story from a collection of love stories titled My Mistress’s Sparrow is Dead.

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On Poetry

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My latest column (“The Bookist,” a monthly column for Hindustan Times Brunch) is on poetry:

One night in the early Eighties, in the basement theatre of Shri Ram Centre in Delhi, I heard the Hindi poet Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena read his long poem Kuano Nadi. This was my discovery. I had taken a DTC bus from Delhi University to Mandi House to listen to this poet without knowing anything about him.

His reading changed me. His poem was about rural poverty and it took me away from myself; it presented a radical vision of art and the language he had used welcomed me as if it was the doorway of my home.

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Radio

Posted by & filed under Media, Writing.

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I saw the above sign at a reading I did at Oblong Books in Rhinebeck. This post is about recent events related to the release of my essay collection, Lunch with a Bigot, primarily links to my radio interviews: with Joe Donahue on WAMC; with Brian Lehrer on WNYC; with John Hockenberry at WNYC’s The Takeaway. Also, check out this podcast on The Aerogram’s “Marginalia” where I was interviewed by Anita Felicelli. In other news, my “Ten Rules of Writing,” excerpted from Lunch with a Bigot, were presented on LitHub. And a wonderful interview with David Burr Gerrard appeared on Biographile.

Upcoming Readings

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Forthcoming readings from Lunch with a Bigot:

Tsion Café, Harlem, New York, Thursday, May 7, 2015, 7 PM, in conversation with Akhil Sharma;

Oblong Books, Rhinebeck, Friday, May 9, 2015, 7 PM;

Community Bookstore, Brooklyn, Tuesday, May 12, 2015, 7 PM, in conversation with Dani Shapiro;

Inquiring Minds Bookstore, New Paltz, Friday, May 15, 2015, 7 PM.

Patna Roughcuts

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I have just written a piece for Granta on a visit to my hometown. Ought one get a massage in Patna? How about a wedding? Or a funeral? These and other questions answered here.

The day after the wedding, I flew out of Patna. When I returned to New York, I found copies of Granta 130: India waiting for me. At the end of his introduction, the issue’s editor Ian Jack had mentioned Patna. Jack had known Patna thirty years ago; he had had his appendix removed there and someone had remarked that if he had gone to the state hospital he wouldn’t have come out alive. Jack’s piece ended with these lines:

‘Now I’m going to Patna again. Of all the things it needed – decent sanitation, drinkable water, honest policemen – who would have guessed the latest aspect of its public life? To a city where I once bought Treasure Island as the most interesting book in a bookshop, I am returning for the Patna Literature Festival.’

First review is in

Posted by & filed under Criticism.

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Kirkus Reviews calls Lunch with a Bigot “an exuberantly inquisitive collection of essays.” The photograph above is of Hanif Kureishi. I’ve put it up here because 1. he is looking good; 2. I have an essay on him in the forthcoming book; 3. I just wrote a review piece on his latest novel, The Last Word, and will post a link when it is published.

Go here for the review in Kirkus.