First off, an admission: The process of writing this has, like most writing, spawned its own little qalaq storm. Least of all because, as I reflect on the topic of anxiety, I cannot help but anxiously wonder whether there is any point to writing on historical cultural anxiety at a moment when the present itself […]
Separation
clubhouse Julian Christopher pinged you: 3m ago You should join this room. I am talking with Chora Nerval, Gerard Labrunie, and 6 others about “Techniques for Eliminating Breath from Talk Radio” I am dead, dear listener. This is not a recording. This is not a metaphor. This is not a lie. I am dead, […]
Understanding the Void of a Historical Pit
Though we may disagree on the causes, extent, and means of liberating ourselves from the injustice we are living in Lebanon, the fact that this injustice exists remains undeniably true. This is not to say, however, that we necessarily comprehend its inner workings and how it oppresses our ability to think and act. Since the […]
Qalaq
By the time this piece of writing is ready for submission, London, where I reside, will hopefully be slowly dragging itself out of a year of endless restrictions and lockdowns, with the promise of the UK’s ambitious vaccination program and Boris Johnson’s grandiloquent determination to follow his ‘roadmap to freedom’. We sit in the post-Brexit mess, […]
A Voice Crying in the Wilderness – For Tarek El-Ariss
Farther from the Desolation of the Wilderness No one knows of whom Isaiah spoke in his prophecy. Isaiah said that it was coming, that voice crying in the wilderness, “Prepare ye the way of the Lord. Make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” But Isaiah, like all of the Old Testament prophets, […]
Getting our Pants Hemmed (On Poiesis and Praxis)
In the prologue to his book The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, British critic Al Alvarez, relays one of the conversations he had with Sylvia Plath about an early version of Lady Lazarus -written shortly before the poet took her own life in 1963. “I was appalled,” he says about listening to her reading. “At first hearing, the […]