remembrance days 1

postcolonial…? what!
did i miss something?
have they gone?
- bobbi sykes
in the houses of history, ed. green and troup (manchester university press, 1999), 278.

Read Full Post »

continental drift

or, “letting conservatism loose” before again schoolwriting, hoping against hope to be done on tuesday:
as distraction (dis-traction, except that i was barely making inroads as it was, driving a creaking diesel ford 5000 from the early 70s) – i’ll have to remember to file this post under ‘narcissism’ (the glowing laptop monitor my pool of [...]

Read Full Post »

dis-pel

there is something about movement that for me is intimately linked with the act of writing. i mean specifically physical, spatial movement, not the cycling of temporal stages or the leaping between maqams and darajahs or the banal, profane drift that so characterizes the (my) lack in the face of daily hisab. each of these, [...]

Read Full Post »

grit

summer08
phil250 – ethics
phil120 – symbolic logic
fall08
hist489 – “‘aboriginality’ in europe: nativism and racism in national discourses from antiquity to present”, 1-credit proseminar, gow
hist420 – “jews in europe”, gow
psyco104 – “intro to psychology”
engl224 – “the literary institution”, zwicker
hist498/604 – “application of the social sciences to history”, bracken
phil481 – “philosophy, poetry, politics”, morin
relig200 – “the discipline of [...]

Read Full Post »

of frustration made

being a muslim of the female persuasion at community events is often not a great position to occupy. “sisters” get shunted to the side, forgotten by speakers who address “the brothers”, sidelined or slotted into back rooms for jum’ah. one benefit of the arrangement that has the khutbah beamed through speakers, though, i am now [...]

Read Full Post »

mid-knight confession

here the tired begins once more. once more because to speak of beginnings after entrance into past present, present present, future present is itself an echo (and) loaded with nostalgia.
last push to the end. a first push, ironically, to an end. am looking forward to writing (some of) these essays.
and then summer. work, outside / [...]

Read Full Post »

anniversaire 2

ira cohen, apr17th, 2003, “some lines written on a cold day on 113th & broadway to the iraqi people”:
i am ashamed to be an american
when i think of the blood
spilled in the nights of depleted
uranium bombs which still
pollute your reticent eyes
drowning in disbelief of destiny’s mocking laughter
your culture from the very cradle
of time lies shipwrecked [...]

Read Full Post »

finds

toronto, then.
(this particular parenthesis begins here. this and here – the empty indexicals forming hard at the surface, perhaps a reason that writing has become instead and if that a register of days, the empty indexicals perhaps all i will allow myself to claim. instead of: telling stories; or trying jokes; or plotting figures; or [...]

Read Full Post »

credo ut intelligam

i used to think restoring measures existed. somewhere between catharsis and redemption, a saving grace would descend from on high and transport me toward light. less a latter-day rapture than the simple effects of staking a claim in the wilderness, clearing a homestead. erasing the pastoral to attempt a life with crimson geraniums in window-boxes [...]

Read Full Post »

doorsteps of those armies

everything i write i have written before and so become broken speech, halted time, feedback loop and caught ellipse, trying and again to put into words the fragments i cradle. themes surfacing, rising to the light. a half-light: neither night nor day, neither dusk nor dawn, light pushed across, and drawn through, and nourished between [...]

Read Full Post »