for love of the road

o canada / our home on native landITAL
highlight of the past couple months: hitchhiking across british columbia after my car broke down in the mountains. over the course of that adventure i talked to cowboys doing the rodeo circuit, cyclists trekking to the lower mainland for a bike race, a sawmill worker who took great [...]

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16

when-i-say-yalla-you-say-go! (yalla!)
adnan tagged me a few weeks ago. and so for his sake i break this silence that has begun to sediment. its broken shards have sharp edges – bad cleavage, rather conchoidal fracture – and so who knows, i might write here again soon. but for now, to recount sixteen things.
- i am not a [...]

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rise

links first:
jean-luc marion: “sketch of a phenomenological concept of sacrifice” with responses by zizek, gschwandtner, and biles. see also, at the archives of chicago’s divinity school, october’s “enchantments of secular belief” by rutherford and the responses by hirschkind, zeghal, and gilpin. also within this theme, charles taylor writes at the immanent frame about buffered and [...]

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05.01.08

a well-meaning msa uncle once told me to watch out for the faculty of arts, “because they are materialists.” and he didn’t mean historical materialists. today, amazon sent me a list of books it wanted to push on me, based on prior purchases or ratings. and, entirely unselfconsciously i’m sure, it is recommending me the [...]

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isaidicanexplainshesaidiknow

yesterday returned to the sketching of harsh words onto the bare wall in front of me. until, an hour later, desperately shook off the drawing inertia and propelled myself outside into the chill autumn air, followed the asphalt along country roads through dark spruce forests interspersed with white birchbark trunks, walked and walked until i [...]

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there – . . . .

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there is a town in north ontario

merry eid, everybody. it’s on saturday, not friday. if you are celebrating on friday you are wrong.
i started the month by attending a four-hour rosh hashanah service at the synagogue downtown. and i end the month by skipping classes and trying to catch up on sleep, readings, people, qur’an, fresh air…
laura on talking ; yaser [...]

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like every other morning

when my soul was embittered,
when i was pricked in heart,
i was stupid and ignorant,
i was like a beast toward Thee.
nevertheless i am continually with Thee;
Thou dost hold my right hand.
Thou dost guide me with Thy counsel,
and afterward Thou wilt receive me to glory
whom have i in heaven but Thee?
and there is nothing upon earth that [...]

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in place of a post

i now have a week, or thereabouts, to write about the pastoral and read a thousand pages of anthropological theory and three novels, write two exams.
instead of formally “going running”, like i sometimes do, lately it has been chasing fence-jumping goats around fields they should not be in.
“why you always look angry when doing dhikr, [...]

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7 things, or, the condensation of disparate significata

 

this is not a commute vehicle. the doors do not close properly, the heater is variable, i can hear the springs creak/groan whenever we wheeze to a stop, it strains whenever we go faster than 80km/hr. being on the freeway into/out of the city becomes my cue to launch into an angry quasi-theoretical tirade on [...]

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