"I told my wife, now that we have reached sixty together -- / with myself a bit ahead of her,/ we will be living from now on/ the most wonderful decade of our lives . . ."
Christian Junge: On Ahmad Faris al-Shidyaq and ‘Exposing Words’
In short, Junge writes that al-Fāriyāqīya demands the right to a woman’s participation in lust, which means not only sexual desire, but also social and cultural desires -- and thus also linguistic pleasures. Women’s emancipation here means not only women’s participation in knowledge, but also in lust. Woman here are not the object of pleasure, but its subject.
Hilal Chouman: ‘This is Truly the Revolution of the Disenfranchised’
"I believe the past — whether we call it a civil war or peace — will not end until the fall of the Second Republic, which is the protector of the official narrative of the civil war and the killer of the war’s missing and kidnapped."
Friday Finds: ‘Ode to Lebanon’
The video was taken on October 19, when Hashem Beck read at the Rugby Tavern in London as part of the London launch of her Laureate's Choice Anthology: There Was and How Much There Was.
Robyn Creswell on Poetic Modernism in Beirut and Deprovincializing Comparative Literature
"But I was able to find out that some early issues of that magazine did receive funding from the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and that was unexpected."
Tomorrow is Pub Day for Dominique Eddé’s ‘Edward Said: His Thoughts as a Novel’
"‘I was very moved’, came his voice down the line. ‘But you’re not cruel enough to me D. You’ve protected me. Your novel suffers from that. And you don’t understand, you haven’t written how much I loved you. Mali loves Farid more than he loves her. Farid isn’t me.’"
On Hanane Hajj Ali’s ‘Jogging’: Sex, Prime Ministers, and Running in Circles
On the night I saw the play, for example, Ali paused in the middle of describing an unpleasant sex dream about Fouad Al-Seniora—the former Minister of Finance and prime minister of Lebanon—to ask who the equivalent, physically unappealing politician in England would be; she received a chorus of “Boris Johnson!” from the audience.
Short Story Original: Hilal Chouman’s ‘World of Dogs’
"He keeps walking. The buildings, rubble, and garbage around him duplicate and multiply."
Friday Finds: Dominique Eddé, Rima Rantisi on Lebanon
"Speed is a reflex, second nature. When a driver is stuck in a traffic jam, his hand on the horn immediately takes over from his foot on the accelerator. It is less an attempt to move forward than a way of not giving up when everything is falling apart."
Sunday Submissions: 4th Khayrallah Prize
Deadline for submissions to this year's prize is August 31, 2019.
Jabbour Douaihy on ‘The King of India’
"The title doesn’t reflect the contents of the novel. I choose a title at random. There is no India in the novel, and no king."
5 Books by Etel Adnan, Born on This Day
"Time and fog escape our grasp." -Etel Adnan, #BOTD.
