Theme: Yahia Lababidi

Poetic Ideal: a language scrubbed clean by silences. If we listen, the air is heavy with poems, ripe for plucking.Read more

To speak of the smell and feel of books, the erotics of the text, has begun to sound perverseRead more

Physical distance is difficult because of the helplessness it engenders. To see one’s world unraveling continents and oceans away and to feel that you can’t do anything can be terribly frustrating. But with distance, one also sees more clearly. Art, as I understand it, and this includes philosophy, is about cultivating a certain distance so that we might, in turn, lend our vision to those in the thick of historic events.Read more

In the wry 1986 Smiths hit song Frankly, Mr. Shankly, singer/lyricist Morrissey warns, “Fame…it can play hideous tricks on the brain” - mind games, that is, where the audience is an unwittingly accomplice.Read more

Complete honesty is the luxury of the utterly good, or the utterly shameless. Our morality is determined by the level of immorality that we can afford to live with.Read more

I buried your face, someplace by the side of the new road so I would not trip over it every morning or on evening strollsRead more