Random Photos

Here are few photos from the last few months.  Scroll down to the bottom to see how the New York Post, and New Yorkers, responded to the New Year's Eve flub by Mariah Carey. Poor Mimi!

One of Kerry James Marshall's paintings,
now on exhibit at his Met Breuer
show, Kerry James Marshall: MASTRY

Profs. Marisa Fuentes and Deborah Gray White,
who co-edited (in record time) the
superbly executed Scarlet and Black:
Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers
History (Rutgers UP, 2016) at the public launch
last fall 

At a gallery on the Upper East Side

Outside the Grove Street PATH station, Jersey City

The Delmar Loop in St. Louis

Muslim Voices, a Rutgers-Newark AAAS-
sponsored program led by Prof. Zain Abdullah,
of Temple University, at the Newark Museum

One of the last episodes of this season of Empire,
featuring a reproduction of Edgar Degas'
"Miss LaLa at the Cirque Fernando," the subject
of my story Counternarratives "Acrobatique"  

Festive trees in the Manhattan
Financial District

Lower Manhattan, from the offices
of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council

Artists at the offices of the Lower Manhattan
Cultural Council's residency site

Zuccotti Park, where Occupy NYC
took place, now glitzed up (again)

Poet, essayist and editor
Saeed Jone speaking on behalf of
his former teacher, Rigoberto González,
who was being honored at Poets House 

My amazing colleague
Rigoberto González

In the WTC Westfield Shopping
walkway, with a giant telescreen
in the background 

On the phone, in the WTC

Newark's gentrifying Halsey Street

New buildings in Newark 

Vintage car on campus 

The cast of Kaija Saariaho's
L'Amour de loin, at the Met Opera

Post-SantaCon Santa,
almost on the rails 

At the Rutgers-Newark MFA holiday
reading, party and book exchange 

Tonya Foster and David Barclay Moore
at the book launch for Robert F. Reid-Pharr's
Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain,
and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU Press, 2016)

Robert F. Reid-Pharr (r) and his editor at
book launch for his new scholarly book
Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain,
and Post-Humanist Critique (NYU Press, 2016)

New York Post: "The Plot Against Mariah"

Poem: Mohja Kahf

Mohja Kahf (Center for Near Eastern Studies, UCLA)

A colleague, John B., mentioned today that I was posting much more, and it's true, though there are always 2-3 more things I'd like to post about than I manage to post here. A few weeks back, another colleague, Fran B., told me about Fred Wilson's show at Pace Galleries, and I went. It was really amazing, one of the most enjoyable art exhibits I've attended in a while. And Fred Wilson and his partner, artist Whitfield Lovell were there, in the gallery! So I want to blog about that. And I said I'd post a review of Red Tails--what was that, a year ago?--and I've wanted to write about Steve McQueen's Shame...and on and on.  Oh well. One of these days soon.

Today, it's a poem, by Mohja Kahf (1967-), whose wonderful little collection E-mails from Scheherezad (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003) I came across a few years ago. I don't get out that much, but I think it's a smart and provocative gathering of poems, and I rarely see it or her mentioned anywhere, so I thought I'd feature one of the poems, since that's one of the things I can do with this blog. (Can I just say that I wish English had diminutives like Spanish and Portuguese, because it's my natural instinct to use them frequently and affectionately when talking about things like, well, this blog.)

Who is Mohja Kahf? She was born in Damascus, Syria, and now is an associate professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas. She also is a pioneer in the field of Muslim American literature. The poem below gives a sense of some of the subjects Kahf's poetry addresses, though many of the poems, which range in length and form, directly address the experiences of Arab immigrants and Arab and Muslim Americans, especially women, in the US, and many are as seriously fiercesome in their tone as this one is wittily fiercesome. It's truly about poetry and poetics, about form and statement, about poetic effects and aims, about how any poem by this poet will initially be read but what she's--it, the poem is--really trying to do. Do read it. I think she, and it, succeed.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION SONNET

So you think I play with the multiculture card
and sign up for affirmative action verse,
slide into print with poetry that's worse?
So you think I get excused from being good

by throwing in Third-World saffron and some veils?
Now is the summer of minority discontent
They have no Idea of Order in the West--
But I do not insist on difference. Difference pales 

beside the horrors facing our race
--the human one: hunger, HIV, genocide,
the unconscionable global marketplace
Where is the salve? We write. We recognize

--we must--each other in millennial glow
or we will die from what we do not know

That's all these smoke-and-mirror poems do
I came across the world to write for you

1998

Copyright © Mohja Kahf, "Affirmative Action Blues," from E-mails from Scheherezad, Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2003. All rights reserved.