Arabesques Review
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- The Irresistible Literary Way of Poet Djelloul Marbrook. A 30 minutes audio conversation conducted by Martina Newberry
Djelloul Marbrook will sign galleys of his new book Skip to Maloo in the Book Expo America May 30-June 3, Jacob Javits Center 655 West 34th Street, New York City 1. Question: Is there one school or philosophy of writing which is particularly compelling to you?
No. There are certain writers who have strongly influenced me. Among more recent writers I think of Glenway Wescott, Mark Helprin, Iris Murdoch, A.S. Byatt, Elmore Leonard, John D. MacDonald, and of course Hemingway. In a way, I missed my calling as a scholar. I was suited to the scholarly life, but not institutions. I get lost in a crowd of three people. I don’t have good enough filters to deal with more than two or three people in any circumstance, and so this unsuited me for universities. But I have read voraciously and eclectically all my life, even scholarly works. In my early 20s and throughout my 30s I tended to write experimental and often obscurantist poems. Some of them were published in literary journals, and I did receive some encouragement from poets like Rolfe Humphries and Alan Dugan. But in time I began to recognize that I didn’t want to be caught saying what I meant or meaning what I said.
Sun, 06 May 2007 20:27:12 -0600 - Save Freedonia, by Ian Williams
Ian Williams Not many people have heard of the Western Sahara dispute and most congressmen could not tell it from Freedonia - until the lobbyists came a-knocking.
Yesterday, the UN Security Council fought back a Franco-American effort to rewrite international law in favour of Morocco and against the people of Western Sahara. Morocco has offered dubious "autonomy" to Western Sahara, but is refusing to hold the referendum in the territory that the World Court and the UN Security Council have called for - and to which Morocco had agreed, until it became clear that it would lose.
Sun, 06 May 2007 18:52:59 -0600 - Western Sahara: Against Autonomy, by Jacob Mundy
Western Sahara In recent years, the Moroccan government has championed the idea of autonomy as a solution to its territorial dispute with pro-independence advocates over Western Sahara. Rabat has said it is willing to consider an autonomous, locally elected government in Western Sahara, which would have powers independent of the central government, albeit circumscribed by Morocco's ultimate sovereignty. The movement for Western Saharan statehood, on the other hand, has rejected autonomy.
Wed, 02 May 2007 06:11:43 -0600 - The Colour of Words & Poem to a Leaf, two poems by Josef Lesser
Tell me the colour of words, the rainbow phrases splashed across the daily canvas, like when seagulls skate through lilac clouds and desert crabs hone their calligraphy skills across the burnt sienna sand.
Wed, 11 Apr 2007 08:42:45 -0600 - The Social Dimension of Textual Interrogation in the Classroom, by Jose Jason L. Chancoco
It was Stephen Krashen who pointed out the importance of exposure in the context of second language acquisition-learning. We remember some of our grandparents here in the Philippines who studied under the Thomasites and we marvel at their English proficiency given that some of them did not even finish tertiary education due to the economic and social disruptions brought by the war.
Tue, 10 Apr 2007 21:36:17 -0600 - To make a “Flowry” Death: Rereading Artro Islas, By Andrés Rodríguez
Although a substantial body of criticism has grown up around Arturo Islas’s The Rain God, very little of it deals directly with the subject of indigeneity.2 Most academic readers see the novel as a mixture of elements: history, gender relations, narratology, and so forth. Terms such as “ambiguity,” “alternative,” “hybridity,” and “reconstruction” have been used to describe the complex nature of The Rain God as a “text.”
Tue, 10 Apr 2007 21:13:42 -0600 - Colors Issue on Sale Now!
Coloured Perspectives, by Abha Iyengar
Othello, the bold and noble Moor in Shakespeare’s tragedy of the same name ‘suffers’ his color and because of his color doubts his own standing in the white, lily-colored Venetian society of which he is a part. Not only that, he begins to doubt his wife, Desdemona’s, love for him since she is white and he is black. All it needs is the vile Iago’s barbed remarks to turn his doubts to certainty, leading to the tragedy that eventually unfolds. What would have happened if Shakespeare had made his protagonist a man as white as the Venetians? Would the tragedy have the same depth and impact? Shakespeare knew that color is a major factor in the life of us humans. The Moor was the hero, a man whose qualities were above the norm, he was respected and esteemed; Desdemona had fallen in love with him and married him. Yet, he was vulnerable because he was not the right color. He was black, and this personified all that was evil and decadent to Venetians, as also to the people of Elizabethan England before whom Shakespeare was presenting his play. Shakespeare chose to color his hero, because he knew that this would add greater color to his tragedy.
Tue, 10 Apr 2007 15:56:41 -0600 - The Brain, the Heart, and the Rectum: Humor, Literary Theory and Terror, by Wisam Mansour
Bakhtin, in his theories of the Carnivalesque celebrates among other things the lower strata bodily functions. He believes that one of the spirits of the carnival is to celebrate the low, the banal, the popular as opposed to the classic and mainstream. This Bakhtinian notion brought to my mind a joke in the form of an angry exchange among several parts of the body, brain, heart, lungs, stomach, and rectum, each disputing its right to the leadership of the body: the brain declares its right to lead on the merit of its superior functionality and its capability for reasoning;
Tue, 20 Feb 2007 04:28:37 -0700 - Lessons learnt from the Israeli-Hizbollah conflict, by Eric Koo
"Starting with a tiger’s head and ending with a snake’s tail.” This Chinese saying aptly describes the conclusion of the Israeli-Hizbollah conflict that lasted more than a month, and which killed around 1719 and wounded about 5479 people on all sides in total.
International pressure and outrage at bombings on Lebanese civilians
Wed, 14 Feb 2007 19:08:23 -0700 - Gillian, Post-Election, short story by Karen Malpede
“A number of my patients have had dreams of decapitation, and I, also, awoke from one of these dreams.” Gillian recorded this information in her notebook, paused and looked out. She did not care to write the details of her own nightmare last night which she could still clearly recall. From her twelfth floor office-apartment in the art deco building at 91st Street she was able to scan the whole park.
Mon, 12 Feb 2007 20:30:32 -0700
