Category: language

• Project Blog It: Strawberries

  Aug 8

  To contribute to Project Blog It today, I decided to post an excerpt from a book I’ve been writing over the past few years based on the journal I kept… more ›

• Istanbul 01: Call to Prayer

  May 28

  Five times a day the call issues forth from the amplified speakers mounted atop the minarets. These days, the muezzin need not bother climbing the steps up the tower. Because… more ›

• the grandeurs of risk

  Mar 9

  I’m convinced that such a circle [that is, the unclosable circle of an encounter, which revolves around the undesirable] only exhausts the strength of those who don’t enter into it… more ›

• Whither the Turks?

  Feb 6

  During the forty-six hours I spent in Budapest in the winter of ’96, I befriended another American at the hostel who was traveling the world researching the history of coffee… more ›

• 15 Songs for a Solstice

  Dec 22

  …to help keep the cold in on the first day of winter. (As if most of us needed help with that.) Here’s to a new season of personal (and universal)… more ›

• Bullet-Point Friday

  Nov 2

  The first definition of “bullet” listed in the OED is “a small round ball.” I think first of a child’s ball: small, probably red, and rolling across a street in… more ›

• Bullet-Point Friday

  Oct 26

  It’s like, you know, flamenco piano: when you hear the first measures of just such a beast you recognize the form (flamenco) but don’t recognize the medium (piano) because your… more ›

• Bullet-Point Friday

  Oct 5

  I’m enjoying my trek through Daniel Weissbort’s From Russian with Love, a book about his friendship(s) and (professional) relationship(s) with Joseph Brodsky, translation theory, Russian, literature, and death. It is… more ›

• Scivias

  Sep 26

  I remainTogether:t(w)o-gatheredA union w/o unityIdentity w/ differenceSingable yet always (yet) unsung remainderTwinned coils twining throughHere & (t)here & no(w)here:now/hereWo ist der Mensch?W(h)er(e) ist der Mensch?Here- her- he- achAnd a thou-Sand… more ›

• Il y a / n’est plus

  Sep 22

  A hundred years of his undying death articulating as if the singular unsaid, unsaying, unsayable, in its fully exteriorized impossibility against the homogenized totalization of a text, an other. He… more ›