Disaster Supplies: June

Och tid förgår och tid sträcks ut, och tid

är som ett återfall i en lång sjukdom.

/ Rainer Maria Rilke, Rekviem

Big Questions #14 by Anders Nilsen: Title and Deed

The Idiot. The tears. The drama. 

Next issue will be the last. How will I ever-

Buy/preview.

Anticipation: N.B.

Disaster Supplies: May

Vad finns det kvar åt oss som nu behöver

vartenda ord som svarar mot ett gränslöst

i omätbara avstånd utlagt Hades.

Harry Martinson, Aniara (1956)

Robert Crawford on T.S. Eliot's "Marina"

Just found my favourite lecture at last year's T.S. Eliot International Summer School online: T.S. Eliot's Daughter, held by poet and professor of Scottish literature Robert Crawford. Not only is Marina one of the poems I keep the closest, but Crawford seemed to have a certain (poet's) understanding that really shone through in his lecture, something which I perhaps felt other lectures lacked.


There was a quite special moment afterwards, when Seamus Heaney, to end a rather excited discussion on the meaning of the poem's epigraph Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga? (*) in relation to the rest of the poem's recalling the recognition scene in Shakespeare's Pericles (**), suddenly said that it must be understood as a tuning fork for the rest of the poem, and nothing else. Some of us sighed out of gratitude for that on point remark.


TSE reading Marina.


(*) "What place is this, what kingdom, what shores of the world?" Taken from Seneca the Younger's tragedy Hercules Furens, where these words are uttered by Hercules himself as he recovers from the insanity during which he has murdered his wife and children. 


(**) Pericles, in mourning for his wife and for Marina, the daughter who is for long thought to be dead, has left his kingdom for the sea. To hopefully rouse him from his despair, a young woman is put before him to sing. As she tells him her life story they both realize that they are in fact father and daughter.

Disaster Supplies: February

Var alla avsked i förväg, som vore de redan

bakom dig, liksom den vinter som gått. 

Ty bland vintrar finns en där den ändlösa ledan

givit ditt övervintrade hjärta sitt rikliga mått. /... /

Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonetterna till Orfeus II:XIII


English, German.

Red Book by David Shrigley

I spent the whole afternoon in that coffee bar reading a few pages at a time, to even out the laughter. Having been a great fan for half a decade or so, I must say Red Book turned out to be one of Shrigley's most brilliant works. 

Read this red book. And visit the artist's website. 

Big Questions #13 by Anders Nilsen: A House That Floats

Back to the thin paper quality but more life-saving than ever before.

Read two pages here. 

Disaster Supplies: December

/... / En del ögon är alltid släckta
Där sover dåsiga drömska djur
som för alltid gått ur vintern
Drömdjur, skrämseldjur
Kallblodiga med förhårdnade naglar
I evighet utstötta ur rasen /.../


Katarina Frostenson, Huset är kvinnligt / Rena Land (1980)

Big Questions #12 by Anders Nilsen: A Young Crowe's Guide to Hunting

Enter the crows.

And I am, as always, in awe of Nilsen's long running series Big Questions. One issue/20-30 pages per year, as it's been the past few, is never enough but still quite - it is with the tiny gestures; the turning of a head, the widening of an eye, that Nilsen's drama becomes what it is. Perfect.

Cover here.

Have a look at his website.

Café Edenborg R.I.P.

In my late teens, during the years when hip hop was my life and I got to travel to NYC for the first time, I found a poetry collection called Aloud: Voices from the Nuyorican Café that was to become my close companion for quite some time. It is an extensive collection of 500 pages or so, by more than 100 poets related to the Nuyorican Poets Café in New York - including ntozake shange, Maggie Estep, Lois Griffith, Reg E. Gaines, Dana Bryant and Sapphire among all, poets who were to become my idols for years to come. (*)

In the wonderful introduction by Miguel Algarín, The Scattering of the Ashes: The Burial of a Poet, one finds his personal account of how all their friends walked in procession upon poet Miguel Piñero's death, to scatter his ashes:

thru the Lower East Side

as he had wanted, and as he had written in a poem many years prior to that day.

Earlier today I vividly remembered cherishing that foreword, as the Nuyorican came to symbolize for me a place where everyone and everything was possible, disregarding of (for example) race and gender. The kind of place that I never got to be part of then, but that I actually would find in Café Edenborg some ten years later.

Since 2004, Edenborg has been my second home, the place where I've read, worked, hung out when I had nothing better to do. And I have gotten to know an extraordinary bunch of people, both the ones working and other regulars. People who I've wanted to share my world with, while everyone outside the café seemed biased, racist, homophobic or just plain out of their minds.

This evening at 7, when Mr. Edenborg made everyone leave the café so he could close the door and symbolically lock up for the last time, there were many with me who couldn't stop crying, scattered and shattered out on Stora Nygatan. An inconsolable group who have spent hours and hours together in that room.

This is the end of an era, and I have no clue what to do now, except for thanking everyone for all these years, and for the honourable award of Best Regular. Thank you Shenge, Evis, Siri, Sofia, Danne, Sara, Elias, Amanda, Carl-Michael, Caroline, Viktor, Chia, Aurora, Frida, Jessica, Elli and Hanna. For everything.

I love you more than.



(The award prize)

.
.
.

(*) A book that I happened to find in my beloved friend Patrik's bookshelf many years after, to my great surprise (considering the fact that we were living in Sweden and that it came out in 1994). Sadly, Patrik is no longer with us, but I somehow know that we had a special bond that came out of owning that exact book; like we were from the same block philosophically, or had similarly coloured dreams or something.

Les Librairies of My Life: Les Mots à la bouche

Les Mots à la bouche is my favourite bookstore in the Whole. Wide. World. It is on my favourite street corner in Paris: rue Sainte-Croix de la Bretonnerie and rue Vieille du Temple, in Le Marais, 4:ème arr.

Les Mots is packed with books, LBGT-themed and others, and they always seem to carry the top 5 books I've been looking for lately; classics as well as new stuff; everything neatly organized. They have a great wall of magazines, too. And a basement.

At the moment all I want is for that wonderfully nice staff to start selling tote bags with their logo, in the appropriate blue colour. It would be perfect in my collection, and I would carry it everywhere with me, showing it off.

By the way, on that same extraordinary corner is:

Amorino (the best ice cream in Europe),
Saveurs de pains (a boulangerie that does fantastic baguettes with gruyère & ham and a mean café crème)
L'étoile manquante (a great hangout café/bar with an otherworldly salad of fresh fruits and cheeses with mustard dressing - Salade d'Ètoile).

(All pics old and googled)

Alban - popmuffa för små hundar by Barbro Lindgren

Swedish children's book from 1972 that I used to love as a kid. Alban is a dog with one ear hanging who wants to die when his brother impresses their common love interest Melitta by dancing on one hind leg.

A million thanks to the wonderful ladies at the Library who helped me find it!

Buoyancies #1

for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf by poet/choreographer/director/author/playwright ntozake shange is one of few books I never could have done without.

I remember my first time reading something by shange, a poem called People of Watts, inspired by Dana Lixenberg's portrait photography in a '93 issue of Vibe. There was something about it. Not long after I recognized her name in the Me'Shell N'degéOcello song Two Lonely Hearts (on the Subway), off her debut album Plantation Lullabies:

Here comes the train / Please don’t turn and walk away – stay / We could read some Ntozake Shange

In '95 I was in NYC for the first time in my life, hanging out at the Nuyorican Poets Café to catch a little something of the atmosphere surrounding shange and her friends; star-struck and overwhelmed by the opportunity to interview author/activist Lois Griffith about the café, the poetry slam scene and the disenfranchised of the U.S. and Sweden.

In the vintage section of the Strand Bookstore I found most of shange's work and I became obsessed, especially by for colored girls (...) which is a choreopoem for 7 women in 7 different cities of the U.S. It was first performed in a woman's bar outside Berkeley, California in '74, later moved on to Broadway, winning an Obie Award.

Lady in Orange:
i'm on the lower east side
in new york city
and i can't i can't
talk witchu no more

20 monologues/poems are intertwined with dance. It's about being an African-American woman in the 20th century, about love, race, gender and violence.

Lady in Orange:
i cdnt stand it
i cdnt stand bein sorry & colored at the same time
it's so redundant in the modern world

Years have passed and I've kept coming back to for colored girls (...) Evidently I had to pay tribute in my radio play on hip-hop and betweenship:

Nanna:
Svartvit. (Paus) Att slå upp ögonen varje morgon och
vara ingetdera. Och istället för att fundera på hur långt
regnbågen egentligen räcker, göra sig till den här
saken, för dem att se på, förundras över.

I didn't realise until now what it was I really saw in Ocean Harbour, South Georgia in February:



Lady in Brown:
& this is for colored girls who have considered suicide / but are movin to the ends of their own rainbows



Look inside the book here.

Listen to great gay rappers Deep Dickollective who have done a beautiful tribute to shange and the choreopoem called For Colored Boys here.

More Disaster Supplies

1. (NEW) Antarctica

Disaster Supplies

1. The sighs of sleeping dogs

2. Maki (although that's not really a maki)

3. Ipoh bean sprouts

4. Anders Nilsen's Big Questions

5. Harold and Maude

6. Char Siu (Bao)

7. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf and The Bridge Poem

8. Vincent

9. Edward Gorey's The Doubtful Guest

10. Sattva's raisin bread

11. The Lady in the Radiator

12. Five Years

13. Longan

14. Kodama

15. Kaya toast and white coffee


Let's pray it gets longer.