I am preparing for the archive visit that starts tomorrow and found myself trawling through (what else?) the immense data of JStor to look for stuff on Carl Weissner. And out of nowhere the fabulous concrete poetry journal came to the screen. Two poems that caught my eye:
more adventures… starting tomorrow.
Somewhere in the midst of reading Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Death in the Family, in the section of the party in spring, a deep ache to listen to all the albums that he had put together “written in my own childish capitals on the spines”.
David Bowie, Hunky Dory
Led Zeppelin, 1
Talking Heads, 77
The Chameleons, Script of the Bridge
The The, Soul Mining
The Stranglers, Rattus Norvegicus
The Police, Outlandos D’Amour
Talking Heads, Remain in Light
David Bowie, Scary Monsters
Eno Byrne, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
U2, October
The Beatles, Rubber Soul
Simple Minds, New Gold Dream
This summer seems far away now that winter is truly upon us here in Berlin. Christmas looks like a quiet affair but I was glad that one is still possible to be able to hold on to some sounds of summer. Like this podcast episode that I worked on, speaking to Zoran Terzić, about memes, the internet, Kafka, and other marvellous beings.
The only other thing out there on the horizon is a visit to the Deutsches Literaturachiv, based at Marbach am Neckar. With the numbers at an all time high, I am mostly wondering what an archival visit can mean at this point of time, both as an exercise in research work and personally as an accessibility concern (politically and generally).
In the meantime, one waits for the week to being some answers.
While the numbers in Germany become more bizarre (we had three consecutive days of 30000+ covid-19 cases), it was wonderful to be able to host a conference this year. Okay, it was online. But it was truly a pleasure to have listened to the people we invited to the conference and also to have been around for the wonderful keynote that Prof. Dr. Elahe Haschemi Yekani delivered at the conference. The program of the conference has been archived here.
Now, with the November rains making things extremely cold and un-outdoorsy, it is back to the work drills of the winter. So, what am I working on? Right now, I am looking at the work of Wolfgang Ernst on digital memory and archives. I am also working on a chapter that has to do with archives and the work of archiving itself.
Reading list, right now:
Digital Memory and the Archive by Wolfgang Ernst
The Archive and the Repertoire by Diana Taylor
Migrations of Gesture edited by Carrie Noland and Sally Ann Ness
Inter-imperiality: Vying Empires, Gendered Labor, and the Literary Arts of Alliance by Laura Doyle
Writing is difficult these days. Not just because we are living in a world that is increasingly unpredictable. Part of it is the very fabric of the unknowability of a future that seems to make any utterance devoid of meaning. That is what is true for all of us, I suppose. This website has been fairly dormant for a while. While I wanted to document my research over a year, it became clear to me that projecting such expectations is not really the healthy thing to do. So, what have I been up to?
I am attending a bunch of fun courses this summer semester. The Canons and Revisions course at Freie Universität by Florian Sedlmeier, for instance. I find the course and its reading rewarding for the many ways it opens up canons to questions.
I have been writing a chapter on canons and the politics of canon for my own thesis. This chapter has been quite a long way from finishing but it is still being shaped by questions of the formation of the subject called Indology (via Aamir R. Mufti) and the idea of the pedagogical via some Bhabha. I am still reading up on the idea of gestures, which I think will be a good addition to this conversation.
On a more organisational level, I have never been busier. We are putting together a postgraduate conference for GAPS’s Postgrad Forum called Postcolonial Narrations.
Sometimes work is all one has in the face of uncertainty. This is definitely one of the times that it has kept me sane.
Watch College Behind Bars on Netflix. Truly inspirational.
Listen to Passenger List which is honestly the greatest podcast ever.