Think About It 064: ZEYNEP TUFEKCI

In the networked public sphere the goal of the powerful often is not to convince people of the truth of a particular narrative or to block a particular piece of information from getting out (that is increasingly difficult), but to produce resignation, cynicism, and a sense of disempowerment among the people.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (2017)

Use the link below to view several TED talks and read articles by US-based Turkish sociologist, journalist and writer ZEYNEP TUFEKCI:

 

 

https://www.ted.com/speakers/zeynep_tufekci

 

 

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Think About It 041: MICHIKO KAKUTANI

 

 

Think About It 022: CHRISTOPHER LASCH

 

Think About It 018: NANCY JO SALES

 

The Write Advice 146: CLIVE JAMES

The critic should write to say, not 'look how much I've read,' but 'look at this, it's wonderful.'  If the young feel compelled to come and see your tomb, there should be something good written on it.  Here in Cambridge, in Trinity College Chapel, there is a plaque dedicated to Ludwig Wittgenstein.  It says, in Latin, that he released thought from its bonds of language.  If I ever had a plaque, I would like it to say:  He loved the written word, and told the young.

Latest Readings (2015)

 

Use the link below to visit the website of Australian writer, poet, lyricist, critic and broadcaster CLIVE JAMES (1939–2019):

 

 

 

https://www.clivejames.com/

 

 

 

 

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The Write Advice 007: GLENDA ADAMS

 

 

The Write Advice 011: JOHN CLARKE

 

 

The Write Advice 061: CHARMIAN CLIFT

Poet of the Month 067: XIAO AN

 

 

XIAO AN 
c 2002

YOU WANT TO EAT THE SUN

 

 

you want to eat the spring sun

you want to eat the sun's energy

such gluttony, to eat your face red

 

gold corona, silver corona

eat a sun today and one tomorrow

and live forever

TO LOST FRIENDS

 

 

love is such a bother

you look on helpless

grasp but can't hold

hold but it slips away

 

it must be springtime

everything is a 

mess of buds    dose of lust

ay ay ay ay

you can't explain on the phone

both poems from

 

 The Woman Who Plants Tobacco

  

(2002)

Translated by

  

DAVE HAYSOM

 

 

 

 

 

The following information appears on the website of The Poetry Translation Centre.  [It is re-posted here for information purposes only and, like the poems re-posted above, remains its author's exclusive copyright-protected intellectual property.]

 

Xiao An (born in 1964) is a poet of the fei-fei ('not/not' or 'neither/nor') school. For decades she combined a writing career with her work as a nurse in a Chengdu psychiatric hospital, earning the respect of the literary world through poems that fuse classical Chinese influences with the stark confessional tone of Sylvia Plath. Her 2002 volume The Woman Who Plants Tobacco collects her work from 1986 to 2000.

 

 

Use the link below to read another poem (in English) by Chinese poet XIAO AN:

 

 

 

https://www.poetrytranslation.org/poems/to-lost-friends

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Poet of the Month 053: TOETI HERARTY

 

 

 

 

Poet of the Month 045: NICULINA OPREA

 

 

 

 

Poet of the Month 011: FATMA BEN MAHMOUD

 

 

The Write Advice 145: GRAHAM GREENE

 

With a novel, which takes perhaps years to write, the author is not the same man at the end of the book as he was at the beginning.  It is not only that his characters have developed, he has developed with them, and this nearly always gives a sense of roughness to the work: a novel can seldom have the sense of perfection which you find in Chekhov's story, The Lady with the Dog.  It is the consciousness of the failure that makes the revision seem endless… the author is trying in vain to adapt the story to his changed personality, as though it were something he had begun in childhood and was finishing now in old age.  There are moments of despair when he begins perhaps the fifth revision of Part One, and he sees the multitude of the new corrections.  How can he help feeling, 'This will never end.  I shall never get this passage right.'?  What he ought to be saying is, 'I shall never again be the same man I was when I wrote this months and months ago.'  No wonder that under these conditions a novelist often makes a bad husband or an unstable lover.  There is something in his character of the actor who continues to play Othello when he is off the stage, but he is an actor who has lived far too many parts during far too many long runs.  He is encrusted with characters. 

Ways of Escape (1980)

Use the link below to read about the life and work of British novelist GRAHAM GREENE (1904–1991):

 

 

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Graham-Greene

 

 

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Some Books About… BOOKS

 

The Write Advice 094: HARRY HANSEN

 

The Write Advice 044: GEORGES SIMENON