TOBI'S DESK

Alma Mahler and her husband, Gustav, 1909. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Sometimes you just want to read something juicy, and Cate Haste’s Passionate Spirit: The Life of Alma Mahler delivers that in spades. Alma is remembered primarily as the wife and muse of three major cultural figures in fin de siècle Vienna: the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius, and the novelist and poet Franz Werfel. But Haste’s biography reveals a woman with artistic ambitions of her own, sidelined in no small part because of the social expectations of the time. To be perfectly honest, though, I read this book for the gossip, of which there is plenty. Haste has a knack for capturing Alma’s world in all its art house fervor. Alma’s first kiss is with Klimt (she refuses his sexual advances by quoting Goethe’s Faust ). During the birth of their second child, a panicking Gutav tries to soothe Alma’s pains by reading Kant aloud to her (it doesn’t work, unsurprisingly...

© Lenspiration / Adobe Stock. I don’t know why I went temporarily blind in Tijuana while waiting to cross the border in 1993. It didn’t happen all at once. It wasn’t like someone suddenly turned off the lights. First it was the colors that started fading, then it was the shapes, and then shadows altogether. Or maybe not in that order. I could explain the colors leaving, I knew that the world sometimes did that—seemed grayer than usual. I thought it was clouds. I thought the gray came from the walls themselves, and the dried trees and the loose dirt. Maybe that’s just what Tijuana looked like. But it was shapes I could not explain. Their edges softening into the empty space around them until I couldn’t tell where one thing started and another ended. I could see something was more of itself closer to the center, and less of itself farther out—a gradient. Maybe the soul wasn’t just one thing but an assortment of many little things huddled together, like penguins keeping warm in a bliz...

Jill Talbot’s column,  The Last Year ,   traces the moments and seasons before her daughter leaves for college. This essay marks the end of winter series. It will return again in March and, and then again in the summer. After driving fifty miles on 380 East to McKinney, I take I-75 south toward the Ridgeview exit. I’m on my way to the cemetery, silk red roses in the passenger seat. In three days, it will be three years since my phone rang at 9:20 on a Saturday morning. My mother, telling me my father was gone. I take a right toward the cemetery and follow the winding path to the tree. I park beside it. As the first anniversary of my father’s death approached, my mother asked me to put roses on his grave: “I want him to have them for the day.” She wasn’t well enough to do it herself—the cancer, diagnosed not long after his death, had taken its last turn, though we didn’t know it then. After she died, fourteen months after my father, I swiped through the photos on her phone ...

Recently, the Oxford English Dictionary recognized West African English, bringing its number of World Englishes to 15. It further added 29 new Nigerian words in its latest update. One of the Dictionary’s consultants on Nigerian English is the academic Kingsley Ugwuanyi, who also provided some information on the pronunciation of West African English. Ugwuanyi’s current […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2UfUz3M

Accord Literary is a Ghana-based literary agency founded by the UK publisher Sarah Odedina and the Ghanaian publisher Deborah Ahenkorah. They are one of the five African organizations in publishing awarded a $20,000 grant from the African Publishing Innovation Fund for projects that will develop literacy, book accessibility, and the use of African indigenous languages […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/38XmKZc

Lolwe is a new online magazine that publishes fiction, literary criticism, personal essays, photography, and poetry. It was founded in January 2020 by the Kenyan writer Troy Onyango, former Managing Editor of Enkare Review. It takes its name from Nam Lolwe, the traditional Luo name for Lake Victoria, which means “endless lake/water body.” The magazine zeroes in […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2RGVRmL

The Bagus NG is a literary platform dedicated to promoting African literature and the arts, and in the process bring needed awareness to the work of authors and artists. Curated by Ijeoma Ucheibe, they offer services ranging from virtual book tours and book marketing services to editorial services and consultation services. Founded in 2016, The […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/31d6cd2

The AfroAnthology Series is curated by the Nigerian writer Basit Jamiu. It is, so far, the only platform dedicated solely to promoting creative nonfiction in Africa. Founded in 2016, the series has produced the widely acclaimed Selves: An Afro Anthology of Creative Nonfiction, guest edited by the Nigerians Emmanuel Dairo and Uzoma Ihejirika, with an […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/36HQrwa

A montage of the solar system, including the Galilean satellites. Image courtesy of NASA . Map pin courtesy of Kilroy 2525 (CC0) on Wikimedia Commons. As the years passed, I learned to think of dreams as an integral part of life. There are dreams that, because of their sensory intensity, their realism or precisely their lack of realism, deserve to be introduced into autobiography, just as much as events that were actually lived through. Life begins and ends in the unconscious; the actions we carry out while fully lucid are only little islands in an archipelago of dreams. No existence can be completely rendered in its happiness or its madness without taking into account oneiric experiences. It’s Calderón de la Barca’s maxim reversed: it’s not a matter of thinking that life is a dream, but rather of realizing that dreams are also a form of life. It is just as strange to think, like the Egyptians, that dreams are cosmic channels through which the souls of ancestors pass in order to com...

In his column “Line Readings,” Ivan Brunetti begins with a close read of a single comics unit—a panel, a page, or a spread—and expands outward to encompass the history of comics, and the world as a whole.  Comics are often likened to short stories and novels, or (more improbably) animated films, but in a sense they are also a kind of poetry, an incantation beckoning us to enter their world. The simplicity of their superficial concision can reveal surprising density, layers, and multivalence. In a poem, lines might form and fill a stanza, which literally means “room”; and so it is with comics, where panels could likewise be thought of as stanzas. Rows, columns, and/or stair-steps of panels, in turn, structure a page (or an entire story) of comics and give it its particular cadence. Even the simplest grid tattoos its rhythmic structure onto the page. The one-page story “Jump Shot” by Lynda Barry (1988), an installment of her comic strip series Ernie Pook’s Comeek, comprises, to p...

William Collins (1721-1759) Let me tell you something. The eighteenth century was just straight up not a good time for poetry. Of course, there are exceptions; we’re talking about a hundred years (or, if you’re in graduate school, we’re talking about 160 years). Still, the principle is essentially sound. 1700–1800: bad poetry. Well, “bad.” Better say unreadable. Some inventive genius could probably set up a pay schedule where the big eighteenth-century poets get their fair share of huffin’-and-puffin’ adjectives. But adjectives aside, the desire to read  the stuff is small, vanishingly small. It wasn’t a bad century for  prose . Swift, Fielding, Sterne, Johnson, Gibbon, Boswell. Or zoom in close: Have you ever looked at Elizabeth Carter’s translation of Epictetus? Or Mary Wortley Montagu’s letters? Anybody today’d be damn proud to be compared to any of those cats. Whereas, if somebody compares your poetry to that of Thomas Gray, you are being made fun of. So why in the w...

The year 2019 was full. While it is gone, its books are not. In December, we released our list of The Notable Books of 2019 by African authors. As we look ahead into 2020, we list the year’s most notable debuts books and authors in fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, some of which also appear in […] from Brittle Paper https://ift.tt/2t4iIiu

In Tash Aw’s column, Freeze Frame, he explores his favorite masterpieces of Asian cinema. In this installment , Yasmin Ahmad’s Orked trilogy. Still from Yasmin Ahmad’s  Mukhsin  (2007) In the heart of the old town in Ipoh, Malaysia’s third largest city, a cluster of colonial-era shophouses has been saved from destruction and, over the last decade or so, reincarnated as a hipster enclave. Boutique hotels with concrete and plywood interiors and cafés serving single origin coffee sit next to kopitiam , the traditional eating houses of Malaysia. It’s a beguiling cocktail of history, modernity, and multiculturalism that seems to perfectly embody the youthful energy of the country. Nestled in a back lane in one of the most touristy parts of town is a small crowdfunded museum dedicated to the work of the filmmaker Yasmin Ahmad, who, at the peak of her powers in 2009, died from complications arising from a stroke. In the first decade of the new millennium, she had made six feature...

Tudor Washington Collins, Woman standing on rock looking out to sea , 1949, silver gelatin dry plate. Courtesy of Auckland Museum, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY (https://ift.tt/2FjBMtd). Elena Ferrante is a fictional character, one of my favorites: a disembodied person in my head, a mind inside my mind. She occupies a large, elastic space in there, in the same neighborhood with a lot of my real friends and mentors and everyone else with whom I have ever seriously corresponded, even though she’s never written anything that’s strictly just for me. She’s one of my Lilas: a sometimes-close, sometimes-distant friend and rival, who keeps winning by being smarter. It’s easy for me, as a reader of Ferrante and as a writer and friend to writers myself, to imagine the woman who wrote Ferrante’s books confiding her secret in me. The novels are already a confidence shared intimately with every reader, no two exchanges alike. It’s also easy because this author has shielded her name, body, and bi...