"The diamond that cuts through illusion."

Props to the renegade Ph.D. students who organized the first-ever MLA Subconference, occurring this Wednesday and Thursday. I'm fortunate to be representing the CUNY Adjunct Project on the closing plenary, "Resisting Precarity."

#JusticeForTrayvon: 13 Vines from 'Our' Ground

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then my phone ran out of juice as we walked down the above block, which I happen to live on. (Would that I could've gone up and gotten a fresh phone.) The march continued east on 12th Street, north on 1st Avenue, west on 23rd Street, north on 6th Avenue, west on 33rd Street, and north on 7th one block to 34th Street, where we were stopped. I peeled off at that point but the march continued west on 33rd and then, from what I heard, to Times Square. No justice, no peace.

#FreeCooperUnion

I participated in and documented the rally at Cooper Union tonight in support of the student and faculty sit-in of the president's office (ongoing as I post this). After more than a century of being free of charge, the school now plans to charge tuition. My Storify.

Derek Walcott's 'A Far Cry From Africa'

My notes for teaching this great poem about the author's conflicting heritages vis-á-vis the struggle for Kenyan independence. I used the poem to kick off my English-composition class this semester at BMCC, which is loosely organized around postcolonialism.

Florent Morellet on Historic Preservation and NYC

"You can't preserve everything," Florent Morellet, pioneering meat-market restaurateur, said Thursday night at a Historic Districts Council screening of the 2009 documentary about the rise and fall of his eponymous French diner. The stories of Morellet, his restaurant (which closed in '08), and the meat market have been well told over the years, but the Frenchman's rebirth as a quasi-anti-preservationist could be fresh narrative terrain: Now a member of the community board that serves the neighborhood, Soho, in which he lives, Morellet professed to have lost interest in the meatpacking district, having turned his attention instead to high-rises, urban density, and sustainability.

"It's not about the buildings, it's about the people," he ramblingly opined after the screening at the Tribeca Film Center. "That's what we as preservationists have to think about. High rise is the future, that's what's sustainable. We have to start leveling the suburbs and bringing them to the city, to the core, where there's transit. Apartment buildings of 100 stories! Going against that is immoral, because it's green."

Not exactly the talking points of New York's historic-preservation community, whose latest success is getting a distinctly low-rise section of the East Village landmarked, but that's part of Morellet's charm: he's unpredictable.

He's also, again, ahead of the trend. "There should be high rises on the avenues of the East Village," he said—and along the northern reaches of Third Avenue, there already are.

Manifesto for a Kairological History of Architecture*

*Or, Why I Like BLDG BLOK

Last night I participated in the inaugural public event of BLDG BLOK, a start-up housed at the DUMBO NYU-Poly incubator that's using mapping and other digital tools to rediscover urban history. My task was to respond creatively to a history of Tompkins Square by writer Francis Morrone; I had five minutes, or about 1200 words. Following is what I wrote and read.

When I think of Tompkins Square, I think of rats. Two summers ago, the square—or park, or gathering place, or historical site, or whatever you deem the most appropriate description of the space for your needs—was infested with rats, as local parents complained to media; their burrows—the rats’ burrows, that is, not the parents’ burrows, which are a different kind of burrow—ran adjacent to the playground on the square’s west side. At night you could see the rats scrambling over the mulch, or venturing across the Avenue A sidewalk to pick through garbage. Rats are shy animals—they disappear if you get too close. But they need humans to survive.

*

During the rat infestation—I understand it’s lessened now—I happened to live, just for a short time, on Seventh Street between A and B, which is the south side of Tompkins Square. Accordingly, I had many opportunities to observe the rats. I was interested in photographing them, I guess to capture them, to hold them in time for longer than a moment—that is, permanently. In one photograph I took, there were 22 pairs of rat eyes glinting in the dark. Stopped in the image, they seemed to look at me with the same mix of curiosity and fear with which I gazed at them.

*

Rats are as much a part of New York City history—of any city’s history—as they are a part of my history in New York. Twelve years ago, shortly after I moved to this metropolis, I hit a rat with my foot as I crossed Broadway on Fourth Street. I didn’t see the rat—I just felt a soft, semi-squishy thud. Immediately a high-pitched screech overcame the corner; I looked down and saw a furry oblong scurry away zig-zag-like. Passersby glared at me as I stood there, stunned, as if I’d been hit by a car—an unexpectedly traumatic collision. But I might as well have collided with history itself.

*

Rats, as we know, are ancient animals—so ancient that the zoological designation “Old World rats” for the black and brown rodents we live with in cities doesn’t refer to the pre-modern era but to the pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-pre-modern era: specifically, the Pleistocene epoch, which began more than two million years ago and ended eleven-thousand-and-seven-hundred years ago. At some point during this enormous span of time—scientists aren’t sure when—the rats that now commingle with us and our refuse in Tompkins Square originated in the forests and scrublands of Asia. Our rats, of course, aren’t a million years old (obviously)—their average life span is only a year. But their bodies carry within them a history of the world, both spatial and temporal. They’re living documents of human civilization. Don’t believe me? Ask the next rat you see. He’ll tell you if he could.

*

Like rats, architecture carries within it a spatial-temporal history of the world, only you can’t stop a building—a design—in its tracks with your foot. As eminent architectural writer Francis Morrone reminds us in his chronological history, the area that’s now Tompkins Square was once a swampy mass filled with birds of the snipe variety; Manhatten men of a certain stripe hunted them. The snipe hunt later became synonymous with the wild-goose chase, a madcap search for an ostensibly real but actually fictional object. Indeed, that meaning is so prevalent today that to use “snipe hunting” to refer to a kind of bird hunting would be archaic. And yet this seemingly outmoded definition is embedded in the phrase; it can’t be separated out. Etymologies are not linear but coextensive—meanings are ever present.

*

When I think about architecture, I often find myself thinking of Orhan Pamuk’s incredible novel Snow, in which the provenance and style of buildings are as important as any other theme. After years of living in exile in Germany, the novel’s protagonist, a poet, returns to Turkey for his mother’s funeral. Subsequently, he’s offered a reporting assignment that takes him to the eastern city of Kars, a remote outpost of have’s and have-not’s—mostly have-not’s. His first stop in town is the Snow Palace Hotel, an “elegant Baltic building…two stories high, with long narrow windows that looked out onto a courtyard and an arch that led out to the street. The arch was 110 years old and high enough for horse-drawn carriages to pass through with ease.” When the poet-reporter walks under the arch, he feels “a shiver of excitement.”

*

The novel takes place in the 1990s. A hundred-and-ten years before then—in the 1880s—Kars belonged to the Russian empire, and Turkey, as a nation, didn’t yet exist. At the beginning of that same decade, Tompkins Square had become a public park—“one of the most attractive spots in the city,” as the New-York Tribune hailed it. Within 60 years, however, the park was no longer attractive: as the New York Times noted—and these references are Morrone’s, by the way—neglect was visible everywhere, the playground vandalized.

*

Kars—you may have sensed I was going here—suffered a similar degradation: “elegant Baltic buildings” turn out to be a rarity in the city as rendered by Pamuk in Snow. Instead, as the novel’s poet-reporter walks through the snow, he finds “decrepit Russian buildings with stovepipes sticking out of every window,” a “thousand-year-old Armenian church towering over the wood depots and the electric generators,” and “a five-hundred-year-old stone bridge,” where a “pack of dogs bark[ed] at every passerby.” The forlorn scenes force our man to wonder if Kars is “a place that the whole world had forgotten, as if it were snowing at the end of the world.”

*

I read this moment, fictional or not, as the end of history—the end of a progressive chronology of the world that relegates the past to the past—forgotten. In contrast to a chronological view of history, I propose a kairological perspective, in which the past is never forgotten but always insistently here. In this regard, I follow the great Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben, who declares: “Against the empty, continuous, quantified, infinite time of vulgar historicism must be set the full, broken, indivisible and perfect time of concrete human experience; instead of the chronological time of pseudo-history, the [k]airological time of authentic history; in place of the total social process of a dialectic lost in time, the interruption and immediacy of dialectic at a standstill.”

*

Architecture can interrupt this dialectic of putative progress, as can rats. So can, perhaps ironically, the digital—or digitality, or technology, or invention, or whatever you want to call it—which makes visible simultaneous—kairological—historical experiences. This is what BLDG BLOK does, and this is why I like it.

An Open Letter to the UVA Board Re Sullivan

You don't have to do this. At your special meeting Monday at 3, you don't have to ratify the corrupt decision by a cabal of three of your members—plus martyred Kiernan and unnamed shadowy advisers—to remove President Sullivan from Mr. Jefferson's great university. Jefferson—we like to talk about him a lot, don't we?—believed in democratic ideals; he founded the University to embody them. He was resolutely and authoritatively against tyranny. But what happened last weekend was tyrannical: a secret conspiracy by an ultra-small but powerful minority to defy the wishes of a very large majority—that is, the UVA community.

The backlash that's grown daily since last weekend's coup profoundly illustrates two facts that you, board members, must consider before voting on President Sullivan's forced "resignation": 1) the University community supports President Sullivan and opposes the secretive process used to depose her. 2) The cabal's actions have substantially injured the University both internally and externally. If President Sullivan was acting too slowly to improve UVA, as the cabal's leader—you know her as rector—has suggested, then the cabal acted swiftly to wreck the University. The negative effects can be seen everywhere: the Faculty Senate executive council's no-confidence vote; the instantaneous feedback to the specially created Alumni Association comment site that "overwhelmed [the] servers" in less than 30 minutes; the newspaper editorials; the criticism from the head of the Association of American Universities, a group of 61 top universities to which the University belongs—but perhaps not for long, if the cabal gets its way.

Furthermore, by all accounts, President Sullivan was leading the University in fine form—indeed, as her May strategy memo shows, she was closely engaged with both strategic and tactical issues that had been left to fester under previous administrative and board leadership. In response to this and much other evidence of President Sullivan's sound stewardship, the cabal has offered nothing. Before you vote on Monday, you might ask the cabal if they have a reason for dismissing President Sullivan. It appears that they lack one. Instead, they seem to just want change for the sake of change—hardly a rational basis for such a deleterious upheaval, wouldn't you agree? In contrast to President Sullivan, the cabal has betrayed its poor stewardship of the University.

The cabal's leader quoted Jefferson in her announcement of the coup last Sunday: "The great object of our aim from the beginning has been to make this Establishment the most eminent in the United States." With your vote tomorrow, board members, you have the great privilege of keeping the University of Virginia on its upward track by rejecting President Sullivan's forced resignation. She may not want to continue her tenure, given all that's happened. (If she didn't continue, it would be understandable but sad, especially since it needn't have come to this.)

But whether she stays or goes, you would, in rejecting her resignation, show the state, and the country, that UVA can't be bullied by a self-interested tyrannical cabal that sows discord instead of progress. To operate at their best, public universities need transparent, rational governing boards. Please show that you belong to such a board by rejecting President Sullivan's resignation and standing up for Jefferson's own ideals.

Respectfully,

Sean Kennedy

CLAS 2000

Related: UVA, Sullivan, & the Renegade Board

Related: UVA, Sullivan, & Online Education

Spy Stories

Started teaching a two-week winter-session course on spy stories at Rutgers today. We meet every weekday through Friday, January 13th, for four and a half hours a day. Course description and syllabus here (second listing).

Susan Youssef on 'Habibi'

The following is an interview I did with Susan Youssef about her debut feature Habibi, which world-premieres in the Venice Days section of the Venice Film Festival on September 4th. Susan is an old friend, and I serve as the media consultant for the film. This interview will be used in Habibi press materials and can also be read as a PDF at the film's site here. 

Based on the ancient Arabic romance of Majnun Layla, Habibi tells the story of young Gazan lovers who are prevented from seeing each other by family, social tradition, and politics. The idea came to writer-director Susan Youssef while shooting Forbidden to Wander in 2002, a documentary that recounts her own romance with a theater director in Gaza. Nine years and numerous grants later, Habibi is set to seduce audiences worldwide. Youssef, a New Yorker, talked about the film by phone from Amsterdam, where she lives part of the year.

Why use Majnun Layla as your source material? You could’ve written the script from scratch.

Susan Youssef: There were two advantages. One, it gave me a structure that had been working for centuries. Two, I was completely enchanted by this idea of a poet who existed in the seventh century and whose name other writers for centuries have used to author their own love poetry. There’s an argument that the Majnun Layla poems aren’t by the original poet Qays ibn-al Mulawwah. I felt I could connect to that tradition of hiding behind his poetry.

But why choose a romance to tell a story about Gaza?

SY: It was easy to make it a romance because my only link to the Gaza Strip was my own personal romance. And Gaza is an incredibly romantic place. The landscape is beautiful: there’s the beach, the tropical climate, fruit, palm trees. Then there’s the heroism of everyone that lives there. The landscape and the nature of the people living there and surviving seemed very romantic.

This is your second film set in Gaza. You’re Arab-American, but your father’s Lebanese and your mother’s Syrian. What draws you specifically to Gaza?

SY: My first screenplays were almost identically linked to me: one was an Arab-American screenplay that I wrote as my thesis when I was an undergraduate, and one was set in Lebanon when I was a journalist in Beirut. I felt like I didn’t have the distance in order to give my characters the truth of their existence; I ended up telling the stories too much as myself, which does not make for very good narrative. I’m much more honest when I’m telling the story through another setting. Gaza, Palestine—it’s still the Levant, we’re still Semitic people. It’s almost what I know, but there’s a little bit more distance.

What was the process of making Habibi?

SY: I fell in love in Gaza and the idea was just handed to me: I saw children acting out Majnun Layla in a gymnasium in Khan Younis. I found the poems at the New York Public Library. I went to Gaza in 2005 to shoot sample scenes. People were very willing to support the production. Across political positions they were really excited.

But you didn’t end up shooting the film in Gaza. Why?

SY: In 2007, I wasn’t allowed back into Gaza. I waited in the West Bank not knowing what I was going to do. But Palestinians are very innovative people, and very hospitable and helpful. I met people from Gaza who were living in the West Bank—they suggested I try to fake Gaza there. But I delayed. Part of the reason it took me until 2009 to shoot was my belief that I’d get back into Gaza. When we filmed in the West Bank it was so painful, because there was a limitation on what we could film. How could I fake Gaza while shooting the West Bank landscape, with mountains in the distance? We couldn’t have wide shots—but that worked to create the suffocating feeling of Gaza. We had many other obstacles—I’m deeply grateful that I was able to find a way to tell the story.

What was the shoot itself like?

SY: Because I’d been so adamant about shooting in Gaza for so long, I closed a lot of doors financially, in terms of being able to find producers, investment… The film had an extremely limited budget. That limited the number of people we could have on the crew. But I believe the camaraderie and intimate nature of the film set resulted in a film made out of love. I’m very superstitious: I believe the kind of energy that goes into a film goes a long way.

What’s your ultimate objective with Habibi?

SY: I love the idea of bringing this poetry back to the mainstream. So that’s one goal, to share how amazing I find my heritage to be. And I believe in the hope of collective consciousness: that greater understanding of the situation in Gaza will somehow improve things there. This film is part of a continuum. I look to the U.S. civil rights and gay rights movements--much of their success has to do with collective consciousness coming through media, culture.

You were born and raised in New York City. How did you end up in Amsterdam?

SY: Well, Mohammed in Gaza, with whom I had the relationship, advised me to go to the Netherlands—it was one of the countries he knew was funding theater in Gaza. It was ironic because in 2002, on the way to Gaza, I was detained at Schipol by Israeli security for interrogation. I applied for a Fulbright fellowship to the Netherlands and it worked out. I found a mentor my first week, Dr. Ihab Saloul, a scholar of comparative literature. He knew the Majnun Layla poetry, was from the Gaza Strip, but he also lived in the Netherlands and understood what was needed to culturally translate the story.

And what about Mohammed?

SY: Things with Mohammed ended up not working out. Instead, in my last month of my Fulbright fellowship, I met my husband, Man Kit Lam, who edited the film with me. So I came to Holland out of love and I stayed in Holland out of love. [Laughs.] I have to thank this film and I have to thank the Gaza Strip because it’s completely defined my life through love.

Postcards From the Eastern Mediterranean, No. 1

 

My parents went on an 11-night eastern Mediterranean cruise earlier this month that sailed from Rome to Istanbul and back again. They sent me postcards from each of the six ports of call. Above is the first, along with its stamp and postmark.