Political Landscapes: A View From Abroad
CALA’s final screening for the semester is a fun one!
Join us on Monday, December 12th at 6 PM, at NYU’s Casa Italiana. Click on this link for information and to RSVP. Habemus Papam (We Have a Pope)
Day Without Art: World AIDS Day
For Information and history click Visual AIDS
Free this evening? Check out PRINT ACTIVISM IN 21st-CENTURY AFRICA
THE COLLOQUIUM FOR UNPOPULAR CULTURE @ Draper presents:
PRINT ACTIVISM IN 21st-CENTURY AFRICA
WHEN: Thursday 1 December 2016, 6:45pm
WHERE: Draper Program, 14 University Place [at 8th Street]
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC. Refreshments served.
Chaired by Michael C. Vazquez, this event shines a spotlight on pathways linking pivotal journals such as Transition, Drum, Black Images, Joe, Staffrider and Black Orpheus to current trends in African and African diasporic book publishing, pathways marked by an enduring fidelity to print – an expanded and increasingly hybrid entity – as a means of exchanging ideas.
At the same time, where bookshops and independent publishers such as New Beacon and Bogle L’Ouverture in London, Presence Africaine in Paris or Third World Press in Chicago once flourished as hubs for political and intellectual thought, the digital mediascape now provides unprecedented space and means – utilised by the likes of Chimurenga, Kwani?, Farafina, Brittle Paper and Jalada – to raise unpopular voices and form complex communities of writers and readers.
EMMANUEL IDUMA, born and raised in Nigeria, is a writer and art critic. He is the author of the novel The Sound of Things To Come and co-editor of Gambit: Newer African Writing. He has contributed essays on art and photography to a number of journals, magazines and exhibition catalogues, including Guernica, ARTNews, and The Trans-African. He co-founded and directs Saraba magazine.
MADHU KRISHNAN is Assistant Professor of 20th/ 21st-Century Postcolonial Writing at the University of Bristol, author of Contemporary African Literature in English: Global Locations, Postcolonial Identifications (2014), and has published – in journals such as Textual Practice and Comparative Literature Studies – a number of articles on the intersection between aesthetics, socio-political interventions and cultural materialism. She is guest editor of forthcoming issues of Research In African Literatures and Wasafiri.
SHAUN RANDOL is the publisher and editor in chief of The Mantle which he founded in 2009. He is also the co-editor of Gambit: Newer African Writing, a fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York City, and a member of the National Book Critics Circle and the PEN American Center.
MICHAEL C. VAZQUEZ is a Detroit-born, New York-based writer, editor and curator. Senior Editor at Bidoun: Art and Culture from the Middle East and former editor of Transition: An International Review, he is writing a book on, among other things, African print cultures of the Cold War era.
For more info: ss162@nyu.edu
William Trevor
Irish writer, William Trevor died peacefully in his sleep during the early hours of 21 November 2016, at his home. He was 88 years old.
Born as William Trevor Cox in Mitchelstown, County Cork, Ireland, to a middle-class Protestant family, he moved several times to other provincial towns, including Skibbereen, Tipperary, Youghal and Enniscorthy, as a result of his father’s work as a bank official.
He was educated at St. Columba’s College in Dublin, and at Trinity College, Dublin, from which he received a degree in history. Trevor worked as a sculptor under the name Trevor Cox after his graduation from Trinity College, supplementing his income by teaching. He married Jane Ryan in 1952 and emigrated to Great Britain two years later, working as a copywriter for an advertising agency. It was during this time that he and his wife had their first son.
His first novel, A Standard of Behaviour, was published in 1958, but had little critical success. He later disowned this work and refused to have it republished.
In 1964, at the age of 36, Trevor won the Hawthornden Prize for Literature for The Old Boys. The win encouraged Trevor to become a full-time writer.
He and his family moved to Devon in South West England, where he resided until his death. In 2002, he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom for services to literature. Despite having spent most of his life in England, he considered himself to be “Irish in every vein” (Wikipedia)
This spring CALA is offering a timely course in which William Trevor and his compatriots will feature. It will be taught by Nancy DiBenedetto.
LITR1-CE 9082 The Irish Short Story: Oscar Wilde to Edna O’Brien
If that’s not enough of the Irish for you, CALA has more in this one-session course from George Scheper, focusing on the “greening” of New York:
“I think it is the art of the glimpse. If the novel is like an intricate Renaissance painting, the short story is an impressionist painting. It should be an explosion of truth. Its strength lies in what it leaves out just as much as what it puts in, if not more. It is concerned with the total exclusion of meaninglessness. Life, on the other hand, is meaningless most of the time. The novel imitates life, where the short story is bony, and cannot wander. It is essential art.”
― William Trevor
Carol Bergman at Cornelia Street Cafe
From fiction writer and journalist Carol Bergman comes a third potpourri of very short stories, aphorisms, anecdotes, verbal snapshots and mini-essays: NOMADS 3. In these subtle, profound and original works, each using a different narrative persona, Bergman demonstrates her experience as a phrasemaker and storyteller. Like Lydia Davis and Czeslaw Milosz, her writing is both unique and difficult to classify, yet its cumulative affect in the last volume of the NOMADS TRILOGY is clear. Humorous, perceptive, precise, wry, sometimes chilling, she writes about war and peace, love and disappointment, the mundane and the sublime, with deep attention and warmth.
To make reservations for a 45 minute performance on Tuesday, December 6, click Cornelia Street Cafe
Carol Bergman’s articles, essays, and interviews have appeared in The New York Times, Cosmopolitan, and Salon.com. Her essay, “Objects of Desire” was nominated for the Pushcart Prize; her short stories have appeared in many literary magazines. She is the author of biographies of Mae West and Sidney Poitier, a memoir, Searching for Fritzi, two books of novellas, Sitting for Klimt and Water Baby and two novels, Say Nothing and What Returns to Us. She compiled and edited Another Day in Paradise; International Humanitarian Workers Tell Their Stories, nominated for the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize. She lives in New York City and teaches writing at New York University
She will be teaching two courses at CALA this spring: Click the links below for details.
Thought for Today
The Hartman Profile: Letizia Mariotti
The Hartman Profile is an ongoing series that features CALA faculty, staff, and students—all through the lens of award-winning Adjunct Associate Professor and writer Susan Hartman.
The Hartman Profile: Letizia Mariotti
Six years ago, Leti Mariotti—a young Frenchwoman—walked into my classroom. She looked shell-shocked.
Leti had just arrived from Berlin, where she’d been living, and working as an editor. “Berlin’s tough,” said Leti, 34, who was born in Paris. “The weather is cold and dark. I was looking for a break.” She had sublet an apartment for three months on the Upper West Side, and was planning to return to Berlin. But she also wondered if she might find a niche here and stay.
She had signed up for my Art of the Photo Essay class not long after she’d arrived. “I wanted to feel more comfortable in English,” she said. Already an accomplished photographer, she liked the idea of telling a story in photographs and words.
I was taken aback by the beauty of Leti’s first photo, which she shot for our class: a Renoir-like little girl on a gritty playground. And I was amazed by her later photos of a local character, the Pigeon Man of Washington Square Park, sitting enveloped by hundreds of birds.
But she struggled to write in English. “You have shorter sentences,” she said. “It’s more to the point than French.” And she felt self-conscious speaking in class. “I mumble in English,” she said. “My friend told me, ‘You seem so much more clever in French!’”
But our class was welcoming, and Leti started to relax. She worked hard on her text for the Pigeon Man photos, sitting with me after class, and working with me through email. By the end of the five week course, “I felt more confident, and more at ease,” she said.
She started to see herself as a photographer: “It became 100% of my time,” she said. She began doing freelance work for Philadelphia Weekly, and shooting stills on TV and independent film sets. She moved to the Lower East Side–and fell in love with her new neighborhood’s narrow, dense streets.
We’d sometimes meet for coffee—and Leti began showing me a personal project: She was documenting Judith Malina, 87, the artistic director and co-founder of The Living Theatre, who was being evicted from her longtime residence and theater on the Lower East Side, and moving into the Lillian Booth Actors Home, a nursing home facility in New Jersey.
I loved Leti’s black and white photos of the fragile looking Ms. Malina. I wanted to meet her—and to write a story to go along with Leti’s images.
I contacted my editor at The New York Times. And Leti and I—no longer student and teacher—began working together on an assignment.
Read the finished piece here: The New York Times: Founder of Avant-Garde Theater Tackles a New Scene
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Take one of Susan’s courses this Spring!
Thought for Today
Steve McQueen, Director of Hunger, wins BFI Fellowship
Bravo Steve McQueen! From the London Film Festival 2016, Vanessa Thorpe writes for The Guardian: It was the culmination of a film festival that attempted to correct a bias against celebrating black screen talent: Steve McQueen, the film-maker, screenwriter and Turner prizewinning artist, was awarded the British Film Institute fellowship on Saturday. … McQueen is the first black director or producer to receive the film industry honour. …
“As winner of both the Turner prize and an Academy Award, Steve is pre-eminent in the world of film and the moving image. He is one of the most influential and important British artists of the past 25 years and his work, both short and long form, has consistently explored the endurance of humanity – even when it is confronted by inhumane cruelty – with a poetry and visual style that he has made his own,” said Josh Berger, chairman of the BFI.
“We are thrilled that Steve has become a BFI fellow.”
Before striking Oscar gold in 2014, McQueen, 47, stepped nimbly between the world of art to the world of film with his acclaimed 2008 first feature Hunger, which won the Camera d’Or at the Cannes film festival and many other international prizes. (Full story here)
CALA’s Second Foreign Film Series, Political Landscapes: A View from Abroad, features Steve McQueen’s Hunger on Frid
ay, November 4, at Ireland House. McQueen’s longtime collaborator and friend, Irish actor Michael Fassbinder, plays IRA man Bobby Sands in the film. Moderated by CALA’s Michael Zam, this screening is currently full but we have a waiting list – click here to add your name via the RSVP link because there will be cancellations.
The first film of the series, Blackboards (Iran), was screened on Monday, October 17. Directed in 2000 by Samira Makhmalbaf (who was a mere 20-years-old at the time), it is a film to put on your “must see” list. Perhaps we will run a “best of” series one of these semesters.
In the meantime, except for the powerful Hunger, all of the other scheduled movies have seats available. Take a look at the line-up here and RSVP to reserve your seat.
CALA Instructor, Bob Lamm, on Playwright August Wilson’s Fences – the Movie
“I’m about to teach Plays With a Social Conscience for the fifth time at NYU SPS. I’ve taught August Wilson’s Joe Turner’s Come and Gone twice, and will teach Wilson’s Jitney for the second time this semester. Now, there is wonderful news for fans of August Wilson’s work. Christmas Day will mark the release of a film version of Wilson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play, Fences, directed by Denzel Washington. The cast will include many actors from the 2010 Broadway revival of Fences, among them Mr. Washington (who won a Tony Award), Viola Davis (who won a Tony Award), and Stephen McKinley Henderson (who was nominated for a Tony). Mr. Henderson has been kind enough to be a guest speaker in two of my classes, talking about his years working with August Wilson.
This is the first of Wilson’s plays that will be seen on film, but not the last. Denzel Washington has a deal with HBO where he will serve as executive producer for filmed versions of the other nine plays of Wilson’s famed Century Cycle. These will be shown on HBO.”
For more details, click on Fences to read Variety Magazine’s article and to watch the movie trailer.
Bob Lamm’s s course, Plays with a Social Conscience, starts on Tuesday, Oct 25 at 2 PM and there are still some places left.
Here’s the course description:
Examine how five well-known playwrights bring moving, memorable stories to the stage and illuminate the injustices evident in cultures and communities. Issues of gender, race, and class are given special focus. We will read Carson McCullers’s The Member of the Wedding, Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, August Wilson’s Jitney, David Henry Hwang’s M. Butterfly, and Diana Son’s Stop Kiss. Active participation in class discussions is encouraged.