New Short Story: Death in Field

I have a short story out in the new issue of Hotel Amerika (Spring 2012, 11.1). It is about photography, compulsion, and gesture. There is an extract from the story below the fold.

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Web links

Here are a few of the better things I have read online this week.

• The great Robert F. Worth on role reversal in Libya for the NYT. The plot of novel by Elias Khoury combined with the restraint of great reportage http://nyti.ms/KXkpL8.
• (Speaking of which, the wonderful archipelago books has just published an English translation of Khoury's As Though She Were Sleeping -- you can hear Khoury talking about the book here).
• Here is an interesting Dan Diner essay from Mittelweg 36 on Jean Améry's once much-read essay on torture. It contains the following suggestive comment on French history:

"French history is marked by a unique constellation. An West-East historical orientation focuses on events in Europe, on the continent. A North-South perspective foregrounds events in the colonies. In actual fact, the two axes – the horizontal and the vertical – merge with the one another. This has significant consequences both on the plane of reality and in the realm of memory."

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Free throws and Miniatures

Like taking a free throw, painting miniatures is a work of reduction. Both basketball player and miniaturist look back upon a bodily tradition, and a memory of practice, and each tries to free himself from the present: for the basketball player, it is the anxiety of the moment, but also those "other working parts" -- the heavy limbs and beating heart -- which constitute his prison, while for the miniaturist, it is the temptation to innovate, and the eyes that might lead one astray, that mean that the highest art of observation is practiced by those than cannot see.

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Sunday Film Notes

What we talk about when we talk of the weather (something approaching a review of Margin Call)

I.

As much as I love the darkened space of the cinema, where I can be anyone, if just for a moment, when I turn up, unannounced and cold, outside one of those big commercial duplexes, and tell myself that inside, in the warmth, there shall be miracles awaiting me, I always feel as if I am acting in bad faith.

I’m not really expecting to see film. I just want to find the world outside, inside that dark, welcoming room.

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New Podcast On Hunting

I have just put up the first of what will be a semi-regular series of podcasts. It is a reading of the essay On Hunting, which I published back in January. You can listen to it here. In the coming months I will post a series of new podcasts, combining readings of texts I have published, with discussions of literature and politics with guests.

Once I have worked out what the mysterious "byte-range requests" problem is, you should also be able to subscribe to these podcasts via itunes. Stay tuned...

A Sketch for the Tent of the Future

I have an essay in the new edition of the wonderful Canadian architecture magazine, Onsite Review. The essay is on Libyan history, the nomadism at the heart of Qadhafi's dreams of direct democracy, and different ways of thinking about the relationship between the urban the rural. Over the next week, I will be posting some blog posts about aspects of this essay that were cut from the final version for reasons of space. In the meantime, I urge you to subscribe to Onsite Review to read the whole essay. There is a small taster just below the fold.

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La Piraterie

Below you can find the text of a lecture I gave at L'Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales on 3 April of this year. The lecture looks at the situation off the horn of Africa through an analysis of the conceptual history of the pirate. It is in French.

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The Conflict over Heglig

I have a summary of the recent conflict over Heglig up with Small Arms Survey; you can read it here, or below the fold.

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The Conflict in Abyei

I have a new report up on the conflict in Abyei. Read it here, or below the fold.

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New article on the situation in Abyei

I have a new piece on the situation in Abyei, published by Small Arms Survey, read it here, or below the fold.

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New article on the situation in Abyei

Just published by Small Arms Survey. Read it below the fold.

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No Lines, No Peace? On the Borders of Abyei

A new essay on the borders of Abyei, and the relationship between territory and the state, published by Anthropology News. Read it below the fold...

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just stay put and keep quiet

From Roman military encampments to contemporary refugee settlements in South Sudan, all camps share the same passion for order. Notice I don’t mention the inhabitants; it’s the camps that want the clean lines and right angles that push us – strangers huddled together – into community.

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Abyei update

My latest update on the situation in Abyei for Small Arms Survey. Either here, or below the fold.

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On Hunting

People get hunters all mixed up, and think they are looking for what is rare or elusive – the thing that might give them the slip, and scurry away down some furtive alley if it were not for the hunter’s state of constant awareness. On the contrary, for the hunter, there is too much world, and all of it is clamouring for attention. Nothing rare or elusive here.

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