During my youth, I thought of influence as a type of combat. In the pleasant years of literary apprenticeship, one reads endlessly, and some of the writers that one reads are elevated out of the library and placed in the arena. There, the young writer does battle with his masters, pitting his words against the ages. He undergoes a multitude of false starts: derivative works, displays of words carved out of the masters’ examples; one day, he hopes to forge a weapon with which to slay his influences: words that would emerge as his own. This, I thought, was the history of literature: a history of battles, in which each unique voice conquered all the voices that attempted to speak through it.
This is a young man’s dream of writing: influence as metaphorical combat.
Read MoreOn 30 May, just over a year after the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF) occupied Abyei, its troops withdrew from the territory. The move came as Sudan and South Sudan resumed talks in Addis Ababa following a series of clashes between the two countries along the disputed border.
Read MoreLike 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.
Read MoreBelow 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.
Read MoreJust published by Small Arms Survey. Read it below the fold.
Read MoreA new essay on the borders of Abyei, and the relationship between territory and the state, published by Anthropology News. Read it below the fold...
Read MoreFrom 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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