Culture

A Reading for Ashraf Fayadh

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

At his retrial in November 2015, the court not only found him guilty a second time but decided to change his sentence from flogging to death by beheading. The poet Ashraf Fayadh, a stateless Palestinian born in Saudi Arabia, was arrested in January 2014 and charged with apostasy, with renouncing his religion. His poetry was put on trial. His life is at risk.

When a court appoints itself as a literary critic, both the judicial system it is a part of and literature are diminished.

Today, writers around the world are focusing attention on Ashraf Fayadh’s story: according to The Guardian, 122 events in 44 countries are being held in which Fayadh’s work will be read. It is being organized by the “International literature festival Berlin.”

Consider this column, with my recording down below, one more event.
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Bowie, ‘Blackstar,’ and a Thank You

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

Saying more and meaning less
Saying no but meaning yes
This is all I ever meant
That’s the message that I sent.—David Bowie, “I Can’t Give Everything Away”

“Something happened the day he died,” sings one character in David Bowie’s longest single, “Blackstar,” which was released as a video in November 2015. At the moment he sings that line in the video, Bowie is a preacher holding aloft a religious book with a black star on its cover. He holds his hands prayerfully and sings earnestly, in the earnest way that signals that lies, or at least complicated truths, are about to be spoken.

Until today, the video and song were simply complex, a piling-on of images and references (the album is also called “Blackstar,” but the album cover only has a black star on it, not the word itself, along with portions of diamond shapes that spell out “BOWIE”), each of which was winking at the other and at past Bowie images and references. (Is the bejeweled skull in the video Major Tom?)

Reviewers and David Bowie experts were just starting to tuck into the multi-layered music and video meal that he had laid out this winter with two videos totaling 15 minutes and a seven-song album released on his birthday, which was Friday. But today is the day David Bowie died, though, or the day the news came out, and for a day at least, every one of the many available interpretations his music and recent work may fire up in one’s mind is filtered through that sad fact. We now know that he recorded the album and the videos knowing that this work was to be his epitaph and not a signal of future directions that his musical interests might take him.

Bowie was an artist for whom public image was one more tool in his expansive repertoire. A personal exit as artistic statement? In a life of many triumphs, this is one more, one last triumph. It is a selfish thing to say that one wishes an artist who produced so much—more than 25 albums, hundreds of songs, memorable acting performances on Broadway and in films and in his videos, an early Internet presence—would not leave us wanting more. But there you have it. I do. Sixty-nine is too young.
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Good. Bad. Not Indifferent

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

In Act 2, Scene 2, of Hamlet, the doomed Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are chatting with Prince Hamlet. They are his old college buddies, and King Claudius (Hamlet’s step-father) and Queen Gertrude (his mother) have sent for them to attempt to learn what is bothering the young man, who has been acting with an “antic disposition” and saying strange things, half to himself and half to, well, no one can figure out who.

Hamlet greets them and speaks in the same riddling manner that he has been using with the rest:

HAMLET: Let me question more in particular, my good friends, what you have done to deserve such fortune, that she sends you to prison hither?
GUILDENSTERN: Prison, my lord?
HAMLET: Denmark’s a prison.
ROSENCRANTZ: Then the world is one.
HAMLET: A goodly one; in which there are many confines, wards, and dungeons, Denmark being one o’ the worst.
ROSENCRANTZ: We don’t think so, my lord.
HAMLET: Why, then ’tis none to you; for there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so. To me it is a prison. [Emphasis mine.]

Hamlet quickly determines that they are not merely dropping in to talk about sports and the weather or to compare Klout scores but are indeed spies. Ultimately, he manages to have them both killed.
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