#Adele25: 25 tweets on ’25’

I bought the new Adele album Friday and, having now spent the weekend with it, offer some thoughts. I decided to tweet them out in what is an incremental music review. It’s a bit of an experiment — I’m curious to see what readers think, both about the use of individual tweets and the compilation of them at the end.

My basic take on “25” is that it is a nice pop record with some excellent songs, but lacks what makes her first two records so good. Let me know what you think.


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#notapoem — just a rant

Not a poem. Not an essay. Just a rant.

#notapoem Again. Or is it still? A continuing thing, blood flowing into blood into blood. Across borders. Beirut. Paris. Mali. Belgium on high alert. Syria in chaos. Jews stabbed on Tel Aviv streets. Palestinian homes bulldozed and bombed. Iraq & Afghanistan. Libya. Ferguson. Baltimore. Michael Brown & Eric Garner. Sandra Bland. Tanisha Anderson. Tamar Rice. White supremacists target blacks, Jews, Muslims. Shoot up churches, mistake Sikhs for Muslims, assault them on the streets. Presidential hopefuls stoke fear; xenophobes call for closed borders. Trump channels Goebbels, calls for Muslims to register with government, backs away. Media doesn’t blink, rides the tide, stokes the fire. Bombs level buildings. Bombs fall from planes. It’s simple, a friend writes. Life’s simple. They want to kill us, she says, ask the mother of someone who died on 9/11. Ask the mother of the Syrian child found dead on a Turkish beach. Or the 11-year-old Iraqi orphan. Ask. Ask. Ask. #instagramessay
A photo posted by Hank Kalet (@newspoet41) on

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#stolenwagesnj

This is, partly, an experiment in form pulled together to show my class that we can tell stories using a variety of platforms. This one is generally called the Instagram essay, which has been used by writers like Neil Shea and Jeff Sharlet. I am working on a longer version of this for NJ Spotlight.

Let me know what you think of this as a storytelling medium.

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Brief Notes: Mersault, Musa and the Paris attacks

This is making the rounds on Facebook and Instagram and is worth reading.

I woke this morning deeply disturbed by the news from #Paris, but more amazed by the attention it received on social media. I understand Paris is a beloved and familiar space for a lot of people, but it troubled me that #Beirut, a city my father grew up in, had received so little attention after the horrific bombings two days earlier. It also troubled me that #Baghdad, a place I have absolutely no connection with, received even less attention after the senseless bombing that took place there last week. Worst of all, I found the understanding of the refugee crisis skewed and simplistic. If you’ve been following the journeys of the people leaving their homes around the world right now, perhaps you’ll understand why the words #SyrianRefugeeCrisis are just as devastating as #PrayForParis. It’s time to pray for humanity. It is time to make all places beloved. It’s time to pray for the world.
A photo posted by Karuna E Parikh (@karunaezara) on

I would edit it some — we should pray for Paris, if we are to pray, but also for Beirut and Baghdad, and the refugees fleeing violence, and the Jews being attacked in Jerusalem, and the Palestinians horded into camps, and African Americans who continue to be victimized by our racist past and present, and the Latinos who are viewed as somehow less valuable and who have been made the convenient scapegoats of American politics, and… and…. But I can’t pray. And not because I am irreligious. I can’t pray because if I were to pray, then I would do nothing but pray.

I am reading The Mersault Investigation, Kamel Daoud’s novel written as a response to Albert Camus’ The Stranger. Daoud’s point of departure is the murder of the unnamed Arab on the beach and the conceit is that the Arab — actually, the Algerian — has a name and a family. It is written in the voice of Harun, the brother of Musa, and is an effort to reclaim a sense of humanity taken from not only Musa, but from Harun and from all of Algeria by the West. The Stranger essentially posits a hierarchy of importance, Daoud’s novel claims, placing the Frenchman Mersault above the Algerian, consigning the Algerian death to footnote status in a novel about the absurdity of life (the trial in The Stranger is only nominally about the murder and centers around the speaker’s alienation).

The response to the awful events in France is totally appropriate, but as this meme makes clear it is wholly insufficient and betrays a western chauvinism that is at least a part of what creates this cycle of violence. The French dead, for whom we should mourn and for whom we should seek justice, are like Mersault. The dead in Beirut and Baghdad and elsewhere, perhaps because of the regularity with which deaths occur in these places but also because too many of us think these dead lack the same humanity as the victims in France, also deserve justice. But they are no longer mourned in the west, no longer even mentioned. They have been stripped of their names. They are all Musa’s.

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