#Teju Cole

[ghosthierophant]

NOPE (Jordan Peele) / Blind Spot (Teju Cole)

[causticameracrap]

NOPE (Jordan Peele) / personal essay / Blind Spot (Teju Cole) / The Writing of the Disaster (Maurice Blanchot) 

[sivavakkiyar]

had to look hard to find Cole’s old (these are like relics) seven short stories about drones (they actually show up pretty quick, no clue why I couldn’t find them for a long time:) these were all originally individual tweets, I believe he did them as off the dome as any tweet is—-

[nobeerreviews]

Everything feels alive, and looking at the trees there in their dozens, you suspect that they are about to rise into the air like a flock of birds.

-- Teju Cole

(Bistrița, Romania)

[burins]

How can literature help us here? The claim is often made that people who read literature are wiser or kinder, that literature inspires empathy. But is that true? I find that literature doesn't really do those things. After observing the foreign policies of the so-called developed countries, I cannot trust any complacent claims about the power of literature to inspire empathy. Some- times, even, it seems that the more libraries we have over here, the more likely we are to bomb people over there. What we can go to literature for is both larger and smaller than any cliché about how it makes us more empathetic. Litera- ture does not stop the persecution of humans or the prosecution of humanitarians. It does not stop bombs. It does not, no matter how finely wrought, change the minds of the fascists who once more threaten to overrun the world. So what is it good for-all this effort, this labor, this sweating over the right word, the correct translation? I offer this: literature can save a life. Just one life at a time. Perhaps at 4 a.m. when you get out of bed and pull a book of poetry from the shelf. Perhaps over a week in summer when you're absorbed in reading a great novel. Something deeply personal happens there, something both tonic and sustaining. When I describe literature's effect in these terms, I speak stubbornly in the singular. But I also know I am not alone in the world, and that none of us is...

Inside this modest thing called literature, I have found reminders to myself to negate frontiers and carry others across, and reminders of others who carry me, too. Imagine being in an emergency: a house on fire, a sinking boat, a court case, an endless trek, a changed planet. In such an emergency, you can no longer think only of yourself. You have to carry someone else, you have to be carried by someone else.

Teju Cole, "On Carrying and Being Carried," from Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time

[las-microfisuras]

En medio de esa fuga sonora me acordaba de san Agustín asombrado ante san Ambrosio, quien parece que había descubierto una manera de leer sin pronunciar las palabras. La verdad, es muy extraño —se me ocurre ahora, como se me ocurrió entonces— que podamos comprender las palabras sin decirlas. Para Agustín, el peso y la vida interior de las frases se experimentaba mejor en voz alta, pero desde entonces nuestra idea de la lectura ha cambiado mucho. Hace demasiado tiempo que se nos enseña que la visión de un hombre hablando consigo mismo es un signo de excentricidad o de locura, hemos perdido totalmente el hábito de oír nuestras voces, como no sea en una conversación o protegida por una multitud vociferante. Pero un libro es una sugerencia de conversar: una persona le habla a otra, y en ese intercambio el sonido audible es o debería ser natural. Así que yo leía en voz alta, teniéndome como público, y daba voz a las palabras de otro.

_ Teju Cole, Ciudad abierta. Traducción de Marcelo Cohen. Editorial Acantilado 2012

[jacobwren]

“Sometime in my late 20s I realised – I mean, it’s obvious in retrospect – that what I wanted was the maximal complexity of thinking in the clearest language that would support that thinking. Being avant garde isn’t about being unreadable.” - Teju Cole

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Editors Note: The words above appear in a book called Human Archipelago which includes photos made by Fazal Sheikh accompanied by text provided by Teju Cole. I find them helpful in my active consideration of what my moral responsibilities are and in my commitment to be (or try to be) an agent of hope and healing in our sweet old world. When I say I find them helpful, I speak only for myself and in my personal capacity as a creature citizen. That said, I hope you find them helpful too.

[Thanks always to David Dark]

Human Archipelago--Online Edition

[litandlifequotes]

There is much sorrow, not only of the dramatic kind but also in the way that difficult economic circumstances wear people down, eroding them, preying on their weaknesses, until they do things that they themselves find hateful, until they are shadows of their best selves.

Every Day Is for the Thief by Teju Cole

[celluloidwickerman]

Presence; or Polaroid Ghosts (Part 1)

‘There is a spectre inside every photograph.’ – Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything There comes a point when trying to get a book off the ground (i.e. published) where you have to accept defeat. As will no doubt become an increasingly familiar scenario, judging from my recent experiences with British publishing at least, the projects that fail to find a home on paper will eventually be…

[wellconstructedsentences]

My friend, who seemed to have read my thoughts, said, You have to set yourself a challenge, and you must find a way to meet it exactly, whether it is a parachute, or a dive from a cliff, or sitting perfectly still for an hour, and you must accomplish it in a beautiful way, of course.

Open City by Teju Cole

[ghosthierophant]

NOPE (Jordan Peele) / Blind Spot (Teju Cole)

[fiercestpurpose]

He was a murderer, a slaveholder, a terror and a pest. But I don’t go to Caravaggio to be reminded of how good people are and certainly not because of how good he was. To the contrary: I seek him out for a certain kind of otherwise unbearable knowledge. Here was an artist who depicted fruit in its ripeness and at the moment it had begun to rot, an artist who painted flesh at its most delicately seductive and most grievously injured. When he showed suffering, he showed it so startlingly well because he was on both sides of it: He meted it out to others and received it in his own body. Caravaggio is long dead, as are his victims. What remains is the work, and I don’t have to love him to know that I need to know what he knows, the knowledge that hums, centuries later, on the surface of his paintings, knowledge of all the pain, loneliness, beauty, fear and awful vulnerability our bodies have in common.

Teju Cole, "In Dark Times, I Sought Out the Turmoil of Caravaggio's Paintings"

[protoslacker]

Pharmakon abounds with mystery. Resolutely indeterminate photos, mute landscapes, undecipherable graffiti, and the motif of travel to unnamed places all create a context in which even the most straightforward pictures are infused with ambiguity. In Cole’s universe, these are less acts of obfuscation than attempts to provoke questioning. What are we really seeing? How do we create meaning? How is a typical carte de visite image redefined by being placed between impenetrable pictures? Without signs, how are we to know where we are? Does it matter?

Cheryl Van Hooven at Photo-eye Blog. Pharmakon: Reviewed by Cheryl Van Hooven

PHARMAKON. Photographs and text by Teju Cole. MACK, London, 2024. English, 200 pp., 8½x11".

The link is to the photo-eye Bookstore lwhich has several other recent titles by Teju Cole offered, and a cool link to the publisher, Mack.

Years ago I stubled upon a blog by Teju Cole. Quite broadly the blog had to do with a return visit to Nigeria. Each post had a black and white photogher and a story. The stories were sometimes very moving and the look of the blog was was quite beautiful. I felt a bit sad when I wen tto look for it and the blog was gone, but moreso grateful that it had been and I hand seen. That blog served as a bsis for Cole's novel, Every Day is for the Thief.

The Wikipedia aticle for the philosophical concept of parmakon is quite interesting.

[writerly-ramblings]

Books Read in June:

1). Postcards from Surfers (Helen Garner)

2). Dedications (Iran Sanadzadeh)

3). The Lagoon and Other Stories (Janet Frame)

4). Every Day Is for the Thief (Teju Cole)

5). The Questions That Matter Most: Reading, Writing, and the Exercise of Freedom (Jane Smiley)

6). The Dutch House (Ann Patchett)

7). Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (Patrick Süskind)

8). How Fiction Works (James Wood)

9). The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise (Pico Iyer)

10). Best of Friends (Kamila Shamsie)

11). Adventures in Pen Land: One Writer’s Journey from Inklings to Ink (Marianne Gingher)

12). Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (David Sedaris)

[burins]

I propose a resistance made of refusals. Refuse a resistance excised of courage. Refuse the conventional arena and take the fight elsewhere. Refuse to eat with the enemy, refuse to feed the enemy. Refuse to participate in the logic of the crisis, refuse to be reactive to its provocations. Refuse to forget last year's offenses and last month's and last week's. Refuse the news cycle, refuse commentary. Refuse to place newsworthiness above human solidarity. Refuse to be intimidated by pragmatism. Refuse to be judged by cynics. Refuse to be too easily consoled. Refuse to admire mere political survival. Refuse to accept the calculation of the lesser evil. Refuse nostalgia. Refuse to laugh along. Refuse the binary of the terrible past and the atrocious present. Refuse to ignore the plight of the imprisoned, the tortured and the deported. Refuse to be mesmerized by shows of power. Refuse the mob. Refuse to play, refuse decorum, refuse accusation, refuse distraction, which is a tolerance of death-dealing by another name. And when told you can't refuse, refuse that, too.

Teju Cole, "Resist, Refuse," from Black Paper: Writing in a Dark Time