Local: Three Stories

Description:	[1 of 3]Strangeness2011, numbered edition of 201; 102 x 148mmLocal: three stories2011, numbered edition of 301; 102 x 148mmFlashes and floaters2012, numbered edition of 301; 102 x 148mm For a while when I was a student I shared a house with a man who taught and lived politics. We need people like you, he said, to remind us what we’re working towards: a society in which people can, if they choose, spend their days thinking about poetry, writing it, going for walks or staring at the wall. This was welcome news. Most of my contemporaries were telling me when the revolution came I’d be first in line for the firing squad. Poetry was counter-revolutionary before you’d written a word.When I heard about the al-Mutanabbi project, my first thoughts were: a street of bookshops was destroyed, let’s repopulate, let’s exercise the freedom to make books and put them out into the public arena, to inhabit the inner life in ways you cannot while you are being bombed or if you have been killed. A Don Delillo character says the true life takes place when we’re alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments. His life happened, he said, when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner.To commemorate a street of bookshops destroyed in Baghdad, I choose to present a record, in the form of poetry and short fiction, of some of my submicroscopic moments and the freedoms they entail.
Origin:	2012
Created By:	Kravis, Judy
Contributor(s):	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition
Source:	http://iuidigital.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/AMSSH/id/500
Collection:	Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition Collection
Rights:	http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/
Copyright:	In Copyright
Subjects:	artists book art bookworks

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