Asghar Farhadi's Oscar win by Duke University Press.

Duke University Press published this little post on Displaced Allegories and on Asghar Farhadi's Oscar win. So honored.



For a review of Displaced Allegories check out Michelle Langford's in Senses of Cinema

Press Pass to Picasso and the Allure of Language at the Nasher

It's pretty incredible to think back and remind myself that I started The Negarponti Files only last semester, and that I started writing it with the intention of thinking through social media and frameworks for social action in the context of art, culture, politics, education and innovation.

The Negarponti Files received its very own press pass today to go to the preview of "The Picasso and the Allure of Language" at the Nasher Museum of Art. It was also the first time that the Nasher invited bloggers to come to their press previews, and that was all Wendy Livingston's doing.


She and I connected via Twitter when I posted a note on the upcoming Picasso exhibit at the Nasher, an exhibit I became aware of when a friend and professor at Duke put it on her Facebook feed. All this to say, that none of what happened today would have happened without our ability to collaborate and connect through social media networks, across disciplines and between institutions at Duke.

The Picasso exhibit is truly inspiring! It opens on August 20th,2009 at the Nasher. It has already showed at Yale where it was originally curated by Susan Greenberg Fisher.

Focusing on the writers that influenced Picasso and those he represented in his paintings, in particular, the exhibit itself blurs the lines between writing and painting and highlights collaborations that just happen to happen between artists because they are friends: Picasso's many heads of Balzacs (1957), his illustrated letter to Leo and Gertrude Stein (1906), his glowing illustrations of Pierre Reverdy's Le chant des morts (The Song of the Dead, 1948)

In her opening remarks, curator Fisher discussed a little piece, a collage, that represents the kernel of the exhibit:

The little collage by Picasso was created out of a calling card left by his long-time friends, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Tokias, one day when Picasso wasn't home. Fisher asked us to notice the fold on the top right corner of the card, a fold which people apparently left on the card if the person they were calling on wasn't home. The collage includes a pack of cigarettes, a reminder of Alice B. Tokias smoking habit.















I don't know what it was, but more than the flow of images and words, it was Picasso's poetry that stuck with me on a Wednesday morning. This one in particular delighted me:
















"...and later now ten minutes to three my fingers still smelled of warm bread honey and jasmine." ~Pablo Picasso

If you can get to Nasher, I encourage you to also visit the "Africa and Picasso" exhibit which showcases some of the Nasher's holdings of masks and figures from colonized territories in West Africa. I made a little video in that room and it is below. Be forewarned: my reading of this text (captured below with my phone camera) and my filming of the objects in the exhibit is awful.

But if it is awful, you should know that I'm just learning to love my new camera phone.

The Wing of a Butterfly That Died.

I was granted tenure on May 6, 2009 in the Program in Literature at Duke University. That's almost ten years after I defended my dissertation at the University of Minnesota's Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature and went on my first job interview. I made this Facebook video to acknowledge the events, the people and the forces that have shaped my life and to recognize this moment of transition as marked by a sweet gift from a young filmmaker who has immersed herself in the world of collaborative learning, collective action, and social networks, a world we call Web 2.0.

Poetry and Code on a Sunday afternoon

Click for animation

This Thursday, I had the opportunity to participate in a talk given by Stephanie Strickland on Digital Poetry. This is a poetry that does as Strickland herself would put it. In an essay entitled "Poetry and the Digital World*," she writes:

"Born-digital poetry is a “next staging” that has arrived, an infant art, practiced throughout the world and now affecting print itself. Known variously as electronic, digital, cyber, hypermedial, hypertextual, ergodic, or net literature, it can be searched out using the full set of these terms."

"Electronic poetry differs from traditional work in several respects that make it a “next staging,” and not simply a recapitulation onscreen of the important experimental poetry techniques of the late 19th and 20th centuries. Digital poetry does things rather than says things. It can be a poetry of performative signs. It often requires that one operate it like an appliance or play it as one would an instrument or game. Sometimes what it generates or displays is unpredictable and irreproducible—only the productive rules able to be known." (p.1)

On Thursday, I wanted to capture the spirit of the poetry by returning the words and images back to the digital world as she spoke to her audience gathered on the second floor of an old building on Duke's East campus. As we listened to her speak the words of her poems in Zone: Zero, and watched the animated images of nature, Strickland encouraged us to embrace the text in order to find its referents. Poetry in this form, has no beginning or end. So start anywhere. Read the words that appear on the water surface, or let the words be read by the water. Move with great rapidity like a frog, or play in the Vniverse. Enjoy!

My live blog of the presentation is below with more links to Strickland's digital work. Just Click on the file and hit Replay.

*Poetry & the Digital World, English Language Notes Special Issue:Experimental Literary Education, forthcoming 2009

Pascale Casanova: Translation as a weapon: language, value and literary capital

This was my first attempt at using CoveritLive. This talk was so much fun to live-blog and link, not just because it was very smart and strangely engaging, but also because Fred Jameson translated quite a bit of the Q&A. The very point of the talk played itself out in practice. Except, oddly, enough the linguistic capital derived from a US context.

Get over it!

I agreed to do a podcast for Duke University Press  which just published my second book: Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema. 

The Press wanted something current, like a discussion of the Oscar winning Iranian films for 2008 and a section on how current Iranian films are representing the 30th Anniversary of the Iranian Revolution. I've been studying the film industry and Post-Revolutionary Iranian films since the early 90s, flying out to film festivals all over the world just to see the latest Abbas  Kiarostami or Rakhshan Bani-Etemad feature film. But this assignment seemed quite difficult. Maybe it was because it would go public on Youtube, I don't know... Or maybe it was my being conscious of the fact that Iranian films that are popular with audiences in Iran rarely make it out of the country to the international screen in the first year of their production. It felt awkward to only speak to the foreign reception of Iranian films and not on topic, on what was going on on the ground.

Stretched for time between classes and my responsibilities as a faculty member in the Literature Program at Duke University, I was doing research late at night and all day long.  

What I found was fascinating. The Islamic Republic celebrated the 30th Anniversary of the Revolution in high fashion, staging the arrival of the spiritual and political leader of the revolution from exile at Mehrabad airport alongside a full string orchestra! 

Lots of parades and glittering honors.

I also found that an inspiring collection of films were actually being screened at the annual International Film Festival which commemorates the ten days of the Revolution. The film Walking My Life by Japanese director Satoshi Isaka won the Crystal Simorgh Prize for best film of Seeking the Truth (Competition of Spiritual Cinema) of the 27th International Fajr Film Festival. And Director Rashid Masharawi’s Laila’s Birthday won the special Moustapha Akkad Prize.  The audience vote and Crystal Simorgh Prize went to Bahram Bayza'i for his While We Were All Dreaming and I have to say that I was thrilled. 

A lot of what I discovered didn't end up working for the interview which was a scene of its own: The two interviewers and I laughed at the amateurish setting...

the lack of fill lighting, the camera equipment (yes believe it or not!)..Finally me: I laughed at my hair, baggy eyes and whimsical last minute choice of clothing and accessories. I got my numbers wrong. (Veiling ends with the Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1936 and compulsory veiling begins with the Islamic Repubic in 1982. And there were more that 227 films competing in the 27th Fajr Film festival.) My mind went numb, obviously. The camera battery died half way. I decided to take a photo of it, tweet it, and check my facts while the camera battery recharged.

 The whole event went down in less than an hour. It started late, stuttered, and went live before the day was done. We made it fun together.

...And in the end, the interview did what it needed to do, which was to highlight the importance of the film industry in the making of a theocratic state. It also highlighted a little known, but very important film industry and an international film festival of proportions. 

 My lesson: Get over it! Get over it and just do it!