http://vimeo.com/20927993 Video for spoken word from Senegalese rapper Keyti–remember him? Keyti was one of the stars of Ben Herson’s 2009 documentary film about hip hop and politics in the Senegalese capital, “Democracy in Dakar.”  The video is directed by Magee McIlvaine. Via Nomadic Wax.

More from that 2008 Comparative Literature interview with my favorite Communist poet, Jeremy Cronin. Bua Komanisi: … A sense of audience has always been important for me. When I write a poem, or when I go back to an old poem, I try to listen to it with the ear of someone else, perhaps an […]

Rapper Stalley, late last year, channels Muhammed Ali. He could have done without the racial epithet.

A worthwhile project by two Canadian brothers who grew up in 1970s Liberia–it still feels like 25% of the city are expats–to restore photo memory because so many people here don’t know what Monrovia looked like before the war. Details.

The daily word of inspiration (cut and pasted from Contemporary Literature) from my favorite, comtemporary Communist, Jeremy Cronin: … At present I am inclined to make my poems much more actively disruptive within themselves, to foreground contradiction and paradox, to enact interruption, to celebrate the parenthetical, to make manifest the unresolved. In the first post-1994 […]

Simon Kuper in the FT Weekend, takes shots at “the news,” maybe also at his own newspaper: … [N]ews has become news about rich people. Today’s economic inequality is reflected and driven by inequality of news. Much of this news about rich people is produced by just a few English-language sources. A wire service will […]

Jeremy Cronin is my favorite Communist. Astute, intellectual and a poet. Cronin is a former political prisoner and now ANC member of Parliament in South Africa. “Even the Dead” is still my favorite poem. I recently chanced upon a 2009 interview he did with the academic Andrew van der Vlies (featured on this blog here) […]