Habitus

by Habitus · 03/28/11

The next event in our series with the JCC in Manhattan will be on April 14th.

Ilan Stavans and Marcelo Brodsky: Reinventing the fotonovela
The Mexican-American scholar and writer Ilan Stavans and Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky have collaborated to re-imagine the fotonovela, a form of photographic comic book once beloved throughout the Spanish-speaking world, as a vehicle for literary experiment and political commentary. Once 9:53, forthcoming later this year in Spanish and English editions, is set in Buenos Aires’ historically Jewish Once neighborhood, in the hours leading up to the 1994 bombing of the AMIA Jewish community center building.

Register for the event here.

Read some of the great press this project has received, in Tablet and the Forward.

We produced a short video about the project last year:

Ilan Stavans and Marcelo Brodsky on Once 9:53 – a fotonovela from Habitus A Diaspora Journal on Vimeo.

JCC in Manhattan
334 Amsterdam Avenue
7pm
$7.00 Members
$10.00 Nonmembers

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by Joshua Ellison · 02/23/11

Our dear friend, contributing editor, and resident polyglot David Sharp has just released the third issue of his online literary journal Global Graffiti. Readers of Habitus will feel a deep affinity with the magazine’s mission and description:

Our third issue of Global Graffiti features an exciting mix of essays, reviews, translation, poetry, fiction, and photography that focuses on migration in its various iterations. Migration has played an important role throughout human history, but it seems to be even more relevant today as we navigate increasingly globalized lives. It has also been a source of tension, especially in times like the present when economic problems tend to seek scapegoats. Nonetheless, the encounters caused by migration are productive sites for defining identities. The pieces included in this issue look at the subject of migration from a variety of perspectives, investigating how physical movement affects the individual migrant as well as the host societies.

Congrats to David and his collaborators. Be sure to read David’s essay, “Racism, Italian Style.” They also include a microfiction selection from another Habitus contributor, Ani Shua.

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by Habitus · 02/13/11

Our dear friend and contributing editor Ilan Stavans is featured in the Amherst Bulletin for his work on the epic Norton Anthology of Latino Literature.

Stavans approached Norton about doing the anthology after the Norton collection on African-American literature was published in the mid-1990s. But he said the germ of the idea probably first came to him when he was doing his doctoral work at Columbia University in the 1980s. He was struck by the contrast between the “quiet, serious” atmosphere of study at Columbia of classic Spanish writers like Cervantes, while in nearby Spanish Harlem, there was a very different world of Latino street life and culture.

“I remember thinking, ‘I need to pay more attention to this kind of vibrant street culture,’” he said. “I began in some probably unconscious way to think of bringing these two worlds together.”

Congratulations, Ilan, on this extraordinary accomplishment.

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by Habitus · 01/17/11

Aspiring photojournalists and photography students: Here is a rare opportunity to learn with Jason Eskenazi, celebrated artist and Habitus contributor. Jason writes:

The fall of the Berlin Wall led me out of Queens into the larger world. After trips to Germany and Romania for their first democratic elections I traveled to Russia in 1991, just before the August coup that marked the end of the USSR, and have returned many times since culminating in a photography book project called Wonderland: A Fairy Tale of the Soviet Monolith, exhibited at Visa Pour L’ Image in Perpignan, France, at the Leica Gallery in New York and winner of Best Photography Book 2008 by Pictures of the Year International.

Jason’s work was featured in our Moscow issue, and in this Habitus-produced video:

Of course, Buenos Aires is also a place near and dear to Habitus, so this is an experience we can wholeheartedly recommend. The workshop is scheduled for mid July. More info here.

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by David Gutherz · 11/22/10

There are those who say we are entering a new Hellenistic era. America, in this scenario, is the new Greece while The Internet has replaced Alexandrian chariot paths. And so, it is fitting that recent Habitus contributor Pedro Meyer’s new exhibition at the Athens Hellenic American Union A Long and Personal Trip Throughout the USA close with a roundtable discussion entitled, “Art and the Internet.” The new exhibition features some of the best of the approximately 80,000 photos Meyer has taken over thirty years criss-crossing the United States.  In addition to the photographer himself, the closing panel on the 24th will feature  photographer Nadia Baram, poet Dimosthenis Agrafiotis,  and Tina Schelhorn, curator of the Galerie Lichtblick, Cologne.

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by David Gutherz · 11/15/10

Conjure up an image of a cosmopolitan. Chances are, your stock caricature involves a mustachioed, bespectacled  type, his endless stream of octolingual, intellectual chit-chat interrupted only by the occasional cigarette or espresso shot. By all accounts, Stefan Zweig pretty much fit this bill. As Andre Aciman put it in a recent portrait for Slate, “He appears everywhere, knows everyone, and is translated into more languages than any of his contemporaries. Just about everything he put his mind to is stamped with the telltale ease, polish, and effortless grace of people whose success, literary and otherwise, seemed given from the day they were born or picked up a pen.”

There is another, darker side to cosmopolitanism, however. For the cosmopolitan is also frequently an exile. Think of James Joyce–who Zweig helped to translate Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man–writing the Irish soul in Paris. Worse still, because they must rely so much on the kindness of strangers, cosmopolitans can become canaries in the geo-political mine. What we call “culture criticism” is really the ululations of these desperate animals whose habitat (the world-as-community) is being destroyed. Stefan Zweig is also exemplary in this regard. “Everything, or almost everything that represents my work in the world…” he wrote in the magisterial World of Yesterday, ”has been destroyed.”

Andre Aciman has probed the depths of this pain and felt the fleeting pleasures that prepare for it. He is, therefore, perfectly suited to play biographer and critic to this eminent biographer and critic. Read the Slate piece, then go see him discuss Zweig’s Journey Into the Past with NY Review of books regular and Zweig-specialist Joan Acocella on November 29th at the Barnes and Noble 150 Lexington Ave.

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by David Gutherz · 10/13/10

Compared to all the buzz around the  contentious Nobel peace prize pick, this years winner for the prize in literature–the Peruvian Mario Vargas Llosa–would seem to be  uncontroversial choice. Except in Israel–that eternal enemy of non-controversy–where some have suggested that giving the nod to Llosa, who has been openly critical of the Israeli government, was an intentionally anti-zionist–or even anti-semitic–gesture. In a terrific profile for Tablet, however, Latin American Jewish scholar and longtime Habitus friend Ilan Stavans sets the record straight. The Llosa Ilan knows is neither benign or an anti-semite, but “essentially a Judeophile” whose criticism of Israel stems not from some knee-jerk anti-zionism but a deep-seated conviction that “minorities…to retain their mission, must be bridges.”

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by David Gutherz · 10/04/10

Let me guess: you’ve already finished reading and re-reading our new Mexico City issue and are hungry for more! Well, if you live in Nueva York, you’re in luck. Just head over to the Aperture Gallery on 547 W. 27th Street and check out Mexico City contributor Monica Ruzansky’s beautiful contribution to the “Mexico + Afuera” exhibit. “I loved Monica Ruzansky’s furtive and romantic snapshots of Mexico City nightscapes,” writes Maria Lokke of the New Yorker, “taken by the light of her car headlights over the course of two years…Driving at night, the theatrical focus of the lights transformed the city into a stage, the resulting images becoming ‘fragments of stories to which we are tempted to imagine a beginning and an end.’”

Monica’s photos–along with those of Chuy Benitez, Dulce Pinzón, and the acclaimed Modernist photographer Paul Strand–will be on display until October 21st.

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by David Gutherz · 09/13/10

“I would hold my mind hostage if I didn’t allow it to wander. I don’t like making mistakes on facts and avoid them as much as possible. But erring is human. Much worse is making the mistake of not daring…”

Ilan Stavans–friend of, advisor for, and repeat contributor to  Habitus–is known for being something of a literary omnivore. In an academic environment where, as Mordechai Drache says, “scholars know more and more about less and less,” Stavans’ list of interests (and interesting publications!) grows longer and longer–wider and wider. Which is perhaps why it so surprising to hear him admit that, until 2004, he “had never read the Bible as a book.”

Then again, reading through excerpts of Stavans’ most recent work, “With All Thine Heart”–a collection of interviews between him and M. Drache on love in the Bible–one gets a taste for the benefits of being a “late-bloomer” in Biblical matters. For Stavans finds things in the Bible that would never occur to your average “specialist.” To him, The characters of Genesis and Exodus are not specimens to be dissected but friends. Friends who have to be introduced to all the other pals Stavans made over the years studying the literature of Kafka, Singer, Cortazar, Borges, and many, many others. In short, its a wild, wild party–and, thanks to Drache, we’re all invited.

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by David Gutherz · 09/04/10

“The problem in Hungary is not that anti-semites are allowed to speak freely,” says Agnes Heller, in a recently translated interview for Salon” but that nobody tells these people to shut up.”  For those interested in exploring of the complex inter-connections between government, media, and culture in Hungarian anti-semitism (and, mutatis mutandis, the recent outburst of American Islamophobia) Heller’s ever-insightful analysis is not to be missed. And after that, be sure to re-read our interview with her in issue 1.

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