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In collaboration with the European College of Liberal Arts, which recently joined the
Bard College group of schools, Ambassador Murphy welcomed Teju Cole, Writer in Residence
at Bard College. Cole read from his critically acclaimed book, Open City.
Ambassador Murphy: This reading with my new best friend Teju Cole, award winning author
and the distinguished writer ın resıdence at Bard College, is a good example of the
richness and the potential of thıs program. Teju masterfully addresses racism, migration,
integration, and discrimination through his characters and plots. Thomas, as he said,
will introduce the work in more detail, but I want to emphasize that the vivd picture
that he paints of the challenges we face in the globalized world we live in, reflects
issues that concern us all. --
Teju Cole: In the spring, life came back into the earth's body. I went to a picnic in Central
Park with friends and we sat under magnolias that had already lost their white flowers.
Nearby were the cherry trees which, leaning across the wire fence behind us, were aflame
with pink blossom. Nature is infinitely patient; one thing lives after another has given way.
The magnolia's blooms die, just as the cherry's come to life. The sun coming through the petals
of the cherry blossoms dappled the damp grass, and new leaves in their thousands danced in
the April breeze, so that at moments, the trees at the far border of the lawn seemed
insubstantial. I lay half in shadow, watching a black pigeon walk toward me. It stopped,
then flew up again and out of sight behind the trees, and then it returned, walking awkwardly,
as pigeons do, perhaps seeking crumbs. And far above the bird and me was a sudden appartition
of three circles, three white cirles against the sky. In recent years I have notied how
much the light affects my ability to be sociable. In winter, I retreat. In the long and sunny
days following; in March, April and May, I am much more likely to seek out the company
of others, more likely to feel myself alert to sights and sounds; to colors, patterns,
moving bodies; smells other than the ones in the office or the apartment. The cold months
make me feel dull, and spring feels like a gentle sharpening of the senses.
After the reading, Cole answered questions from students, including one about his current
short form writing project on Twitter.
Cole: I think most people use Twitter kind of as a, you know, watercooler conversation,
it's a place to just put random thoughts. I'm using Twitter for storytelling. The project
I'm working on, I've called it "Small Fates," it's sort of like a half pun on "fait divers?"
which are little newspaper items that have been appearing in French Newspapers, for,
I don't know, centuries at this point. They basicaly, in English papers they would appear
as "News of the Weird": little items "somebody did something stupid," or something highly
unusual, unlikely, terrible, fates, disaster, mayhem, death, happened to someone, you know.
And this is something that has had a very stong influence on French literature. From
Flaubert who wrote Madame Bovary based on just a small news item like this, you know,
"woman falls in love and then does something stupid," you know, in some provincial French
newspaper and he constructs a novel out of this. Barthes, Gide, Le Clezio, all the way
down, they are all interested in this kind of; and it hasn't really affected English
literature quite so much. Soyinka, a Nigerian playwright wrote Death of a King's Horseman
based on such a small news item as well. So these are small, with a sort of potential.
But what's interesting about them in the newspaper form is that they appear, theyre decontextualized,
they last for two or three lines, they are never full stories, and then they disappear,
you know, forget about the story. I got interested in reviving this form and so I started by
actually reading full news articles from Nigerian newspapers, where quite more than our fair
share of absurdity happens, and compressing them down into Twitter length stories. Somehow
I have to get the entire story into 140 characters; two lines, something like this. The story
has to have the name of the person, where it happened, and what happened. And it happens
in this very compressed form. It became very interesting to me as an artform; like a haiku,
or like a very compressed poem.
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