Talk about a scary Halloween! This graphic features a new American warship, the Delaware, bombing New York City. The transcription is as follows:
The New York Tribune, Sunday, October 31st, 1909
TWELVE-MILE RANGE OVER WHICH OUR NEW DREADNOUGHT COULD SCATTER DEATH AND DESTRUCTION
Besides demonstrating last week, by attaining a speed 21.98 knots, that she is the fastest first class battleship ever made, the Delaware has the most powerful battery in the service. From each of her ten 12-inch guns of the largest type she can throw a shell weighing 870 pounds to a distance of twelve miles, or from below the Narrows, down the Bay, into City Hall Park, and a little beyond. After traversing 9,000 yards these shells can still penetrate eleven inches of solid steel.
This groundbreaking, trans-genre work—part detective story, part literary memoir, part imagined past—is intensely autobiographical and confessional. Proceeding sentence by sentence, city by city, and backwards in time, poet and essayist Kazim Ali details the struggle of coming of age between cultures, overcoming personal and family strictures to talk about private affairs and secrets long held. The text is comprised of sentences that alternate in time, ranging from discursive essay to memoir to prose poetry. Art, history, politics, geography, love, sexuality, writing, and religion, and the role silence plays in each, are its interwoven themes.
Bright Felon is literally “autobiography” because the text itself becomes a form of writing the life, revealing secrets, and then, amid the shards and fragments of experience, dealing with the aftermath of such revelations. Bright Felon offers a new and active form of autobiography alongside such texts as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, and Etel Adnan’s In the Heart of the Heart of Another Country.
From the Book:
You wouldn’t think I would have wanted a beacon. Rather to find myself in the wilderness on my own.
But I did, I always did.
Could there have been someone else like me, not one thing not another, barely able to choose.
A poet, a Muslim, and of a particular persuasion.
When I knew someone like me I barely knew him and we couldn’t bring ourselves to speak of the one thing we needed to speak to each other about.
Silence stretched between us taut as sin.
In 2004 I moved with Marco down the river to Beacon, NY.
Named for the signal fires placed on top of each mountain in chain running from New York City to Albany.
So if either city fell to the British the insurgents at the other end would know about it.
I placed signal fires up and down each street, so anxious I was to belong somewhere.
—From the chapter “Beacon”
Endorsements:
“Bright Felon will steal your heart and outrage your poetics. Part memoir, part trip book, part literary discourse, there is in it an urgent sense of a life lived in words. The tale is one of both innocence and experience. Rigorous, romantic, experimental, true, and yet mysterious, it is a book for the ages.” —Laura Moriarty, author of A Semblance: Selected and New Poems, 1975–2007
“Kazim Ali writes in Bright Felon a prose shaped by the various cities he has lived and loved in. This is a book that is so much more than memoir or autobiography. It is embodied and questioning and it carries through its politics a grace and generosity. —Juliana Spahr, author of Fuck You, Aloha, I Love You
KAZIM ALI is the author of two books of poetry,
The Far Mosque (2004) and
The Fortieth Day (2008). He is an assistant professor of
creative writing at Oberlin College and teaches in the low-residency MFA program of the
University of Southern Maine. He is one of the founding editors of
Nightboat Books.
The text above was copied from the website of book distributor, University Press of New England
Below is a detail from my map
Manhattan & Brooklyn Bridge Quilt, which is featured on the
cover of the book:
Related New York City Entries:
Yesterday I went through all my 2008 entries and began to compile this year’s maps like I’ve done for previous years. However, this year I decided to expand the listing to include designs & animations that I’ve made.
The rationale for this expansion was rather simple: if these yearly listings are to be aggregates of my creative work, they might as well include everything. I’m a bit tepid about going through the previous years to find creations that I might have missed, but I imagine that I’ll get around to doing it. Also, since this website has gone public, I’ve found myself sharing content that I did not create and this makes it more difficult to decipher what I’ve created and what I have found on-line & decided to share here.
Today’s creation is the start of a new series of New York City maps that I expect to make in the coming days. This morning I discovered that the USGS has released newer imagery of New York City that was taken in March of 2006.
However, as with other imagery, I’ve found that the older imagery is of better quality. Its not that this new imagery is fuzzy or not as sharp, but rather I found the coloration to be more subdued. The 2004 imagery, which I used to produce all of my previous New York City maps, is more vivid and the colors just look nicer. With that issue aside, I’ve made a few different tessellations that I’m going to be using for the next set of maps of New York City.
This map shows the Manhattan Bridge and the Brooklyn Bridge, as well as a tiny portion of Brooklyn and a larger portion of Manhattan’s Lower East Side. I tried a few different Quilt projection shapes and finally settled on using the Diamond Quilt Projection because I like the way the bridges create a square box within the diamond layout. I have made a derivative tessellation of this map, but I think I’m going to use some of the other imagery first.
View the Google Map of the Manhattan & Brooklyn Bridges.
: detail :
View the rest of the map’s close-up details:
|| 9/8/2006 || 12:16 pm ||
Williamsburg Quilt #2
|| 9/7/2006 || 6:11 am ||
Williamsburg Quilt
: rendered at 18,000 X 12,000 :
These maps of Williamsburg are last of the series using NYC imagery. If you’d like another location in NYC made, just ask.
View the Google Map of Williamsburg neighborhood in Brooklyn, New York.
View Details:
