It is 14:27, Saturday afternoon, 25 September. Oh yes, 2021. The year-2021-is important. It’s everything right now. This is day 561 of Norway’s Covid lockdown…and this is the last hour and a half. People who are sitting in restaurants and bars, one meter apart as is their Covid habit, are…
I saw an amazing report on the news last night about an incident in Afghanistan. The report by Norwegian journalist Yama Wolasmal was shocking and inspiring. It is a clear demonstration of the need for good journalists, now more than ever, engaging in the public debate. I think this…
Or: where digitalized reading leads and misleads
Okay, so I’m reading a poem in the online New Yorker on my iPad, enjoying the frolic through language so much I glance at the poet’s short biography — a Polish man — so this is a translation,
but how his sentences cavort…
By Rasma Haidri
On Twitter yesterday I saw someone ask if he can call himself a memoirist because he keeps journals. No, I wanted to say, but didn’t. I resist engaging in social media conversations with strangers (although I’m told that is the point of social media). Nothing proves Goethe’s…
This is exactly my problem with the onslaught of "JUST DO THIS!" articles that I addressed in my last blog.
Fetching headlines promise ways (count ‘em!) to self-improvement. But the allure of countable fixes just leads us around corners to more of the same.
There was a time coy headlines appeared primarily in tabloids and celebrity gossip magazines. Serious media enticed readers with the promise of information. That changed as…
It’s impossible to respond, impossible not to respond, but in a state of shock it is hard to come up with an original thought.
Sometimes words just don’t do it. What to say about what happened in Washington D.C. this week? It’s all been said. It’s still being said. …
You aren’t alone in wondering if you are done with a piece of writing…
W. H. Auden is famously quoted saying that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. He was actually quoting Paul Valéry in an interview at Swarthmore, but no matter. …
Poet and memoirist writing from an island off the coast of Norway. More at www.rasma.org.
