On language, PPPs and wrestling | In search of missing perspectives

“Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire.” 

— Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse (1977)

While the world of politics and corporations, or the game which defines their culture, is often described as competitive, masterminded, as chess, and maybe even as a kind of media-centric theater, the life of the public realm has always been characterized as one of spectatorship and representation. Using this kind of language to organize and categorize the social — (as) they who do (in terms of gestures/moves) and they who receive (in terms of spectacle/spectator) — is one of power; one that constructs power/lessness and asserts its longevity. It is a language of inequality. Just like history is written by the winners, it seems to me that language has been deployed to preserve the legacy of masters. Hence, we need to find new ways to resist and subvert this language. What if we do not only refer to, but actually talk of politicians and corporations as they who take, who corrupt, and of publics as they who give, who are taken for? What if we approach and speak of spectatorship as resistance, and the public ‘lifestyle’ as struggle? What if we stop calling politic(ian)s and conglomerates leader(ship)s and start addressing them as dictator(ship)s? These questions might be too big or complex to take on, but not impossible to ask, especially when we realize that the master’s house will never be dismantled with the master’s tools. 

I bring this up because we often talk about politics, private interest, and public space from a position that ultimately separates them, at the juncture of their intersections. What if instead we approached them from a place within, from amidst their thickly entangled ecology — one that we would need to work our fingers through knots and to the bone, to decipher and make sense of its diverging threads? Hence, a transversal or sectional investigation of language as a construct of power might reveal a fuller spectrum of how these power relations are established. 

For example, let’s consider the Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) in Albania. As the name suggests, PPPs are modeled in the form of a partnership where both parties have an equal standing and mutual benefits. Though, even with Public taking top billing, we can argue until we run out of breath about which P is what and which P gets what P(iece), but that’s beside the point here. The point is that, as an ecology of all three, PPP gives us a clear model through which to analyze, sort, and understand the Power relations between Public realm and Private interests, maybe in the same way we try understand the difference and dependency of the host/parasite couplings or a lovers’ discourse. The fact that such a model, a Partnership legally exists, on paper, doesn’t necessarily mean it is mutually fair, and it shouldn’t automatically legitimate its in situ practices. Bear with me here. 

If the public-private coupling continues to be described as a partnership in the already established language of masters, of power, on paper anyway, then it is important to understand that it will translate as one of inequality in deeds. 

It is not the position of the public nor that of the private that we need to watch closely, but that of the partnership (hence from within) which constitutes the construct of power and constraint of freedom, thus (the many degrees of) fairness. The parameters of the partnership fall under the tutelage or tyranny of the state, at least for now, which is in a position to leverage one against the other or both against the middle. Or maybe I’m giving it too much credit, too many sides. As a middleman of sorts, the state acts as both referee and judge, jury, executioner. The P of Partnership stands for Politic(ian)s. They administer public assets and resources. They sell said public assets and resources to the private. After enough such transactions, the state might eventually lose its leverage because it will have nothing else to sell. In a final act of despair, it may even give away its constituents’ data. So, the three P-s will not have the same capacity to P(lay) P(ower) anymore, nor will it ever be a multitude of P-s. They will be devoured into one — a kind of becoming P(anopticon). But still, the specter of the Public will haunt the partnership, lingering over its name. In its afterlife, the public becomes a myth. But what’s in a name, right?! I digress only to make the point that what might be a morose description of events here, thus unpopular opinion, it is in fact the reality of how language designs power and how it is designed  by it in return, in the language of masters.   

   

With the Public Private Politics (PPP) as the social model/medium/media for the 21st century Albania, it becomes all the more important to be able to find a new language, at least a different one, to deduce, describe, and deploy the P-s involved: Public, Private, Politics, Partnership, Play, Power. Seen from a different POV, the PPP model provides us with a language of struggle too, one that can dismantle that of power. So, for once, instead of seeing it through the eyes of competitive sports, the masterminding of chess or the melodrama of the theater, let’s look at it through the lens of something else — wrestling (for example) — which provides us with a much needed tactility of action and symbols, of gesture and exaggeration.

Below, I’ve shared a few excerpts from Barthes’ essay on wrestling, taken from his Mythologies book. He uses wrestling as a theoretical framework to critique the language of the so called mass-culture, which might be useful to us too, to understand that of the PPP. Keep in mind that the essay was written in the ‘50s and the book was published in the ‘70s, hence much has changed since then. Nonetheless, I found bits of it helpful in grasping the construct of power. It is even more interesting if you read it a second time (for our purpose here) without knowing which P is in the ring and which P is outside cheering or booing. We always assume the latter is the public, but what if that wasn’t the case?

(As it is taken out of the context, time and space of the writing, I recommend you read the entire essay to draw your own conclusions.)  

The World of Wrestling 

The virtue of all-in wrestling is that it is the spectacle of excess. Here we find a grandiloquence which must have been that of ancient theatres. And in fact wrestling is an open-air spectacle, for what makes the circus or the arena what they are is not the sky […], it is the drenching and vertical quality of the flood of light. Even hidden in the most squalid […] halls, wrestling partakes of the nature of the great solar spectacles, Greek drama and bullfights: in both, a light without shadow generates an emotion without reserve. 

There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of Suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.* […] True wrestling, wrongly called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate halls, where the public spontaneously attunes itself to the spectacular nature of the contest. [I]t abandons itself to the primary virtue of the spectacle, which is to abolish all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what it thinks but what it sees. 

[W]restling is a sum of spectacles, of which no single one is a function: each moment imposes the total knowledge of a passion which rises erect and alone, without ever extending to the crowning moment of a result. 

Thus the function of the wrestler is not to win; it is to go exactly through the motions which are expected of him. […] Wrestling […] offers excessive gestures, exploited to the limit of their meaning. [A] man who is down is exaggeratedly so, and completely fills the eyes of the spectators with the intolerable spectacle of his powerlessness. 

This function of grandiloquence is indeed the same as that of ancient theatre, whose principle, language and props (masks and buskins) concurred in the exaggeratedly visible explanation of a Necessity. The gesture of the vanquished wrestler signifying to the world a defeat which, far from disguising, he emphasizes and holds like a pause in music, corresponds to the mask of antiquity meant to signify the tragic mode of the spectacle. […]

Each sign in wrestling is therefore endowed with an absolute clarity, since one must always understand everything on the spot. As soon as the adversaries are in the ring, the public is overwhelmed with the obviousness of the roles. As in the theatre, each physical type expresses to excess the part which has been assigned to the contestant.

[…]

It is therefore in the body of the wrestler that we find the first key to the contest. […] Wrestlers therefore have a physique as peremptory as those of the characters of the Commedia dell'Arte, who display in advance, in their costumes and attitudes, the future contents of their parts [.]

The physique of the wrestlers therefore constitutes a basic sign, which like a seed contains the whole fight. But this seed proliferates, for it is at every turn during the fight, in each new situation, that the body of the wrestler casts to the public the magical entertainment of a temperament which finds its natural expression in a gesture. The different strata of meaning throw light on each other, and form the most intelligible of spectacles. Wrestling is like a diacritic writing: above the fundamental meaning of his body, the wrestler arranges comments which are episodic but always opportune, and constantly help the reading of the fight by means of gestures, attitudes and mimicry which make the intention utterly obvious. Sometimes the wrestler triumphs with a repulsive sneer while kneeling on the good sportsman; sometimes he gives the crowd a conceited smile which forebodes an early revenge; sometimes, pinned to the ground, he hits the floor ostentatiously to make evident to all the intolerable nature of his situation; and sometimes he erects a complicated set of signs meant to make the public understand that he legitimately personifies the ever-entertaining image of the grumbler, endlessly confabulating about his displeasure.  

We are therefore dealing with a real Human Comedy, where the most socially-inspired nuances of passion (conceit, rightfulness, refined cruelty, a sense of 'paying one's debts') always felicitously find the clearest sign which can receive them, express them and triumphantly carry them to the confines of the hall. It is obvious that at such a pitch, it no longer matters whether the passion is genuine or not. What the public wants is the image of passion, not passion itself. There is no more a problem of truth in wrestling than in the theatre. In both, what is expected is the intelligible representation of moral situations which are usually private. This emptying out of interiority to the benefit of its exterior signs, this exhaustion of the content by the form, is the very principle of triumphant classical art. Wrestling is an immediate pantomime, infinitely more efficient than the dramatic pantomime, for the wrestler's gesture needs no anecdote, no decor, in short no transference in order to appear true. 

Each moment in wrestling is therefore like an algebra which instantaneously unveils the relationship between a cause and its represented effect. Wrestling fans certainly experience a kind of intellectual pleasure in seeing the moral mechanism function so perfectly. […]

What is thus displayed for the public is the great spectacle of Suffering, Defeat, and Justice. Wrestling presents man's suffering with all the amplification of tragic masks. The wrestler who suffers in a hold which is reputedly cruel (an arm-lock, a twisted leg) offers an excessive portrayal of Suffering; like a primitive Pieta, he exhibits for all to see his face, exaggeratedly contorted by an intolerable affliction. It is obvious, of course, that in wrestling reserve would be out of place, since it is opposed to the voluntary ostentation of the spectacle, to this Exhibition of Suffering which is the very aim of the fight. This is why all the actions which produce suffering are particularly spectacular, like the gesture of a conjuror who holds out his cards clearly to the public. Suffering which appeared without intelligible cause would not be understood; a concealed action that was actually cruel would transgress the unwritten rules of wrestling and would have no more sociological efficacy than a mad or parasitic gesture. On the contrary suffering appears as inflicted with emphasis and conviction, for everyone must not only see that the man suffers, but also and above all understand why he suffers. What wrestlers call a hold, that is, any figure which allows one to immobilize the adversary indefinitely and to have him at one's mercy, has precisely the function of preparing in a conventional, therefore intelligible, fashion the spectacle of suffering, of methodically establishing the conditions of suffering. The inertia of the vanquished allows the (temporary) victor to settle in his cruelty and to convey to the public this terrifying slowness of the torturer who is certain about the outcome of his actions; to grind the face of one's powerless adversary or to scrape his spine with one's fist with a deep and regular movement, or at least to produce the superficial appearance of such gestures: wrestling is the only sport which gives such an externalized image of torture. But here again, only the image is involved in the game, and the spectator does not wish for the actual suffering of the contestant; he only enjoys the perfection of an iconography. It is not true that wrestling is a sadistic spectacle: it is only an intelligible spectacle. 

There is another figure, more spectacular still than a hold; it is the forearm smash, this loud slap of the forearm, this embryonic punch with which one clouts the chest of one's adversary, and which is accompanied by a dull noise and the exaggerated sagging of a vanquished body. In the forearm smash, catastrophe is brought to the point of maximum obviousness, so much so that ultimately the gesture appears as no more than a symbol; this is going too far, this is transgressing the moral rules of wrestling, where all signs must be excessively clear, but must not let the intention of clarity be seen. The public then shouts 'He's laying it on!', not because it regrets the absence of real suffering, but because it condemns artifice: as in the theatre, one fails to put the part across as much by an excess of sincerity as by an excess of formalism. 

We have already seen to what extent wrestlers exploit the resources of a given physical style, developed and put to use in order to unfold before the eyes of the public a total image of Defeat. […] In wrestling, unlike judo, Defeat is not a conventional sign, abandoned as soon as it is understood; it is not an outcome, but quite the contrary, it is a duration, a display, it takes up the ancient myths of public Suffering and Humiliation: the cross and the pillory. It is as if the wrestler is crucified in broad daylight and in the sight of all. I have heard it said of a wrestler stretched on the ground 'He is dead, little Jesus, there, on the cross,' and these ironic words revealed the hidden roots of a spectacle which enacts the exact gestures of the most ancient purifications.

But what wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: that of justice. The idea of 'paying' is essential to wrestling, and the crowd's 'Give it to him' means above all else 'Make him pay'. This is therefore, needless to say, an immanent justice. [T]he crowd is jubilant at seeing the rules broken for the sake of a deserved punishment. Wrestlers know very well how to play up to the capacity for indignation of the public by presenting the very limit of the concept of justice, this outermost zone of confrontation where it is enough to infringe the rules a little more to open the gates of a world without restraints. For a wrestling-fan, nothing is finer than the revengeful fury of a betrayed fighter who throws himself vehemently not on a successful opponent but on the smarting image of foul play. Naturally, it is the pattern of Justice which matters here, much more than its content: wrestling is above all a quantitative sequence of compensations (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth). […] Justice is therefore the embodiment of a possible transgression; it is from the fact that there is a Law that the spectacle of the passions which infringe it derives its value.

It is therefore easy to understand why out of five wrestling- matches, only about one is fair. One must realize, let it be repeated, that 'fairness' here is a role or a genre, as in the theatre the rules do not at all constitute a real constraint; they are the conventional appearance of fairness. So that in actual fact a fair fight is nothing but an exaggeratedly polite one [.] 

Conversely, foul play exists only in its excessive signs [.] Since Evil is the natural climate of wrestling, a fair fight has chiefly the value of being an exception. […]

Extrapolated, fair wrestling could lead only to boxing or judo, whereas true wrestling derives its originality from all the excesses which make it a spectacle and not a sport. The ending of a boxing- match or a judo-contest is abrupt, like the full-stop which closes a demonstration. The rhythm of wrestling is quite different, for its natural meaning is that of rhetorical amplification: the emotional magniloquence, the repeated paroxysms, the exasperation of the retorts can only find their natural outcome in the most baroque confusion. Some fights, among the most successful kind, are crowned by a final charivari, a sort of unrestrained fantasia where the rules, the laws of the genre, the referee's censuring and the limits of the ring are abolished, swept away by a triumphant disorder which overflows into the hall and carries off pell-mell wrestlers, seconds, referee and spectators. 

[…] What the public is looking for here is the gradual construction of a highly moral image: that of the perfect 'bastard'. One comes to wrestling in order to attend the continuing adventures of a single major leading character, permanent and multiform like Punch or Scapino, inventive in unexpected figures and yet always faithful to his role. The 'bastard' is here revealed as a Molière character or a 'portrait' by La Bruyère, that is to say as a classical entity, an essence, whose acts are only significant epiphenomena arranged in time. This stylized character does not belong to any particular nation or party […] the aficionado does not attribute to him any country except 'fairness' - observing the rules. 

What then is a 'bastard' for this audience composed in part, we are told, of people who are themselves outside the rules of society? Essentially someone unstable, who accepts the rules only when they are useful to him and transgresses the formal continuity of attitudes. He is unpredictable, therefore asocial. He takes refuge behind the law when he considers that it is in his favour, and breaks it when he finds it useful to do so. Sometimes he rejects the formal boundaries of the ring and goes on hitting an adversary legally protected by the ropes, sometimes he re-establishes these boundaries and claims the protection of what he did not respect a few minutes earlier. This inconsistency, far more than treachery or cruelty, sends the audience beside itself with rage: offended not in its morality but in its logic, it considers the contradiction of arguments as the basest of crimes. The forbidden move becomes dirty only when it destroys a quantitative equilibrium and disturbs the rigorous reckoning of compensations; what is condemned by the audience is not at all the transgression of insipid official rules, it is the lack of revenge, the absence of a punishment. So that there is nothing more exciting for a crowd than the grandiloquent kick given to a vanquished 'bastard'; the joy of punishing is at its climax when it is supported by a mathematical justification; contempt is then unrestrained. One is no longer dealing with a salaud but with a salope - the verbal gesture of the ultimate degradation. 

Such a precise finality demands that wrestling should be exactly what the public expects of it. Wrestlers, who are very experienced, know perfectly how to direct the spontaneous episodes of the fight so as to make them conform to the image which the public has of the great legendary themes of its mythology. A wrestler can irritate or disgust, he never disappoints, for he always accomplishes completely, by a progressive solidification of signs, what the public expects of him. […] What is portrayed by wrestling is therefore an ideal understanding of things; it is the euphoria of men raised for a while above the constitutive ambiguity of everyday situations and placed before the panoramic view of a univocal Nature, in which signs at last correspond to causes, without obstacle, without evasion, without contradiction.

When the hero or the villain of the drama, the man who was seen a few minutes earlier possessed by moral rage, magnified into a sort of metaphysical sign, leaves the wrestling hall, impassive, anonymous, carrying a small suitcase and arm-in-arm with his wife, no one can doubt that wrestling holds that power of transmutation which is common to the Spectacle and to Religious Worship. In the ring, and even in the depths of their voluntary ignominy, wrestlers remain gods because they are, for a few moments, the key which opens Nature, the pure gesture which separates Good from Evil, and unveils the form of a justice which is at last intelligible.

*********************************************

Calvino's Memos for the Millennials & Albanian Education | In search of missing pieces

I recently stumbled upon Italo Calvino's unfinished manuscript, a series of 'memos' he wrote for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he was due to give at Harvard University in 1986, but unfortunately passed away in Italy before leaving for Cambridge. These memos make up certain values dear to the author, qualities he thought should be carried on to the new millennium. The work is titled Six Memos for the Next Millennium but only includes five: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity -- leaving Consistency unfinished.

The reason I am sharing a few excerpts on here, is because of everything that is happening with education reform, pedagogy and student rallies happening in Albania. Yes, it is about legitimacy, learning standards and legacy of the university (education system) -- but first and foremost, it is about language -- language as communication, cognition, learning, imagination, etc, etc, -- language of and as access. After all, it is the next millennium already, and providing free and open access to a decent if not great education is an absolute must, a no-brainer (pardon the pun). Therefore, this, is for the students -- to find the courage to continue their quest for knowledge, meaning and value  -- to be brave and assemble (access) all modes of their language in order to be heard.

photo credit: PERfACT, Tirana, AL 2011.

Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (excerpts)

**As always these pieces are taken out of the original context to make the point stated above. To draw your own conclusions, I encourage you to read the book.

I'm not here to talk of futurology, but of literature. The millennium about to end has seen the birth and development of the modern languages of the West, and of the literatures that have explored the expressive, cognitive, and imaginative possibilities of these languages. It has also been the millennium of the book, in that it has seen the object we call a book take on the form now familiar to us. Perhaps it is a sign of our millennium's end that we frequently wonder what will happen to literature and books in the so-called postindustrial era of technology. I don't much feel like indulging in this sort of speculation. My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it. I would therefore like to devote these lectures to certain values, qualities, or peculiarities of literature that are very close to my heart, trying to situate them within the perspective of the new millennium.

Lightness

In this talk I shall try to explain - both to myself and to you - why I have come to consider lightness a value rather than a defect; to indicate the works of the past in which I recognize my ideal of lightness; and to show where I situate this value in the present and how I project it into the future.

It is hard for a novelist to give examples of his idea of lightness from the events of everyday life, without making them the unattainable object of an endless quête. This is what Milan Kundera has done with great clarity and immediacy. His novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being is in reality a bitter confirmation of the Ineluctable Weight of Living, not only in the situation of desperate and all-pervading oppression that has been the fate of his hapless country, but in a human condition common to us all, however infinitely more fortunate we may be. For Kundera the weight of living consists chiefly in constriction, in the dense net of public and private constrictions that enfolds us more and more closely. His novel shows us how everything we choose and value in life for its lightness soon reveals its true, unbearable weight. Perhaps only the liveliness and mobility of the intelligence escape this sentence - the very qualities with which this novel is written, and which belong to a world quite different from the one we live in.

Whenever humanity seems condemned to heaviness, I think I should fly like Perseus into a different space. I don't mean escaping into dreams or into the irrational. I mean that I have to change my approach, look at the world from a different perspective, with a different logic and with fresh methods of cognition and verification. The images of lightness that I seek should not fade away like dreams dissolved by the realities of present and future . . . . .

[T]here is such a thing as a lightness of thoughtfulness, just as we all know that there is a lightness of frivolity. In fact, thoughtful lightness can make frivolity seem dull and heavy. 

At this point we should remember that the idea of the world as composed of weightless atoms is striking just because we know the weight of things so well. So, too, we would be unable to appreciate the lightness of language if we could not appreciate language that has some weight to it.

We might say that throughout the centuries two opposite tendencies have competed in literature: one tries to make language into a weightless element that hovers above things like a cloud or better, perhaps, the finest dust or, better still, a field of magnetic impulses. The other tries to give language the weight, density, and concreteness of things, bodies, and sensations.

 Even Galileo saw the alphabet as the model for all combinations of minimal units . . . . . And then Leibniz . . . . .

Should I continue along this road? Won't the conclusions awaiting me seem all too obvious? Writing as a model for every process of reality . . . . . indeed the only reality we can know, indeed the only reality tout court . . . . . No, I will not travel such roads as these, for they would carry me too far from the use of words as I understand it - that is, words as a perpetual pursuit of things, as a perpetual adjustment to their infinite variety.

There remains one thread, the one I first started to unwind: that of literature as an existential function, the search for lightness as a reaction to the weight of living.

[W]e shall face the new millennium, without hoping to find anything more in it than what we ourselves are able to bring to it. Lightness, for example, whose virtues I have tried to illustrate here. 

Quickness

The very first characteristic of a folktale is economy of expression. The most outlandish adventures are recounted with an eye fixed on the bare essentials. There is always a battle against time, against the obstacles that prevent or delay the fulfillment of a desire or the repossession of something cherished but lost.

The relativity of time is the subject of a folktale known almost everywhere: a journey to another world is made by someone who thinks it has lasted only a few hours, though when he returns, his village is unrecognizable because years and years have gone by.

This motif can also be interpreted as an allegory of narrative time and the way in which it cannot be measured against real time. And the same significance can be seen in the reverse operation, in the expanding of time by the internal proliferations from one story to another, which is a feature of oriental story-telling.

The motif that interests us here is not physical speed, but the relationship between physical speed and speed of mind.

Speed and consciousness of style please us because they present the mind with a rush of ideas that are simultaneous, or that follow each other so quickly they seem simultaneous, and set the mind afloat on such an abundance of thoughts or images or spiritual feelings that either it cannot embrace them all, each one fully, or it has no time to be idle and empty of feelings.

"Discoursing," or "discourse," for Galileo means reasoning, and very often deductive reasoning. "Discoursing is like coursing": style as a method of thought and as literary taste. For him, good thinking means quickness, agility in reasoning, economy in argument, but also the use of imaginative examples.

In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing, and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

The motor age has forced speed on us as a measurable quantity, the records of which are milestones in the history of the progress of both men and machines. But mental speed cannot be measured and does not allow comparisons or competitions; nor can it display its results in a historical perspective. Mental speed is valuable for its own sake, for the pleasure it gives to anyone who is sensitive to such a thing, and not for the practical use that can be made of it. A swift piece of reasoning is not necessarily better than a long-pondered one. Far from it. but it communicates something special that is derived simply from its very swiftness.

[T]his apologia for quickness does not presume to deny the pleasures of lingering. Literature has worked out various techniques for slowing down the course of time. 
 In practical life, time is a form of wealth with which we are stingy, In literature, time is a form of wealth to be spent at leisure and with detachment. Quickness of style and thought means above all agility, mobility, and ease, all qualities that go with writing where it is natural to digress, to jump from one subject to another, to lose the thread a hundred times and find it again after a hundred more twists and turns.

A writer's work has to take account of many rhythms. But it is also the rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral contingency.

Exactitude

For the ancient Egyptians, exactitude was symbolized by a feather that served as a weight on scales used for the weighing of souls. This light feather was called Maat, goddess of the scales. The hieroglyph for Maat also stood for a unit of length - the 33 centimeters of the standard brick - and for the fundamental note of the flute.

 To my mind exactitude means three things above all:
1) a well-defined and well-calculated plan for the work in question;
2) an evocation of clear, incisive, memorable visual images; 
3) a language as precise as possible both in choice of words and in expression of the subtleties of thought and imagination.

It seems to me that language is always used in random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearable.

It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty - that is, the use of words. it is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meaning, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots our from the collision of words and new circumstances.
 At this point, I don't wish to dwell on the possible sources of this epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of the mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language.
 I would like to add that it is not just language that seems to have been struck by this pestilence. Consider visual images, for example. We live in an unending rainfall of images. The most powerful media transform the world into images and multiply it by means of the phantasmagoric play of mirrors. These are images stripped of the inner inevitability that ought to mark every image as form and as meaning, as a claim on the attention and as a source of possible meanings. Much of this cloud of visual images fades at once, like the dreams that leave no trace in the memory, but what does not fade is a feeling of alienation and discomfort.
 But maybe this lack of substance is not to be found in images or in language alone, but in the world itself. This plague strikes also at the lives of people and the history of nations. It makes all histories formless, random, confused, with neither beginning nor end. My discomfort arises from the loss of form that I notice in life, which I try to oppose with the only weapon I can think of - an idea of literature.

I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface. I think our basic mental processes have come down to us through every period of history, ever since the times of our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bride flung over an abyss.
 For this reason, the proper use of language, for me personally, is one that enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words.

Visibility

There is a line in Dante (Purgatorio XVII.25) that reads: "Poi piovve dentro a l'alta fantasia" (Then rained down into the high fantasy . . .). I will start out ... with an assertion: fantasy is a place where it rains.

 Let us look at the context in which we find this line of the Purgatorio. We are in the circle of the Wrathful, and Dante is meditating on images that form directly in his mind, depicting classical and biblical examples of wrath chastised. He realizes that these images rain down from the heavens - that is, God sends them to him.
 In the various circles of Purgatory, besides the details of the landscape and the vault of the heavens, and in addition to his encounters with the souls of repentant sinners and with super-natural beings, Dante is presented with scenes that act as quotations or representations of examples of sins and virtues, at first as bas-reliefs that appear to move and to speak, then as visions projected before his eyes, then as voices reaching his ear, and finally as purely mental images. In a word, these visions turn progressively more inward, as if Dante realized that it is useless at every circle to invent a new form of metarepresentation, and that it is better to place the visions directly in the mind without making them pass through the senses.

It goes without saying that we are here concerned with "high fantasy": that is, with the loftier part of the imagination as distinct from the corporeal imagination, such as is revealed in the chaos of dreams.

Let us ... ask ourselves about the genesis of the imaginary at a time when literature no longer refers back to an authority or a tradition as its origin or goal, but aims at novelty, originality, and invention. It seems to me that in this situation the question of the priority of the visual image or verbal expression (which is rather like the problem of the chicken and the egg) tends definitely to lean toward the side of the visual imagination.
 Where do they come from, these images that rain down into the fantasy?

In short, it is a question of process...

In which of the two tendencies outlined by Starobinski would I place my own idea of the imagination (thought): [i]magination as an instrument of knowledge or as identification with the world soul?

I have yet to explain what part the indirect imaginary has in this gulf of the fantastic, by which I mean the images supplied by culture, whether this be mass culture or any other kind of tradition. This leads to another question: What will be the future of the individual imagination in what is usually called the "civilization of the image"? Will the power of evoking images of things that are not there continue to develop in a human race increasingly inundated by a flood of prefabricated images? At one time the visual memory of an individual was limited to the heritage of his direct experiences and to a restricted repertory of images reflected in culture. The possibility of giving form to personal myths arose form the way in which the fragments of this memory came together in unexpected and evocative combinations. We are bombarded today by such a quantity of images that we can no longer distinguish direct experience from what we have seen for a few seconds on television. The memory is littered with bits and pieces of images, like a rubbish dump, and it is more and more unlikely that any one form among so many will succeed in standing out.

If I have included visibility in my list of values to be saved, it is to give warning of the danger we run in losing a basic human faculty: the power of bringing visions into focus with our eyes shut, of bringing forth forms and colors from the lines of black letters on a white page, and in fact of thinking in terms of images. 

Will the literature of the fantastic be possible in the twenty-first century, with the growing inflation of prefabricated images? Two paths seem to be open from now on. (1) We could recycle used images in a new context that changes their meaning. Post-modernism may be seen as the tendency to make ironic use of the stock images of the mass media, or to inject the taste for the marvelous inherited from literary tradition into narrative mechanisms that accentuate its alienation. (2) We could wipe the slate clean and start from scratch. Samuel Beckett has obtained the most extraordinary results by reducing visual and linguistic elements to a minimum, as if in a world after the end of the world.

Still, all "realities" and "fantasies" can take on form only by means of writing, in which outwardness and innerness, the world and I, experience and fantasy, appear composed of the same verbal material. The polymorphic visions of the eyes and the spirit are contained in uniform lines of small or capital letters, periods, commas, parentheses - pages of signs, packed as closely together as grains of sand, representing the many-colored spectacle of the world on a surface that is always the same and always different, like dunes shifted by the desert wind.

Multiplicity

[H]uman knowledge accumulated over the centuries are the very qualities that were destined to be claimed for their own by the greatest writers of the twentieth century. But theirs I would tend to call an active skepticism, a kind of gambling and betting in a tireless effort to establish relationships between discourse, methods, and levels of meaning. Knowledge as multiplicity is the thread that binds together the major works both of what is called modernism and of what goes by the name of the postmodern, a thread - over and above all the labels attached to it - that I hope will continue into the next millennium.

Someone might object that the more the work tends toward the multiplication of possibilities, the further it departs from that unicum which is the self of the writer, his inner sincerity and the discovery of his own truth. But I would answer: Who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled and reordered in every way conceivable.
 But perhaps the answer that stands closest to my heart is something else: Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, to the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to plastic . . . . .

-- Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (excerpts)

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Albania 1927-2015 | The paradox of the missing years

I am currently reading Joseph Roth's The Hotel Years, a small collection of feuilletons from his extensive travels in Europe between the two wars. A wanderer but not lost, he is a journalist that doesn't investigate, and a novelist that doesn't romanticize. He considers himself a “hotel citizen” and describes his writings as “saying true things on half a page.” Such are his daily dispatches from Albania in 1927.

I mention this, because as we approach the end of yet another year, full of hope in wishing, even anticipating a better one ahead, Roth's portrayal of Albania in the verge of unknowingly becoming a monarchy a year later, reminds me of the phrase: “The more it changes, the more it stays the same.”

Now, I don't want to be the ever nagging critic, nor the bitter cynic, and there's plenty of proof that the country has been through many a change (monarchy, war, 50 years of communism, democracy, capitalism..), but there is a certain paradoxical quality inherent lingering in the Albanian identity. Something that has always bothered me and one that I couldn't quite put my finger on before - that uncertain progress from “national culture” to “autonomous republic.” A transition I find quite problematic and increasingly complicated. A transformation that hasn't fully happened yet, just reduced to a stalling paradox. A contradiction often dismissed or judged as a complexity, which we have grown proud of, and fanatically preserve.

As Roth recalls, the country feels “like a locked courtyard, ringed by the walls of a natural prison,” - its mountains. Everything and everyone “should be judged with an unprejudiced eye as an expression” of this surrounding. A land so peaceful that one “refuses to credit its reputation for murder.” “Freedom is a relative concept,” he states, and we seem to have cast its definition and practice in stone. “Stone buildings in stone courtyards in stone grounds have the monumentality of death and at the same time its idyllic grief.” Although, the architecture of stone and its painful history of human sacrifice in Albania is not the point here (only my projection), it identifies another paradox of hospitality vs. vendetta, which is definitely worth pursuing further.

Roth's observations start with the most powerful Albanian of the time, president Ahmed Zogu. Interesting enough, similar things can be said of any public servant and/or man of influence succeeding him. Another observation, which I find especially curious, probably because of my own projection again, is the high visibility of the exercising soldiers in the army as compared to that of the musicians in the band, both deeply ritualized in the Albanian identity. (Another paradoxical relationship to be further explored/exploited for sure.) The author then ends the series (at least in this book) by giving us a wider glimpse of the country written on a hot day, a glimpse that looks a lot like an identity struggle between the Oriental state (primitivism), Western capitalism (fascism), national patriotism and democratic freedom (true independence).

Thusly, the more we have changed, the more we remain the same. I come to this conclusion as a wanderer myself, one that doesn't have an agenda other than an immediate, even a far-fetched wonder that is curiously expressed here. It seems that all roads lead to the puzzle that makes up Albania. What is Albania? Who is Albanian? Has Albania ever been Albanian? What has remained? From time to time, this blog has taken on a personal and (semi) professional quest to better understand my Albanian identity through the small details of its paradoxical be(com)ing. What started as a shot in the dark, has turned out to be and feel more Quixotian than anything else I've done, but it has clarified many things for me and it continues to do so, even though I increasingly feel the weariness of taking on such a complex black hole. I guess the challenge consists in figuring it out by removing myself from it, geographically (through physical absence/virtual presence) and temporally (by studying historical patterns of presence/absence of place, events in it) in order to better understand myself as a product of it, a wandering one at that. The more we change, the more it can change, right?! Here's to finding out and failing in the new year!

 *As always the reading and emphasis is mine. I strongly recommend you read the book to draw your own conclusions.

Albania 1927. by Joseph Roth

A meeting with president Ahmed Zogu

I had no particular questions from him - I could answer them all for myself. Interviews are an alibi for a journalist's lack of ideas.
Ahmed Zogu looks harmless enough, tall, as representative as he needs to be, and oddly, blond. The blondness overlies the Oriental features like a mistake. The posture he adopts when giving audiences is more the result of caution than any personal confidence. The sparseness of his speech, the slowness of his tongue, the empty politeness of his questions, all are the expression of an insufficiently practised and therefore all the more rigidly adhered-to diplomacy. He strives - for no good reason - for a crown-prince-like banality. 

His military abilities are said to be small. [...] He is said to be a ruthless dictator. But in Albania, where every warlord has aspirations to be a dictator, every landowner his vassal, and anyone who can read and write his secretary, there is probably no other dictatorship going than the ruthless kind. Ahmed seems if anything less dictatorial than the people around him, who are more experienced, clever, and ruthless than he is, and many of whom have undergone a thorough education in these qualities under the Turks. [...] Ahmed has "conquered" Albania with the help of South Slav bands before shortly afterwards concluding the familiar pact with Italy. But for more than 800 years most of the influential men in the Balkans have not refused money, especially when offered by two opposing sides - and why should Ahmed be the exception here? [...]

But, even if I (rightly) question the selfless patriotism of Ahmed, in many points the selfish ambition of the president tallies with the true needs of his country, which, faced with the choice between putting itself in the care of a more cultivated country or one still fighting with its unresolved internal difficulties, chooses the former.

Another paradoxical quality we can't seem to shake off still.

In any case, it is impossible to judge the circumstances of an Oriental state, whose history is oppression, whose ethics are corruption, and whose culture is a mixture of native bucolic and archaic-romantic naivete and the recent importation of intrigue, by the criteria of a Western democracy. If one suddenly found oneself back in the Middle Ages, it would be similarly fatuous to be exercised about the burning of witches.
One should try to judge Ahmed with an unprejudiced eye  as an expression of his surroundings. One should bear in mind that he is the scion of an Albanian noble family that was in power in the seventeenth century and before - and presumably not with democratic methods then. One should bear in mind that a parliament in Albania can only be convoked in one way, the way that it is presently convoked. It will be a "parliament in name only" for at least another twenty years.
Today even his ties to Italy make him nervous. He is no longer able to play off Italy and the South Slavs against each other.
[O]ne doesn't take exception to the loss of life he is said to have been responsible for, so much as the sums of money he has obtained. Tomorrow may see Ahmed Zogu still in power, and the day after gone, and someone else in his place, who would be almost indistinguishable from him. 

 ~ Frankfurter Zeitung, 29 May 1927 

Tirana, the Capital City

A section of the populace has devoted itself to brass instruments. Brass players - horns for the fatherland - have been recruited into the Albanian army. The soldiers' days begin with reveille and end with taps. Music keeps the swing in their stride.
The president has his very own personal band.
At seven in the morning, just as the soldiers are tooting and parping away, the musicians get up like so many larks, and rehearse passages of marches and overtures in the middle of the high street. The local inhabitants have petitioned the courts on six separate occasions to have the practice moved to a meadow outside the city. But on six separate occasions they have forgotten to attach arguments to their petition. Nothing works without arguments. 

An interesting observation, where music and band musicians are strongly connected and compared to the soldiers in the army. Both, highly disciplined rituals, visible and loud, practiced in the middle of a city otherwise tranquil. A very public gesture. A marking of territory. One that reminds me of today's policed state. By being so visible and occupying such public presence, these two paradoxical categories seem to have been accepted into the Albanian identity. Otherwise, why put them front and center? Furthermore, the author places the mild mandolin players in a separate group, off-center from such a public sight. Neither soldiers, nor musicians, these men consist of a different public, the emigrants, those who left then longed for their country, and that have now returned and long for the world they've seen. A public, whose existence is rooted in longing, without quite belonging, now reduced to and profited by only their wares. A group whose identity still needs to be proven. Their belongings mark and make up their only territory. A materialistic third. One that lacks a place. A place-less consumerism. A capitalist democracy. A progress from the ‘national culture’ that the army and the band dictate to an ‘autonomous republic’ of the consuming kind.

But barracks are erected in the interests of progress.

Not for an instant is one safe from a vendetta. 

The veiled women, the hundreds of ownerless dogs led on the wind's leash, the fezzes on fat heads and turbans on bearded faces, the colour-postcard vendetta-artists with revolvers for bellies, and rifles for umbrellas - all these money-earning, business-conducting, official-bribing exotic philistines are in the majority and beyond time. There is nothing so arid as an ethnicity that has been dissected in the mausoleums of ethnology and in books and seminar rooms for thirty years, but is still paraded, as though it were in any sense alive.

This passage sums up the “transition from so-called ‘national culture’ to the demand for an ‘autonomous republic,’” a paradox that is felt even today, one that continues to baffle and bother me in equal amounts, because I'm afraid it is deeply rooted in the Albanian identity, remaining unresolved, unstable, and at the root of all our contradictions and unproductive attempts at change.

~ Frankfurter Zeitung, 15 June 1927

The Albanian Army

The Albanian army exercises from five to twelve in the morning and from three to seven in the afternoon. It exercises during its lunch-break. It exercises before bedtime, and at night, when the soldiers are asleep, many hundreds of trumpets may be heard blowing in the mosques (in which the army likes to camp). From this I conclude that the Albanian army surely exercises in its sleep. I am forced to wonder, is there any time when the Albanian army is not exercising?
Nor do I know why it exercises. [...]
Further, to what end do Albanian soldiers exercise?
Now the Albanian army has Austrian rifles and Italian ammunition, bullets that jam, magazines that can't be clicked in, British knapsacks that can't be secured with Italian straps, covers for field-shovels and no field-shovels with which to dig trenches, Italian officers who don't know commands in Albanian, Austrian officers who are blackballed by their Italian comrades, White Russian officers who don't exercise at all, but have only come so as to be able to stay in uniform while they wait for Soviet Russia to collapse, British officers who know neither Albanian nor Italian nor German nor Russian, and like to walk around with their swizzle sticks just so that Britain is represented too. It's the oddest army in the world. 

This passage might read as a joke, but I am not laughing. I find this strategy, crippling and with tragic consequences. One that clearly shows an identity struggle between peoples freedom (true independence) and patriotism, the primitive Oriental culture from centuries of ottoman occupation and exploitative Western promises of democracy. Definitely set up to fail. A move that promotes patriotism through military exercising, while the country is at the mercy of the highest bidder. I say crippling, because this misguided practice doesn't guarantee protection, and ultimately renders the peoples republic a spectacle. In a similar move, Enver Hoxha kept the army exercising for an enemy that never came. A deception rooted in paranoia (among other things) which in turn made for a spectacle of fear and terror.
As I mentioned before, the public visibility of a military exercise is meant to be a fear tactic. One that makes people think they are living in war, no matter if they can't see the enemy. Keep in mind that these are all internal acts happening at vulnerable and unstable times of transition before or after a war, or significant event. This is not about gaining independence from a foreign force. We already did that in 1912. This ‘joke’ is what Albanians are doing to Albanians. It is Zogu who okay-ed military contracts, economic negotiations, diplomatic agreement, etc. What then becomes of the Albanian identity if Albanians don't have the Albanian best interest at heart and practice? It falls into an existential crisis, a constant state of transitioning to nowhere, without quite making the jump from ‘national culture’ to ‘autonomous republic.’

It has no coherent rule book or command structure, all it has is martial music, trumpet signals, drums, and a devotion to drill. 
For whom do they exercise? Surely not for their country? Because half the country is unhappy with their government - for reasons of idealism. Half the rest has been bought by the Serbs, and the remainder is on the payroll of the Italians. And in the middle of it, the soldiers are exercising. Perhaps they are exercising for Ahmed Zogu, their president? He has his personal bodyguard, which if required to, will shoot at the regular soldiers, who, for all their exercising, are thought not to be reliable, and who are deliberately issued with bad ammunition and heavy boots, to keep them from undertaking anything against the president.

~ Frankfurter Zeitung, 29 June 1927

Article about Albania (Written on a Hot Day)

Albania is a beautiful, unhappy, and for all its current topicality, boring. Its mountains are sometimes of an uncertain clear substance, so that you might take them for shards of glass painted green. [...] They have become more massive, implacable, and the whole country feels like a locked courtyard, ringed by the walls of a natural prison. Freedom is a relative concept. [...]
Under such circumstances, I am less receptive to the beauties of nature than those born optimists called tourists. [...]
A few houses, windowless, fortress-like, deaf and blind cubes of stone, coarse, enigmatic and tragic, redolent of destiny and secret curses. On each of these buildings that are so arranged as to offer rest to a murderer, refuge to a pursued man, security to a whole clan, lies the so-called charm of eeriness, which I would sooner not get too close to. Without the permission of the master of the house, one may not set foot in the meanest hut. But with his permission, the hospitality is life-threatening. Hospitality is a fine custom, among the noblest proofs of humanity. But there is every justification for it too in the selfish thought that among people who have instituted blood revenge for justice, a man needs to rest up somewhere, because sooner or later everyone will end up as a fugitive. 

The paradox of carrying on the tradition of vendetta while being proud of one's hospitality. Being a fugitive, yet opening one's home to strangers, is a perplexing and much too real a contradiction that still echoes in lost, abandoned and isolated parts of Albania. Another stone in the transition between 'national culture' and 'autonomous republic.'

May Albanians and others forgive me that I am not sufficiently gifted to admire unproductive conservatism in the way it should be admired. Unfortunately, alongside other habits that I revere, the Albanians have one that I merely understand: they are utterly intent on preserving old habits, not only stressing their Albanianism at the expense of their humanity, but also cultivating their tribalism at the expense of their nation. [...]
I understand that most "national traits" are the consequence of an unhappy history, in this case centuries of bitter struggle against the Turks, But there were also thousands of Albanians who went voluntarily to serve the Turks, were Turkish favorites, generals, officials, helped oppress their country and  - and yet remained Albanians. Such are the whims of national culture. An Albanian major said to me: "It's as well that the Turks oppressed us, and kept us away from their civilization. But for that, the Albanian language might have disappeared without trace." [...] It's a crime to oppress a nation, we both agree about that. But to praise the negative outcome of this oppression, the chance survival of a technically interesting language is false and childish national pride. But as I say, I bit my tongue. 

These comments would probably make most Albanians mad, rightfully so I don't know, maybe, but pride aside, let's for a moment think about the truth of this observation. If we list all occupying forces that have entered our territory, and compare the evolution of the language at these times, can we really say that we came out winners? What are the chances of a language disappearing? I'd like to ask the experts about the ways a language does indeed disappear (by not using it, adding foreign influences, developing into something else, a hybrid of sorts, etc..)? Which one would be the most dangerous? How does disappearance differ from development, and what are the consequences of a static language? What, then, are the consequences of a static identity?

Urban Albanians are strikingly timid. It takes less courage to shoot here than the speak. An Albanian would rather shoot than say what he thinks. He is afraid of the walls' ears. He senses a spy in everyone, and he's half-right. [...] These people's love of intrigue is as great as their fear of expressing an opinion. Over time, they do so little that they seem to have given up all their own opinions, and only listen to those of others. Why have an opinion merely to suppress it? In place of political convictions there is political partisanship, instead of struggle conspiracy, instead of a word a hint, instead of caution fear. In this land no ruler is safe, and no subject either. A publicly expressed view is an impossibility - even if it were allowed. Over the centuries the Albanians have lost all pleasure in the right to an opinion. Even unambiguous circumstances become secret mysteries in their hands. They have no taste for the absence of danger. [...] Their most dangerous quality: love of money. 

The continuous and ever-evolving struggle between free-speech and corruption has been an ongoing war in Albania (and else, for that matter) - one that we now call business, the entertaining business. If one doesn't have or is afraid to have and express an opinion, how does s/he identify? With whom? For whom? To what end?

~ Frankfurter Zeitung, 30 July 1927

Lastly, let's keep in mind another historical fact in play then and now - fascism. We may have just come full circle (without fully realizing it), but our Albanian identity has remained static, stalling, and still a paradoxical struggle between the Oriental state (primitivism), Western capitalism (fascism), national patriotism and democratic freedom (true independence). What gives?

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Sunday Beats | Greek-Albanian Folk Dirges

**Creative Sunday Series

A few weeks ago, I came across Christopher King and his collection of rare records when reading a piece on long lost blues musicians Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas and their only surviving record "Last Kind Word Blues". Recently, I checked out his Long Gone "How the Other Half Hears" Series (via) on Easter European, Balkan and Mediterranean musics - and found it to be an awesome source of lost pre-war sounds.

Here's a glimpse of a few featured stories/sounds:

Albanian Traditional Music: An Introduction, with Sheet Music and Lyrics for 48 Songs.
By Spiro J. Shetuni. McFarland & Company, 2011. Sheet Music, Lyrics, Bibliography.

“Folk music from Albania, particularly from the Central and Southern regions of the country, is rightly characterized as otherworldly, sublime, and in many instances, incongruent with practically all other European and Baltic musical expressions. The distinction is so great between Albanian music and music from surrounding areas that adjectival descriptors are sometimes tortured in relation to their referents. [...] The only melodious expression that is similar to the song and dance of Central and Southern Albania is the repertoire of Northern Greece, Epirus. 

Geographic isolation is the main reason why the music of Central and Southern Albania (and Northern Greece) is so distinctly different from the rest of the Baltic and surrounding European countries. 

Shetuni divides Albanian folk music into roughly four different dialects (broad styles) that have specific geographic locations and boundaries. Gheg traditional music is found in Northern Albania (Ghegëri), Tosk music is located in Central and Southern Albania (Toskëri), Lab music is found in Southern Albania (Labëri), and Urban music is found in the more densely populated cities throughout Albania. Crucially noted by Shetuni is the fact that Gheg music is almost exclusively monophonic and Tosk, Lab and Urban are primarily polyphonic and instruments normally accompany Gheg and Urban music whereas Tosk and Lab are almost always a cappella. Besides discussing the various sub-dialects and styles found in various villages and regions within a dialect, Shetuni goes to great lengths to describe each stylistic variation based on what he calls core structural groupings.”

Five Days Married & Other Laments Song and Dance from Northern Greece 1928-1958

Beyond Rembetika: The Music & Dance of The Region of Epirus

ALEXIS ZOUMBAS A LAMENT FOR EPIRUS, 1926-1928

“Years of research and obsession have resulted in this, the first collection of recordings by the legendary and masterful Greek folk violinist Alexis Zoumbas. Very few pre-war musicians have tapped deeper into the human soul than Zoumbas and this volume presents his most profoundly hypnotic and unearthly pieces.” - via 

More on Albanian Folk Music:

Musical Encounters of Two Worlds

Elina Duni: Love, Lost & Albanian Folk Songs

BBC's World Routes | Albanian Urban Music (part 1)

BBC'S World Routes | Iso-Polyphony in Southern Albania (part 2)

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21 May | World Day for Cultural Diversity for Dialogue and Development

Open Invitation | DEAR ALBANIA Video/Photo Contest!

Remember last year's film project by Eliza Dushku on Albania? 

Well, she has announced an official video/photo contest with a December 15, 2013 11:59pm PST deadline. 

“One of the film's major themes is that Albanians remain proud of their country, even when they do not live within the country's borders. We want to show Albanians bringing Albanian pride to their own homes and communities around the world. We need your help. We are looking for video or photos that will help tell this story. 

No matter the corner of the world you live in, you're more than welcome to participate by showing how you keep the Albanian spirit alive.

“Do you teach an Albanian Language course? Or take one? Show us your Albanian class.

Have you taught your grandchildren your favorite Albanian dances? Show us a clip of their performance. 

Do you make Berek for your family dinners-- even if it's paired with local wine? Show us what your dinner table looks like. 

Do you have pictures in your home of your parents or grandparents? Show us! 

Where do you exhibit the Albanian double-headed eagle? Do you hang your Albanian flag on your brick faced Boston walk-up-- or inside the shop your parents have run for decades?

If you are interested in being in the movie, follow the official instructions for HD Video submissions (preferably) or old photos that depict the Albanian pride of previous generations throughout the world. The chosen entries will be featured in the film, receive credit in the end credits, and also be awarded a free copy of the final feature “Dear Albania.”

For official rules, forms, and further submission check the links below:

Rules: http://www.dearalbania.com/Contest/OfficialRules.pdf

Entry Form: http://woobox.com/hrs94w

INFORMATION ON HOW TO PARTICIPATE GO HERE.

Also, check out the contest's Facebook page.

Here's a sneak peek:

Dear Albania Ruff Intro from Nate Dushku on Vimeo.

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Don't forget the deadline: 

December 15, 2013 11:59pm PST (Pacific Standard Time)

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