Essays, Journalism and Translation

Essays

Recent writing for exhibition catalogues includes the essay ‘Filled with Emptiness: The Dream Theatres of Hiroshi Sugimoto’ for the exhibition Hiroshi Sugimoto: Time Machine at the Hayward Gallery, London (October 2023—January 2024)

James wrote an essay  On Margate Sands  about artist artist Katie Paterson’s First There Is a Mountain project which toured 25 coastal venues in the UK in 2019. Paterson chose 5 mountains in the world and made a series of to-scale moulds of them out of 100% degradable corn starch, which miraculously fit inside each other. The public is invited to the beach near each venue to hear the commissioned piece, then take the moulds and make  sandcastle mountain ranges on the beach— before their works are washed away by the tide. James read the essay to an audience on the beach at Margate in August 2019.

Translation

A poem by Afghan poet Hasan Bamyani, ‘translated’ by James, was published in the Oxford Review of Books in May 2019. You can read it below.

The expression Darde Dell in Persian — literally ‘pain heart’ — means sitting with a friend and sharing your sorrows

Darde Dell

 

Oh, my friend

let’s sit down together and do darde dell,

sharing the pain in our hearts

I am imprisoned in darkness—

please shine your light on me

so I can bloom

 

I was like a dying flower

during a drought—

you gave me life.

By the help of your hand

I will grow strong again

for the harvest

 

Instead of bracing myself

against the waves

unleashed by war

I would like to rest

for just a few hours

in the calm waters of a lake

 

Take my hand

be kind

until I manage to

free myself

from the hostile forces

that bind me

 

I made my escape

from a volcanic realm

where I suffered like Abraham in Egypt

persecuted by Nimrod

Arriving at the River Nile

I wanted to drink a little water

 

My generation is waiting for peace

as a swallow waits for spring

but peace has come to me here

With your help I feel

as though I’m living in my motherland

and Oxford becomes

Kabul for me

 

HASAN BAMYANI is a poet from Kabul. He worked as a teacher there until 2002, when he came to Oxford as a refugee. Two of his poems are included in the anthology Crossing Lines: An Anthology of Immigrant Poetry  from Broken Sleep Books (2021). He is the author of the collection Lyla and Manjun and his poetry is featured in the anthology The Story of my Life.

Note on translation: James does not speak or read Dari. He and Hasan enjoy a close collaborative process, working through poems line by line over multiple drafts to find a satisfactory translation. The English version does not attempt to replicate the formal structure and rhyme scheme of the original, instead concentrating on capturing Hasan’s voice. Artwork by Abigail Hodges. To see the poem both in English and the original Dari, click here

Journalism

For a piece in Apollo Magazine to tie in with the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 in July 2019, on post moonshot art, click here.

In the piece Take Me to the River: A Journey into Digital Fiction, James discusses the collaborative nature of new media for Review31

To read a discussion of digital fiction with writer Thomas McMullan in Partisan Hotel, click here

James reviews the extraordinary show ‘Hannah Ryggen: Woven Histories’  at Modern Art Oxford  here

A review of  the exhibition Pity and Terror: Picasso’s Path to Guernica at the Reina Sofia in Madrid for Frieze magazine, staged to mark the 80th anniversary of both the painting and the fascist bombing of the Basque town in 1937, reviewed for Frieze.

Airports

James went behind the scenes at Heathrow to research this piece for The Independent about the experience of passing through an airport  — something many of us are now probably wondering if we will ever do again— the curious, weightless state we enter when we have checked in our luggage and passed security but haven’t yet left the ground.

Slipstream by Richard Wilson. Terminal 2, Heathrow

BOOK REVIEWS

 Beat Generation

Here are a trio of reviews of books about Beat Generation related themes, all for the Independent: first, a review of Jack Kerouac’s lost novella This Haunted Life; second, of Barry Miles’ biography of William Burroughs; third, of Iain Sinclair’s American Smoke.

Barry Miles at the Indica bookshop, 1967

Literature

The title of Jay Parini’s exhaustive and fascinating biography of Gore Vidal sums up at least one aspect of his mercurial character: Every Time a Friend Succeeds, Something Inside Me Dies…

 

Travel, walking and psychogeography

It was tough picking just five books for the Independent’s Christmas round-up of travel books. In the end, these were the ones that made the selection: a hymn to air travel by a 747 pilot, two rambles through London, an immersion in Putin’s Russia and a love-song to Granada…

In Night Walking, Matthew Beaumont has written a crepuscular classic, given a full review (beyond its mention in the best of 2015 round-up) here for the Independent. Staying with perambulatory titles, here’s a stroll through A Philosophy of Walking by Frederic Gros.

 

Click here for a review of Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts’ fascinating book Harlem is Nowhere: A Journey to the Mecca of Black America. 

Nature Writing

Click here for a review of George Monbiot’s provocative and thought-provoking book Feral that has gone on to spawn a movement.

This review of Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk  for the Independent was one of the first…

Easter Saturday 26 March 2016, the last ever print issue of the Independent came out carrying James’ review of Tim Birkhead’s The Most Perfect Thing. A blend of scientific rigour and passion, Birkenhead’s book will be in many lists of the best nature writing of 2016, as one more great broadsheet institution becomes extinct.

 

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