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Jan 12, 2025 | 
lrb.co.uk | Anahid Nersessian
On Monday, 6 January, the National Weather Service warned Los Angeles residents of high Santa Ana winds. The Santa Anas stir in the deserts of Southern California, rush up over the mountain ranges that separate the high, dry inland regions from the coast, and then surge, hot and blustering down towards the ocean. They often come in autumn but can strike at any time, drying out the air and cloaking the city in a shroud of brown dust. Often the Santa Anas pass without incident if not without notice.
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Jan 12, 2025 | 
parapraxismagazine.com | Anahid Nersessian
The following quiz is meant to be both funny and provocative. Each question invited seminar participants to reframe their erotic attitudes through another person’s language, by choosing or otherwise responding to a quotation from a poetic or theoretical text as if it were an expression or encapsulation of the participant’s own beliefs.
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Dec 13, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Anahid Nersessian
The American Academy of Arts and Letters sits at the back of Audubon Terrace in Washington Heights, flanked by Boricua College and the Hispanic Society Library and Museum. It is one of eight Beaux Arts buildings tucked into this beautiful and disorienting pocket of Manhattan, where the names of Spanish writers, artists, and conquistadors—Cervantes, Velazquez, Columbus, Balboa—are carved into the friezes and a giant bronze sculpture of El Cid dominates the plaza.
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Oct 25, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Anahid Nersessian
In 1598 the world’s first opera, Dafne, was composed by Jacopo Peri and Ottavio Rinuccini, who based his libretto on an earlier one: “Combattimento di Apollo col serpente Pitone.” The “Combattimento” had been performed nine years before as an intermedio during the marriage celebration of Ferdinando I de’ Medici and Cristina di Lorena in Florence.
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Oct 16, 2024 | 
newyorker.com | Anahid Nersessian
On March 1, 2020, roughly two weeks before the COVID lockdown began in France, the French writer and filmmaker Virginie Despentes published an essay in the left-leaning paper Libération.
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Sep 26, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Anahid Nersessian
How do you say […]? The title of Fady Joudah’s new book of poems is made up of two square brackets enclosing an ellipsis, an image that suggests modification—someone else’s words swapped out for those of the writer or speaker—and omission. Printed in large font on the cover, it looks a bit like a hieroglyph (derived from a Greek word meaning “sacred carving”) or perhaps a sigil, a magical representation calling invisible things into the material world.
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Aug 29, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Anahid Nersessian
On November 11, 2008, 150 police officers surrounded the tiny village of Tarnac, in central France. They had come to arrest members of a small leftist commune that had been operating a farm, along with a general store and a bar, for the previous four years. The charge was terrorism, or rather being part of an “association of wrongdoers in relation to a terrorist undertaking”—in this case the use of iron rods to disrupt several high-speed rail lines in the area.
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Aug 8, 2024 | 
nybooks.com | Anahid Nersessian
The California run of “Simone Leigh,” a traveling exhibition of the artist’s work organized by the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, is split between two locations: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the California African American Museum, separated by just over seven miles of broad city blocks.
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May 15, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Anahid Nersessian
On 25 April, a large group of students at the University of California, Los Angeles, set up an encampment on the main quadrangle of their campus. Flanked on all sides by plywood barricades, the Palestine Solidarity Encampment included smaller tents for sleeping as well as larger enclosures for food, first aid, electronics (phone chargers, batteries), musical instruments and art supplies.
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May 5, 2024 | 
lrb.co.uk | Anahid Nersessian
The Palestine Solidarity Encampment at UCLA on 1 May. Photo © Amy Katz / ZUMA Press Wire / AlamyOn 25 April, a large group of students at the University of California, Los Angeles, set up an encampment on the main quadrangle of their campus. Flanked on all sides by plywood barricades, the Palestine Solidarity Encampment included smaller tents for sleeping as well as larger enclosures for food, first aid, electronics (phone chargers, batteries), musical instruments and art supplies.
