Local
Subtitle: three stories
By: Judy Kravis
Contributors: Mutanabbī, Abū al-Ṭayyib Aḥmad ibn al-Ḥusayn, 915 or 916-965, poet; Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition; Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Artists' Books Collection (Columbia University. Rare Book and Manuscript Library)
Publisher: Road Books
Published: 2011
Place of publication: Garravagh, Inniscarra, County Cork, Ireland
Language: eng
Number of pages: 47
Subjects: Violence; Pictorial works; Booksellers and bookselling; Bombings; Iraq War, 2003-2011; Protest movements; Books and reading in art; Intellectual life; Social conditions; Censorship; Terrorism in art; In art; War and civilization; Vehicle bombs; Visual literature; Specimens; Small presses; Private presses; Al-Mutanabbi Street Coalition
Description: This collection supports and promotes awareness to the important mission and framework of the Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition's focus on the lasting power of the written word and the arts in support of the free expression of ideas, the preservation of shared cultural spaces, and the importance of responding to attacks, both overt and subtle, on artists, writers, and academics working under oppressive regimes or in zones of conflict, despite the destruction of that literary/cultural content.

"Judy Kravis has published short fiction and poetry, and given many readings of her work. She wrote the libretto for the opera Hot Food with Strangers, which has been performed in London and Ireland. She teaches French literature at University College, Cork, and is the author of Teaching Literature: Writers and Teachers Talking (1995)"--The Lilliput Press website (viewed June 30, 2015).
Notes: Printed in a numbered edition of 301.

"A Boreen book."

"For a while when I was a student, I shared a house with a man who taught and lived politics. We need people like you, he said, to remind us what we're working towards: a society in which people can, if they choose, spend their days thinking about poetry, writing it, going for walks or staring at the wall. This was welcome news. Most of my contemporaries were telling me when the revolution came, I'd be first in line for the firing squad. Poetry was counter-revolutionary before you'd written a word. When I heard about the al-Mutanabbi project, my first thoughts were: a street of bookshops was destroyed, let's repopulate, let's exercise the freedom to make books and put them out into the public arena, to inhabit the inner life in ways you cannot, while you are being bombed, or if you have been killed. A Don Delillo character says the true life takes place when we're alone, thinking, feeling, lost in memory, dreamingly self-aware, the submicroscopic moments. His life happened, he said, when he sat staring at a blank wall, thinking about dinner. To commemorate a street of bookshops destroyed in Baghdad, I choose to present a record, in the form of poetry and short fiction, of some of my submicroscopic moments and the freedoms they entail"--The Book Arts at the Centre for Fine Print Research, UK website.

"Local is a companion volume to strangeness, how to write round things, the pataphysics of making bread, bunch of monads and tell the bees"--Colophon.

On March 5th, 2007, a car bomb exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. Al-Mutanabbi Street is located in a mixed Shia-Sunni area. More than 30 people were killed and more than 100 wounded. Al-Mutanabbi Street, the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, holds bookstores and outdoor bookstalls, cafes, stationery shops, and even tea and tobacco shops. It has been the longstanding heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community for centuries. In response to the attack, a San Francisco poet and bookseller, Beau Beausoleil, rallied a community of international artists and writers to produce a collection of letterpress-printed broadsides (poster-like works on paper), artists' books (unique works of art in book form), and an anthology of writing, all focused on expressing solidarity with Iraqi booksellers, writers and readers. The coalition of contributing artists calls itself Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here Coalition.

Gift; Beau Beausoleil; 2019-2020.