BOB HOLMAN

Then you need THE BURGANDY POETS! Bowery Poetry Club, 8pm $8 “Not For Everybody”

- Hal Sirowitz, Eternal Poet Laureate of Queens

- Sparrow

- Mike Topp

- Me!

EPISODE TWO FROM THE “ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN” SERIES PREMIERES TONIGHT! The show is airing on LinkTV which is available on local cable channels, online, and on DirectTV channel 375 and Dish Network channel 9410. EPISODE 1: THE GRIOTS OF WEST AFRICA (Feb. 1). EPISODE 2: TIMBUKTU TO THE DOGONS (Feb. 8). EPISODE 3: ISRAEL AND THE WEST BANK (Feb. 15). linktv.org Catch it NOW at the links below!

Episode 1 (http://www.linktv.org/programs/on-the-road-episode-1) follows Father and Son griots Papa and Karamo Susso and is an exploration of the oral traditions of West… Africa, roots of the blues, jazz, hiphop — and a quest to visit African American Beat poet Ted Joans (1928-2003), who lived in Timbuktu.

Episiode 2 (http://www.linktv.org/programs/on-the-road-episode-2) is a travelogue, visiting the Tamasheks aka Tuaregs, the Sahara “Blue People,” and the Dogons, the renowned mask makers of Africa. The cinematography here is incredible — Beatriz Seigne, Lamont Steptoe and Karamo Susso all contributing extraordinary footage.

Episode 3 (http://www.linktv.org/programs/on-the-road-episode-3) is the most directly involved with endangered languages, this time through the lens of the languages of Israel — Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, and Arabic. Yiddish and Ladino are both endangered. Ram Devineni’s creating a video poem in the midst of this, the five-minute rendition of a story told by Yiddish storyteller Sarat, intercut with my visit to the Wailing Wall, is a highlight. The poem, “The Feeling,” was a selection at last year’s Zebra International Poetry Film Festival in Berlin.

We’re in the beginning of an Arizona/Grand Canyon Western film set, so stop after just fifteen minutes  down the piste to shoot some B roll. Bea discovers the key to the room at Gourma, so Abdul returns to Douentza while we shoot, crack jokes, get burrs in our pants, are visited by wandering Peuls, and…. finally our faithful driver  returns and we’re on our way. Taking it easier. And of course today happens to be Tabaski here (it’s a locally defined thing), so still no food.

And as we move into Dogon country something happens. As if the cliffs are living. The Telems were here first. In the eleventh century. You can sense their world – veldt, savannahs, jungle with lions, buffalo, elephants. The wild dangers led the Telems to live in impossible-to-reach cliff houses, like Chaco Canyon or Mesa Verde. You can see these astonishing dwellings in a documentary of a Dogon cliff funeral made by Jean Rouch Cimetieres dans La Falaise . I HIGHLY RECOMMEND THAT YOU STOP whatever you are doing and spend 18 minutes with the Dogons. It’s in Dogon and French and awesome.

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/

The six-hour 4x4 trek from Timbuktu to Douentza on the Muslim Feast Day of Tabaski (i.e., no stores open in the two towns we passed) did me in. We stopped an hour or so north of our destination to shoot the sunset behind the first Dogon cliff landscape, and I felt a might queasy – or was it just the poetry of the moment? (This is the sunset conclusion riff that concludes the 2nd show, “From Timbuktu to the Dogons.”) The piste was ass-crackingly rugged, hellishly bouncy with intimations of carsick. Was it because I was memorizing Dogon salutations, which can go on for seemingly ever? Researching Douentza hotels? Reading David Markson’s The Last Novel? Maybe the heat? The luncheon salad in Timbuktu? Whatever. While checking out our quarters at Gourma Campement I became a walking projectile-vomiteer. Three times sending indecipherable stomach remnants into orbit. Diarrhea. I am sick in Africa.

So I lay down, Bea helped me, brought cold Coke and a bucket, and in this night of fitful sleep I drift unthinkingly through consciousness. No fever, so probably not malaria. I look at myself for the first time on the trip: I have aged. My face is red. My lips are badly cracked, bleeding. My hair is crazy. A tired, sad sack. Now sick.

Heave a couple times overnight as well. Really wished I wasn’t the guy who had to decide in the morning, but I am and do. The working principle for this trip seems to be Stick to Schedule. Keep On. So having skipped dinner and now breakfast, feeling “better,” not hungry, we’re on our way.

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/

As in the French, Mali being part of French West Africa, “pie-ee” or the area of the Dogons, whose epigraph as the “mask-builders of Africa” gives them mysterious purpose but is a dire simplification. A truly independent people, their cliff villages have an otherworldly yet organic complexity. Their cosmology, as revealed to French anthropologist Marcel Griaule in the late 40s, is similarly fantastic but grounded, with some Dogons believing in visits from aliens (from Sirius, to be exact: the Sigi Festival occurs every sixty years, ready or not, when a hidden moon of Sirius Dog Star appears in the heavens) and others possessing the ability to fly. And this is not to mention that Dogon villages are built above and below the impossible-to-reach cave-in-the-cliff dwellings of the tribe who preceded them in this Grand Canyon-like escarpment, the Telem, who evidently traveled home by rope. I’ve looked on this part of the Griot Trail, the inspiration for Nathaniel Mackey’s Andoumboulou (“We are the Failed Human Experiment”) poems, as dessert, the most different, the furthest away, the unknown, the essence.

Correct.

(Try one of Mackey’s poems — I consider him the greatest living jazz poet. His poems aren’t about jazz. They are jazz.)

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/

The Collected Poetry, Leopold Sedar Senghor. I’m a big fan of Melvin Dixon’s poetry, but his translations seem stilted, and intro, dated. But what a great object to have on hand in Dakar! With Eshelman’s Cesaire translations, we’ve got a good intro to Negritude in English.

Slumberland, Paul Beatty. DJ Darky has created a perfect beat (Think Pootie Tang crossed with a DJ Spooky satire) and is in Berlin to track down an unknown US African American jazz genius whose work he’s discovered as the sound track to porn films. It gets wilder and funnier. A couple of plot gimmicks – spies and fortune tellers – are Beatty’s nod to prose, but his whiplash wit kept me spinning throughout this joke de force.

Tropic Moon, Georges Simenon. The first of Simenon’s nouvelles dur (hard novels, i.e. not Maigret), this is a young man’s descent into lust/love/madness as metaphor in colonial Benin, 1932. Norman Rush, a totally brilliant, required reading, novelist has written a super intro for this new edition.

God’s Bits of Wood, Sembene Ousmane. Ousmane, the great Senegalese film director (required viewing), was a writer long before, and this kaleidoscopic novel of the 1948 Dakar-Bamako train strike against the French overseers is simply great history, great writing. Finished this novel today while working on the Ted Joans section of the Timbuktu shoot, came across the phrase “fine warm sand” and was struck down – it’s a phrase from the totally inspiring letter that Ted’s widow, Laura Corsiglia, sent me right before I left for the Griot Trail! Words I had selected for tomorrow’s blog. (BTW, God’s bits of wood are the native population of West Africa.) Incredibly powerful novel, which Breyten Breytenbach recommended.

The Koran, Allah. The copy given to me, Mohammed Bob, at the Senegal-Gambia border, is hardcover, gilt-embossed, and called The Noble Qur’an. Unlike the first time I read it, when I thought it harsh and finger-pointing, the  book seems quite lyrical this time through. I can see how Rumi got so revved up by it. To understand Islam, read the Koran.

Bob Holman is the host of a new travel series focused on endangered languages called ON THE ROAD WITH BOB HOLMAN on LINK TV. He traveled to West Africa, Middle East and Asia and these are his blog stories from his travels. More information at http://www.rattapallax.com/blog/on_the_road/