Welcome to issue two of The Attention Span Newsletter by me, Canan (Ja’anan) Marasligil. I’m a writer, a literary translator, an artist and a curator of cultural programmes based in Amsterdam. Every other week, I take the time to reflect and offer a glimpse of how I see the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature. Each issue has a short essay, a nerdy look at translation, a page from one of my notebooks, a list of things to read, watch or listen to, and a highlight from my archives.You can support my work on Patreon. Thank you for your presence and attention!To subscribe: https://theattentionspan.com/subscribeSHOW NOTES: Aliya Gulamani, commissioning editor and editorial lead at Unbound – the world’s first crowdfunding publisher, wrote a piece for The Bookseller on why literary festivals need to listen to what Deaf people are saying about accessibility: https://www.thebookseller.com/comment/theres-nothing-for-us-without-us I’ve finished writing an essay on Etel Adnan last week and have been diving back into a lot of material about this incredible artist and poet, whom we lost in 2021. One video I wanted to share is this short film made by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, as part of the exhibition Colour as Language, which was on show in Spring 2022. If you don’t know Etel Adnan’s work, this is a nice way to dive in: https://youtu.be/odzjLhDDKdcIn an excellent piece, writer Breanne Mc Ivor challenges narrow visions of Trinidad and how she refuses to adapt her writing to the needs of US readers. Here’s a fragment in which I also recognized my own struggle – and the one of many of my writer friends: “However, faced with the challenge of securing an agent, I began to wonder whether authenticity was the hill I wanted to die on. I had heard many stories of Caribbean authors whose publishers asked them to change “ent” to “ain’t” so the language wouldn’t confuse readers or Caribbean writers who were asked to edit because their books lacked “relatable” characters; a term that begs the question, relatable to whom?” https://lithub.com/caribbean-fiction-doesnt-need-to-be-altered-for-american-audiences/Out of SPACE podcast, hosted by artist and curator Cathy Lomax. I really loved listening to the episodes focusing on the economics of making art (the whole series titled “Artonomics”) as well as those on “care”. https://spacestudios.org.uk/out-of-space-podcast/

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