French and African writers met in Harar to celebrate the 19th century French poet Arthur Rimbaud, who spent more than a decade of his life in the eastern Ethiopian town after turning his back on writing .... There are few remaining traces of Rimbaud in the town, and many of the town's residents confuse the poet with the American film character "Rambo".Many of the world's residents, too, I'd wager.
"A peculiar anthologic maze, an amusing literary chaos, a farrago of quotations, a mere olla podrida of quaintness, a pot pourri of pleasant delites, a florilegium of elegant extracts, a tangled fardel of old-world flowers of thought, a faggot of odd fancies, quips, facetiae, loosely tied" (Holbrook Jackson, Anatomy of Bibliomania) by a "laudator temporis acti," a "praiser of time past" (Horace, Ars Poetica 173).
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Tuesday, December 21, 2004
Fickle Fame
In an Agence France-Presse story from Harar, Ethiopia: