Cirrus@Austlit

Author's note: This piece was written for Barbara Campbell's time-based work, 1001 Nights, in which Sheherezade is embodied as a performer who seeks to tell the stories of others in order to go on living after the death of her partner in the far off land she has left behind her. Every night at dusk (the time of which varies according to where she is in the world), the performer recounts via live webcast a story produced in response to a phrase she has excerpted form her morning's reading of news stories about the middle east. Without a story to tell, Sheherezade will die. This particular story grew from the phrase 'culpable blindness', taken from Benjamin Joffe-Walt's 'Union votes to boycott Israeli unis' from The Guardian, 31 May 2006.