« I detect the head of a mannequin. Then the grains get too coarse. »
« Once the most social democratic country in Europe, and then, in the 1990s, the most neoliberal one, Sweden now aims to become the most nationalist one. »
« Dreams could show an internalization of oppression just as easily as a resistance to oppression — which would mean a dream isn’t so free a realm after all. »
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« To see the West as a process means that France was at one time westernized. Rome was westernized. Greece was westernized »
« This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. »
« To write a biography about a writer like Kiš is a violation of the poetics of the very author it claims to revere. »
Visiting his hometown, Tartus, he opened a drawer of old family photographs.
Translated from the Catalan into English by Julie Wark A bond of free laws Friendship is the emotional bond that exists between people who are not united by other relationships — family, workplace, neighborly, nationality, and others — or subject to any of their purposes. Although it can be part of any of these spheres, […]
« I think reimagining relationships of distance and proximity is interesting in order to go beyond romantic ideas of neighbors. »
« In both countries, it has left the government officials grappling with an extremely delicate and complex issue. Why is it so difficult to move forward? »
« This summer my inner warrior was kissed back alive by an unlikely figure: the Pope. »
« In order to survive amidst this bleak existence, the Mediterranean people established two distinct strategies: hopelessness or salvation. Some embraced hopelessness as the best way to approach the absurd condition of human life. »
Black on white, with a glint of copper. And inside: the Mediterranean as a sea between; dreams, and their political life; headaches — human, divine, and artificial. A woman steps in Tangiers; looted libraries whisper their afterlives; strangers write to strangers. What Sweden isn’t; Yugoslav tales of literary theft ascending; an angel is saved — or not — in a broken geography. Eight hours that don’t make a day, and the question of what the West means to the rest.
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I was reminded of Muybridge’s moving pictures while looking at the serial attempts of Ambrogio Lorenzetti (d. 1348/49) at rendering the invisible visible.
*wīrós (man), *h₁ék̂wōs (horse), *gwéneh₂ (woman)
Maria Theresa, Habsburg empress, created the modern European state. To ponder her reign is to ask what the Enlightenment was — and is. Be careful…
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