Issue Two
The Van Leer headquarters is not a fish tank
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« The office of the future » is all well and good, but what can be learned from the offices of the past that have sustained? Like: The Van Leer Headquarters in Aalsmeer.
Curtain call
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An iron curtain makes a powerful canvas. Images from Sven Johne & Falk Haberkorn’s Aus Sicht des Archivs, documenting life in the former East Germany in the 1990s.
No money off a dead woman’s body (& other poems)
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« I like my tyrants like I like my heroes. That is, crushed by a giant chandelier. »
When the world makes rags of us
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He spoke of painting like a starving man speaks of food. On Józef Czapski, Memories of Starobielsk and the art of observation.
Coagulated soy juice
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〖 A killed darling. 〗 Lucia Berlin belonged to a less sanctimonious age than ours.
Flags & bones
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On Curzio Malaparte’s Europe — and ours. The midcentury novelist read anew, on war’s aftermath and transatlantic romance. What was, or is, « postwar Europe », anyway?
Of human children & language children
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The first word I ever wrote was stsikukha: « pisser ». This is how my nanny Frosya called me to my face. On poetry and pathos in a bastard tongue.
Two palindromes
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→ → Pursuing / you lead me to come to the future.← ← coming to the future, I lead you / demanding.
Kill your darlings
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Like plots in a garden cemetery, with lamentations, good-riddances or other epitaphs.
Gerard Croiset & the adventure of the psychic detective
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The clairvoyant Dutch grocer who charted the frontiers of parapsychology and lent a hand to the FBI. « Unbelievable but true! »
Skinned alive
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Imagine your therapist assigned you to write your autobiography, after which you decided you were cured, so your therapist published it as revenge. Zeno’s Conscience turns 99.
A sangre fría
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Fernanda Melchor’s prose hits you square in the face, but its lyricism works differently in Spanish. On Veracruzano modernism, lyrical slang, and worlds so new that style falls apart.