Issue One
June 2022
Our first print issue, sprawling by design. Essays spanning the archaeological and the astronautical. Reviews of old books in new translation, and reviews of new books in non-translation. Plus fiction, poetry, anecdote, remembrance, collage, photography, and questions-not-so-frequently-asked.
Europas & bulls
A logo might start as a designer’s whim. Only then does one look for meanings to fill it with. On Europas: mythic, artistic, fictional, political, psychological, satirical, and finally unfinished.
Україна вчора і завтра
Україна не стала епіцентром світової історії раптово. Україна стала епіцентром світової історії знову.
Ukraine yesterday & tomorrow
Ukraine didn’t become an epicenter of world history all of a sudden; it became an epicenter again.
Beyond thalassophobia
German vice-chancellor Robert Habeck has more than twenty books to his name. It is tempting to read his fiction for glimpses of Green political futures, and his literary criticism for similar clues. How experimental can a literary politician be?
The prodigal half-rooster
Maggie Nelson’s On Freedom and Lea Ypi’s Free spoke past one another from half a world away. But both ask whether freedoms mean anything if they are not practiced in public, and if they are not passed on — and whether the word « freedom » means anything at all.
Place, non-place, place
« What happened was that we were driving on the highway from Izola towards Koper when we saw a drummer on the side of the road. So I immediately drove to the side of the road and reversed my car and asked if I could take some pictures. »
Optimize this headline for Google*
Google’s rise to dominance can seem inevitable, and its power over publishers monolithic. Yet Google’s wanton disruption of publishing resembles evolution more than intelligent design. Journalists, publishers, regulators, and scholars are left grappling with our new, random god.
Optimiere diese Schlagzeile für Google*
Googles Dominanz erscheint heute unausweichlich. Googles mutwillige Störung des Verlagswesens ähnelt eher der Evolution als intelligentem Design. Journalisten, Verleger, Regulierungsbehörden und Wissenschaftler müssen mit ihrer neuen, chaotischen Gottheit zu Recht kommen.
Bee Gees FAQ
Fragen, Antworten, Quintessenzen.
All is not vanity
Lose, delete, restore. What to remember when everything is always, forever, in a digital now?
« When I was silent… »
— Interview with Sulaiman Addonia
Stop! I am doing what they all do: presenting writer Sulaiman Addonia as one-who-has-suffered, because he grew up as a refugee. It is a problem of genre. Suffering has become an interviewer’s crutch.
On learning to write again
Ramallah, downtown, fifth floor. The phone rings and the caller’s number appears on the screen. It’s an unknown number. And yet a call that comes at this hour must be answered.
تعلُّم الكتابة من جديد
رام الله، وسط البلد، الطابق الخامس. يرن الهاتف ويظهر رقم المتّصل على الشاشة. إنه ليس لأحد معارفنا، فالرقم غير معروف. مع ذلك، يتطلّبُ اتصال هاتفي في ساعة مبكِّرةٍ كهذه الردَّ عليه.
How to write; or, how to insult
Shoulders were slapped, fingers pointed, hearts fired up. Perhaps a little scuffle broke out after class, a boisterous wrestling over insults exchanged. Nothing to be concerned about. Acquiring knowledge was, after all, a combative affair.
Why we write
A letter to George Orwell. « All narrative is hypnotic. Some narratives are more hypnotic than others. Because of you, we can be conscious of the kinds and the workings of the narratives that set out to deaden us, lessen us, make us lie, make us part of the lie. »
The void that fills the void
Relics, and the places devoted to their worship, dotted the map of Europe and the Middle East. Saints, like today’s celebrities, were both omnipresent and faraway, once-vulnerable people who became something more than human.
Ballad of a Homburg hat
On racial metonymy and the art of misidentification. (Meanwhile: has a glass of beer ever been more crisply and deliciously depicted? Has the froth of a European pilsner ever looked so delectable?)
A breast is a breast is a breast
To contemplate Pompeii is to contemplate archeology in its most extreme form, framed by the wish not only for discovery, but for resurrection.
On paths not taken
« Genocide Studies » is a house with many rooms. It accommodates and even encourages a broadening of its central concept. And like all academic fields, it presumes its object of study will always be there.
What is a pillar?
In 2010, OMA was invited to take part in a competition for the Damascus National Museum. It was part of a concerted effort toward a political « rapprochement » with Bashar al-Assad. Three months later, the entire effort was cancelled. Civil war was about to break out.
To see a city
« What if all fictional characters from novels continue to dwell somewhere, just like the dead? » Sewn together, the fragmented narratives of Daniela Hodrová’s City of Torment (Trýznivé město) make something deeply European.
Into the muck
Time? For? Socialism? What happened when Thomas Piketty descended from the elegant mathematical Olympus of economic theory into the muck of political and economic crises, public debates, social confrontations, and competing visions of progress?
By misadventure
A short story about vertigo from the author of Utopia Avenue, Cloud Atlas and Black Swan Green. « Possibly a dare, or a rite of passage, hung in the air. Remember their age: most late teenagers are immortal. »
설탕생쥐
A poem, plus a note on tongue-like mice and the translation of mice-like tongues.
Sugar Mouse
A poem, plus a note on tongue-like mice and the translation of mice-like tongues
Animal Anti-Cities
« A black cat sneaks across a flower bed toward a shed, past some asters, and squeezes into a gap an arm's width wide. Some worn-down club-goers lay wasted on sofas, sweat and smoke in a late-summer landscape. » On Berlin clubs and Calvino's cat flâneurs.
Animalische Anti-Städte
« Eine schwarze Katze huscht über ein Blumenbeet in Richtung eines Holzverschlags, an einigen Astern vorbei drückt sie sich in eine armbreite Lücke. Einige Abgefeierte lümmeln auf Sofas; in Schweiß und Rauch in dieser spätsommerlichen Club-Landschaft. » Über Berliner Clubs und Calvinos Katzenflaneure.
Женщина—это и есть пространство
Пространство—это ключевое слово в понимании литературной и философической истории России. Оксана Васякина переделывает русское пространство—и русский роман—для женских миров.
Woman is space
« Space », or prostranstvo, is a key word for understanding the literary and philosophical history of Russia. Oksana Vasyakina’s Rana (Wound), a Siberian road novel, remakes the Russian landscape and the Russian novel for women’s worlds. It renders prostranstvo unruly, polysemous, queer.
Firsts in space
A friend of mine likes to say that the moon landing was real, but dumb. On astronautical tokenism.
Cretan Europa’s second coming
Citizen’s day in Fiesole, December 2021. In the EU, Christian Europe stands in quantum superposition, both here and not here. Can Cretan Europa help us imagine better futures?
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No one would have understood both the sentiment and the absurdity more keenly than Marx himself, whose face has adorned real currencies in more countries than anyone else’s, with the possible exception of Elizabeth II.
¿Quién hablará Européen? Un puzle
La capital de Europa es, en ese sentido, un espejo cóncavo que devuelve un reflejo concentrado (y algo deforme) de la imagen que proyecta el continente.
Who will speak European? A puzzle
Brussels is a concave mirror that returns a concentrated (and somewhat distorted) reflection of the projection of its continent.
Eat the dust
Søren Kierkegaard compared reading reviews of his books to « the long martyrdom of being trampled to death by geese. » What martyrdoms does today’s bookishness portend?
It wasn’t the beer
How could it be that despite decades of rigorous European unification, of open borders and largely adjusted standards of living, a virus was able to kill up to 40 times more people in one country than in another, only a few hundred kilometers away?
Es war nicht das Bier
Wie konnte es sein, dass trotz jahrzehntelanger rigoroser europäischer Einigung, offener Grenzen und weitgehend angeglichener Lebensstandards ein Virus in einem Land bis zu 40 Mal mehr Menschen töten konnte als in einem anderen, nur wenige hundert Kilometer entfernt?
Metaphrasis
A short story about fiction, from the author of Plunder.
Unclaimed, claimed, unclaimable
On unrecognized states, micronations and curious border zones.
A kayak in Zierikzee
Was a Dutch town founded by Inuits in the 9th century? On American discoveries of Europe.
Only stupidity is hereditary
There sits a donkey before an open book, held between his forehooves in such a way that we can clearly see the pages. It is a family tree of sorts, with eight rows of seventeen standing donkeys.
Books reviewed in this issue
Подолати минуле: глобальна історія України (Overcoming the Past: The Global History of Ukraine)
Reviewed by Oksana Forostyna
Time for Socialism: Dispatches from a World on Fire
Reviewed by Noam Maggor
Capital and Ideology
Reviewed by Noam Maggor
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Reviewed by Noam Maggor
Free: Coming of Age at the End of History
Reviewed by Linda Kinstler
On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
Reviewed by Linda Kinstler
City of Torment
Reviewed by Alexander Wells
Рана (Wound)
Reviewed by Caroline Tracey