Library / Pearls
On Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino
On Natalia Ginzburg’s Valentino, newly translated: a Q&A with Alexander Chee.
The Mass of Mies
« Less is more »? The scale and shape of his body gave the architect Mies van der Rohe an unequaled weight and architectural authority.
Two palindromes
→ → Pursuing / you lead me to come to the future.
← ← coming to the future, I lead you / demanding.
求索 & 层云
→ → 求索 / 你引导我来未来
← ← 来未来我导引你 / 索求
Cheers!
A photograph found in Rome’s Porta Portese. The recumbent can also raise a glass.
Marx and the art of natural winemaking
The grapes are tiny, burnt to a crisp. It’s day two of the harvest, in late August — freakishly early in a year of drought and heat waves. What is wine?
Curtain call
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.
On Kafkaesque pedagogy
Not the nightmare one might instinctively expect. Franz Kafka and Stig Dagerman on parenthood vs. educatorhood: who can educate a child?
Back to the office
From the office of the future to the office of the past. What endures?
No pity
The documentary When spring came to Bucha reaches beyond common representations of war and one-dimensional victimhood.
No money off a dead woman’s body (& other poems)
« I like my tyrants like I like my heroes. That is, crushed by a giant chandelier. »
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.
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
€ 0
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.
VOID FILL
On multinational packaging systems, « inflated fictions of transparency », desire and fulfillment.
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.
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.
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.
Unclaimed, claimed, unclaimable
On unrecognized states, micronations and curious border zones.
¿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.
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. »
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.
Firsts in space
A friend of mine likes to say that the moon landing was real, but dumb. On astronautical tokenism.
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?
Bee Gees FAQ
Fragen, Antworten, Quintessenzen.