Berfrois

December 2014

  • Lauren Berlant performs by clicking

    December 2014 Highlights

    Lauren Berlant performs by clicking

    Today I introduced Facebook to someone older than me and had a long conversation about what the point of networking amongst “friends” is. The person was so skeptical because to her stranger and distance-shaped intimacies are diminished forms of real intimacy.

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  • Remembering Michael B. Katz

    December 2014 Highlights

    Remembering Michael B. Katz

    Michael B. Katz sadly passed away in August. We knew him as a brilliant writer and strong champion of the urban poor. Here are some tributes from his friends.

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  • David Beer: Broadcastwerk

    December 2014 Highlights

    David Beer: Broadcastwerk

    Writing at sometime around 1930 or 1931, Walter Benjamin suggested that the voice on the radio is a like a visitor in the home, as such it is “assessed just as quickly and sharply” as any other houseguest.

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  • Michael Munro on Spinoza

    December 2014 Highlights

    Michael Munro on Spinoza

    Immanence is not philosophy, nor philosophy immanence. But there is in the passage from one to the other a modification of sense that is not without significance. It is perhaps for that reason that the two formulas are best read together. At the point of vertigo.

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  • Robyn Ferrell on Balthus

    December 2014 Highlights

    Robyn Ferrell on Balthus

    The pitfalls of identification, hero-worship, envy and malice can beset the most patient writer in the throes of five hundred-plus pages of attention to genius.

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  • Tinder Times by Bibi Deitz

    December 2014 Highlights

    Tinder Times by Bibi Deitz

    I am in bed with a man. He has to go home. He is not staying the night. So he pulls out his iPhone and orders an Uber. It is ten o’clock. Joni Mitchell croons in the corner from my Macbook Air. Ubering while listening to Joni Mitchell, he says. Probably not what she had in mind.

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The Threat to Printed Books

The Threat to Printed Books

One would like to be as cheerful as this about the future of the printed book, or even the book, but the analogy with newspapers, which each year continue to record further steep declines in sales, leading to the extinction of many venerable titles, does not give us great...

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It’s Getting Ho Ho Hot

It’s Getting Ho Ho Hot

Oh, the weather outside is frightful, The heat wave brutal and spiteful. Our crops have no water to grow—Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow!

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Thomas Rath: Mexican Democracy

Thomas Rath: Mexican Democracy

I don't think Iguala means we should jettison the narrative of democratization entirely, at least if we want to understand how and why Mexico has changed in the last fifty years. Elections are contested by more parties than they used to be, and the Supreme Court has recently shown...

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Pinsky on Hayden

Pinsky on Hayden

Poetry is not the same as mere eloquence or high language. That’s a truism. The stock modernist examples demonstrating it include William Carlos Williams’ “This is just to say.” In a related way, Marianne Moore clearly enjoys saying, in the first line of her “Poetry,” “there are things that...

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Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei: Albanian Poppies

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei: Albanian Poppies

Recently, historian Bernd Fischer claimed that in fact the last German left on December 4, which was in turn heavily contested by Paskal Milo, etcetera. Why the fact of the last German leaving ought to determine the symbolic date of national liberation is beyond me, but I'm sure it's...

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Woolf, it seems, was predisposed to find Ulysses undeserving of Eliot’s praise…

Woolf, it seems, was predisposed to find Ulysses undeserving of Eliot’s praise…

In February of 1922, just after James Joyce's Ulysses appeared, Virginia Woolf wrote to her sister Vanessa, who was then in Paris: “for Gods sake make friends with Joyce. I particularly want to know what he’s like.”

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