Berfrois

September 2016

Ed Simon on the Whiskey Rebellion

Ed Simon on the Whiskey Rebellion

Herman Husband – itinerant preacher, politician, regulator, radical – would amble among the woods surrounding Pittsburgh. Here on the trans-Appalachian frontier, the native North Carolinian with his shoddy patchwork clothes and with his biblically long beard.

Read More

Joe Linker on the Whiskey (Radish)

Joe Linker on the Whiskey (Radish)

by Joe Linker To my odd ears, usquebaugh, from which whiskey derives, reminds me of the wedding party that year in Berkeley, and he…, and he couldn’t say…, or, he could not pronounce…, but that was nothing to the question of how he got the overstuffed hotel room chair...

Read More

‘You remember that footage’

‘You remember that footage’

I dedicate my No-Trump vote to my 15 year old son, Jude. Jude was born with an extremely rare physical disability that impacts his speech profoundly. When Jude talks, it’s much like encountering someone with a heavy foreign accent.

Read More

Sara Coleridge was very still, but always in motion…

Sara Coleridge was very still, but always in motion…

Coleridge also left children of his body. One, his daughter, Sara, was a continuation of him, not of his flesh indeed, for she was minute, aetherial, but of his mind, his temperament.

Read More

That final inhale/exhale of life…

That final inhale/exhale of life…

He was gone. I heard the final, awful rattle, the ragged, gasping breath that I couldn’t help thinking was full of his angry, determined desire to beat this impossible thing that had happened to him. He’d taken a fall. He’d hit his head. Now he was dead.

Read More

The Truth of Rama by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

The Truth of Rama by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

In October 2015, Endri Fuga, former co-founder of Mjaft and Propaganda Boss at the Office of Prime Minister Edi Rama announced the launch of a new governmental website, transparenca.al. According to Fuga, this “transparency website,” paid with taxpayers’ money, has as its sole purpose to deny “the slander of...

Read More

Back to Honey by Lital Khaikin

Back to Honey by Lital Khaikin

The world’s oldest documented love poem: Sumer tablet, 8th century BC. Istanbul Archaeological Museum. by Lital Khaikin Notes departing from Deniz Eroglu’s exhibition “Milk & Honey” @ OVERGADEN * I would not call him a lover The man who craves God’s Paradise. Paradise is only a trap To...

Read More

Navigating public space is never a neutral act…

Navigating public space is never a neutral act…

It’s never a neutral act, to navigate public space, not for anyone. I’d like to hope that Flâneuse troubles the act of walking in the city for those who would consider themselves flâneurs as well.

Read More

Unprintlike

Unprintlike

Jessica Pressman’s Digital Modernism: Making It New in New Media examines the aesthetic, thematic, and political lineage between modernist literature and criticism and electronic literature.

Read More

Nicholas Rombes on Edward Albee

Nicholas Rombes on Edward Albee

For years I was guilty. Why did I “like” a movie that was so hateful, so against the sort of niceties that veneered my own troubled life?

Read More

‘After a couple of pages, my fingers twitched for a keyboard’

‘After a couple of pages, my fingers twitched for a keyboard’

I was in an unending dialogue with readers who were caviling, praising, booing, correcting. My brain had never been so occupied so insistently by so many different subjects and in so public a way for so long.

Read More

Remembering Max Ritvo

Remembering Max Ritvo

Two years later, on our first wedding anniversary, we exchanged poems. He died three weeks later. I had written him a poem about trying to make him permanent, and not being able to.

Read More

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei: Holy LED

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei: Holy LED

Skënderbeg Square has once again become a giant building site in order to be transformed into a nationalist underground parking lot.

Read More

French Theory certainly was not French eventually

French Theory certainly was not French eventually

French Theory is no theory. It is a well-known fact that “Theory,” as in “French Theory,” is neither a theoretical endeavor nor a theoretical manifestation of thought.

Read More

To Study in Argentina

To Study in Argentina

One of the first to enter the classroom, I sat next to a painted banner proclaiming free abortion. On the opposite wall huge posters called for social justice and Marxist revolution.

Read More

Jessica Sequeira on Ghosts

Jessica Sequeira on Ghosts

Dear reader, here we are now, you and I. Ghosts, half here, half not. If I reach out and try to place my hand on your shoulder, I won’t feel a thing. But I know you’re close, so trust me.

Read More