October 2010
Berfrois Interviews Gabriel Josipovici
The first thing to be said is that to define Modernism in any way at all is to take a stand. In that it is like Romanticism. You cannot write a 'history of Romanticism' or of Modernism, because you cannot stand above it on some neutral vantage-point.
Read MoreWelcome to the Mug Shot
Bill Bailey Comes Home | by John Jeremiah Sullivan
The Paris Review Blog
I followed the band around Europe for a while, feeding cigarettes to the band members’ model girlfriends and failing to secure face time with “Ax”...
Read MoreAn Empire Lacking Food
From American Scientist: Let me reintroduce you to planet Earth. Nearly 64 percent of its surface, close to 208,640,000 square kilometers, sits below 200 meters of water. The lack of light at those depths prohibits photosynthesis, the biological energy conversion system that is the foundation of most food...
Read MoreA New Stimulation
From The Millions: I’ve been on the Internet since I was fourteen years old. I’ve always loved it here. But a few months back, I found myself a bit troubled by what I perceived to be a difference in the way my mind was working. I would be at...
Read MoreCan a big voice be too much of a good thing?
Noises On | by Patrick Dillon
OperaNews
"Am I too loud?" Gerald Moore famously queried in the title of his "musical autobiography" of 1962...
Read MoreKidnapped!
by A. Roger Ekirch From Common-Place: In London on St. Valentine’s Day in 1945, the aspiring young novelist Patrick O’Brian, today regarded as one of the great twentieth-century writers of historical fiction, received as a gift an early volume of the Gentleman’s Magazine. Published in 1744, it briefly recounted...
Read MoreZombie Economic Ideas That Refuse to Die
From Foreign Policy: Theories, factual claims, and policy proposals that seemed dead and buried in the wake of the financial crisis are now clawing their way through the soft earth, ready to wreak havoc once again. Five of these zombie ideas seem worthy of particular attention and, if possible,...
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A response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
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As a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
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Eric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
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What, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
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Poet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
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In May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
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Florence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
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To begin at the end: After nearly two hours exploring facets of exploitation in the globalized food system, Luc Moullet closes Genèse d’un repas/Origins...
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Now it seems the state’s radical conservatives are degrading the historic, populist-provincial mentality of Iowa; they are revising the state’s legacy within the broader...
Read MoreA few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world....
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The persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
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The memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
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As many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
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Elle called Silverman’s image of her wearing a shirt with several naked Lena Dunhams a “beautiful tribute.” Dunham, the article tells us, “seemed to...
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A few years ago all I had was a certain ambition and an understanding, more or less, of how things work in this world. I lived in the tiny room of a pension on B----- street. Funds were running low.
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I was eighteen years old when I was introduced to the fascinating world of Alasdair Gray. I read Poor Things (1992) in the second year of my undergraduate degree at the University of Glasgow,
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It’s easiest to start from the impulse to problematize the position of the flâneur. The ugly word privilege hovers around it, and we turn to questions that we know the answer to, “Who, exactly, is allowed to wander, like so?”
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From the backseat, Jude saying, Mama, I HATE Republicans, and the way he says HATE, saying it the way only a seven-year-old can.
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That Diana and the Amazons speak ‘hundreds’ of languages is believable, given their situation and seeming enlightenment; that English becomes their go-to choice for daily chats off the Greek coast, less so.
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On the ancient river, seagull rock crests out of the waters. An outcrop within its sight is thorned by a few young silhouettes, taking turns plunging into the river some feet below. Riverboats and water taxis, white river cruise-ships weave short and cyclical tours between the two shores.
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In the spring of 1793, the entomologist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Herbst, as a means to supplement his lectures at the newly founded Berliner Tierarzneischule
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