June 2012
A thousand copies of Vargas Llosa’s novel were burned at the academy…

Tahitian Landscape, Paul Gauguin, 1893 From The Guardian: When Vargas Llosa was awarded the 2010 Nobel prize for literature, the Swedish Academy praised his “cartography of structures of power and his trenchant images of the individual’s resistance, revolt, and defeat.” That assessment could still apply to The Dream of...
Read MoreSympathetic Magic

In September 1863, a local paper in Somerset, England, ran an article about a man and a woman from Taunton whose child had been stricken with scarlet fever. Depressingly common, a child suffering from the illness itself was not noteworthy—what made the news were the remedies proposed. Distraught, the...
Read MoreSuch Leniency

One of the hostage takers during the Munich Massacre, at the 1972 Summer Olympics, Munich. Photograph by Russell McPhedran From Der Spiegel: The men who were arrested in the Munich house of former Waffen-SS member Charles Jochheim late on Oct. 27, 1972 were armed like soldiers on their way...
Read MoreAndrea Teti: Egypt Decided

After one of the most nail-biting weeks since the Egyptian uprising of January 2011, the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood’s political party, Mohammed Morsy, was recognised as Egypt’s new President, the first in the country’s history to be voted in through genuinely competitive elections. This is doubtlessly a momentous...
Read MoreBobbi Lurie Plays with Mad-Men-ness

John Hamm as Don Draper in Mad Men, AMC by Bobbi Lurie Mad Men has given me many hours of quality escapism. My involvement with the characters, through four seasons, provided me with a rare opportunity to connect deeply with imaginary companions. It allowed me to leave my life...
Read More‘Why would I be allowed to steal from myself and not from others?’

Plate 37 from Jerusalem, William Blake, 1804-1820 by Jeroen Mettes Translated by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei from Jeroen Mettes. “Politieke Poëzie: Enige aantekeningen, Poëtica bij N30 (versie 2006).” In Weerstandbeleid: Nieuwe kritiek. Amsterdam: De wereldbibliotheek, 2011. Published with permission of Uitgeverij Wereldbibliotheek, Amsterdam. L’égalité veut d’autres lois. —Eugène...
Read More‘What are you doing?’

From N+1: It’s possible to have a clear attitude toward Twitter if you’re not on it. Few things could appear much worse, to the lurker, glimpser, or guesser, than this scrolling suicide note of Western civilization. Never more than 140 characters at a time? Looks like the human attention...
Read MoreNate Garrelts: Comics Teachers Assemble!

One of the reasons Will Eisner quit working on the Spirit in 1952 was so that he could continue working on PS Magazine, an instructional comic dedicated to teaching enlisted men how to perform preventative maintenance on U.S. Army equipment. While there certainly may have been other contributing factors...
Read MoreWe Built This City

Paris Commune, 1871 by Jonathan Moses Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution, by David Harvey, Verso, 206 pp. It would be impossible to cover here the range of ideas in Harvey’s recent book, Rebel Cities, but it is worth considering one of its...
Read More“And no wireless”

Julie Otsuka From The Days of Yore: Days of Yore: Where did you live during your early New York years? Julie Otsuka: I have always lived in this neighborhood . I’ve always had my own place, I don’t think I could do roommates. I moved to New York...
Read MoreAnother World: Contemporary Cemeteries and Heterotopia

Contemporary cemeteries have adopted various ‘useful’ applications, but they also remain highly complex and ambiguous spatio-temporal enclosures. Worpole, in his study of cemetery landscapes, wonders whether we have the ‘vocabulary for describing what these unsettling landscapes mean culturally’. Are they religious or secular, places of despair or places of...
Read MoreHugh Everett III, Many-Worlds Man by Jeffrey Barrett

Jacek Yerka by Jeffrey A. Barrett In the Spring of 2007, the journalist Peter Byrne interviewed Mark Everett (E of the band Eels) about Mark’s father Hugh Everett III. Mark did not know much about what his father had done for a living, and he knew even less about...
Read MoreJamie Olson on Gennady Aygi

Even though Gennady Aygi, who passed away six years ago, began writing poetry as a student in Moscow back in the 1950s, it was only in the early 1990s that his first major book collection appeared in Russia. What accounts for the time lag? On the one hand, it...
Read MoreIn the early modern period, horniness and sexual insatiability are classic female attributes…

Frenzy of Exultations, Władysław Podkowiński, 1894 by Justin E. H. Smith I’ve observed before that until at least the early 19th century, ‘orgasm’ did not mean what it does for us today. In La philosophie zoologique of 1809, for example, Jean-Baptiste Lamarck uses the term to describe something like...
Read MoreLike many ugly controversies, the beginnings of #gamergate are linked to the end of love — well, the end of a relationship, at least....
Read MoreA response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
Read MoreAs a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
Read MoreEric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
Read MoreWhat, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
Read MorePoet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
Read MoreIn May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
Read MoreFlorence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
Read MoreTo 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...
Read MoreNow 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....
Read MoreThe persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
Read MoreThe memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
Read MoreAs many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
Read MoreProust would advise us to refuse the tyranny of algorithms...
Read MoreOur work began with a question: Why do we sacrifice the pleasures of human connection in order to claim our place as “one of the boys” or as a “good” woman?
Read MoreIt is doubtful whether the gift was innate. For my own part, I think it came to him suddenly. Indeed, until he was thirty he was a sceptic, and did not believe in miraculous powers.
Read MoreIt’s as if the natural cold of the night / is dispersed by the fog that fills the park / as you, a friend, and I walk and sit and talk...
Read MoreThe dodo was not always fat. Nobody alive is able to say for sure what a dodo was really like: the last one had died by the end of the 17th Century...
Read MoreWhat's the use of teaching Young ones how to shape love With their mouths? Let the elders Touch their own lips, let them feel How dry they are.
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