November 2014
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November 2014 Highlights
Jenny Diski keeps up
Some things are best met with silence. If I were to proceed with this month’s column in an honest way, it would be a blank page, without words.
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November 2014 Highlights
Playing the Percentages: Berfrois Interviews Danny Dorling
The portrait of the 1% in your book is one of sociopathic, power-hungry narcissists with a striking lack of empathy. This may seem antagonistic, but you also write that we “may be making a mistake when we blame them [the 1%] for being greedy. Many of them may not be able to help it. The very rich desperately need the help of the better-adjusted majority.” What can we, the 99%, do to help?
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Berfrois Films
I’d rather it was an adventure novel, or a sex-romp novel. As it is, you’ve got me holed up in a rather ratty motel (not even hotel!) for three days, drinking bourbon every time a reader picks up the book and reads about me drinking bourbon.
Read MoreStreet Haunting in Winter
No one perhaps has ever felt passionately towards a lead pencil. But there are circumstances in which it can become supremely desirable to possess one; moments when we are set upon having an object, an excuse for walking half across London between tea and dinner.
Read MorePostgraduate education has been one of our culture’s most prominent expressions of upper-class privilege…
My father wrote his share of poems in high school in India. He still recites verses—though never his own—in Punjabi on occasional late evenings. My mother, the daughter of a schoolteacher and at the top of her high school class in a village not far from my father’s, could...
Read MoreBlue Flakes
One evening during the westward retreat of the defeated Austro-Hungarian forces, he announced his own intention to shoot himself, but was forcefully disarmed by his comrades. His committal followed on October 6, and he died in hospital on November 3. His medical file lists the cause of death, complete...
Read MoreWhenever you hear that whistle…
I write in my rental apartment on Rue de Seine in Paris, while trying to simultaneously ignore the tolling of the church bells in my vicinity as well as the continuous barking of my next door neighbor, Georges. I have never seen him or his owners; however, given...
Read MoreAustin Carder on Tara Donovan
The best way to encounter Tara Donovan’s work for the first time may be by accident. I walked into her show at Pace on a whim (I had come for Joel Shapiro next door) and was immediately transported into her world, or rather the two worlds of her massive...
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The tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
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The thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
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I spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
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The tea should be strong. For a pot holding a quart, if you are going to fill it nearly to the brim, six heaped teaspoons would be about right...
Read More
The thing about new blooms is that they tend to bleed— / Those petals birthed / hugging close / that come warmer weather are tricked into jumping away...
Read More
I spent a good part of my childhood at home staring outside my bedroom window, following the trail of planes approaching the nearby Paris airport in the sky from my banlieue. I envied the passengers...
Read More