Berfrois

September 2015

Gore Vidal by Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal by Gore Vidal

Vidal defined his more outré work as ‘inventions’, but though Parini admits to admiring Myra Breckinridgehe shares the common wisdom that Vidal’s legacy takes two principal forms.

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Setsuko Adachi: Azalea Exuberance Strikes

Setsuko Adachi: Azalea Exuberance Strikes

In May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom. They protrude and hang out over the white oya stone walls and over the road. The azaleas break the rhythm of the march.

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Arsenal Fans in the Millwall End

Arsenal Fans in the Millwall End

The media have tried to portray Corbyn as boring, but surely a vote for him in a general election would be a vote for a bloody military coup. Hardly boring.

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‘When it came time to put up the stone’

‘When it came time to put up the stone’

Forever the prankster, my father died at 79 on Yom Kippur of 2003, prompting my mother’s comment: “That day is for the holy — how did they ever let him in?”

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Flat White Lit Chat by Russell Bennetts

Flat White Lit Chat by Russell Bennetts

I’d rather stick a needle in my eye than drink a really strong coffee. Coffee is made when the devil passes water. Tea, however, is the true blood of the living God.

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Morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies…

Morality is the most dark and daring of conspiracies…

In attempting to reach the genuine psychological reason for the popularity of detective stories, it is necessary to rid ourselves of many mere phrases.

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So Haute Then

So Haute Then

As the story is usually now told, Charles Frederick Worth (1825–1895), often described as a French couturier of British origin, created the institution of haute couture.

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Stanimir Panayotov on Oleg Mavromatti

Stanimir Panayotov on Oleg Mavromatti

Where No Place for Fools leaves no room for fools, it pries open the space for the fool’s room, his contemporary cell: the camera.

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Teresa K. Miller and Gregory Giles Discuss Luc Moullet

Teresa K. Miller and Gregory Giles Discuss Luc Moullet

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 of a Meal (1978) by turning the camera on himself.

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Edi Rama’s Bunker Mentality by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

Edi Rama’s Bunker Mentality by Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei

As many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind with the most recent fad in international politics, has been profiling itself as a country of multicultural and multireligious tolerance.

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Menachem Feuer on Slavoj Žižek

Menachem Feuer on Slavoj Žižek

At stake in this difference between the schlemiel and the cynic (or kynic) is a choice between one way of evaluating and understanding reality, chance, and humor and another.

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Did Pynchon publish a novel under the pseudonym ‘Adrian Jones Pearson’?

Did Pynchon publish a novel under the pseudonym ‘Adrian Jones Pearson’?

Is it possible that the literary sensibility—person—that produced a clutch of novels under the name Thomas Pynchon has had a fat new novel out since April, under a different name, only to encounter a virtual vacuum of notice?

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