February 2017
GOOD LUCK.
Few exhibitions have been as anticipated as the current Francis Picabia retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art.
Read MoreEric D. Lehman: The Darkest Book of All
During dark times, we are drawn to dark books. Threats of chaos and futility skyrocket sales of nihilistic fictions like Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Read MoreNicholas Gamso on Patti Smith
As Smith sang the words, she appeared a disused vessel, ruined by the trauma of modernity. Her eyes were in a squint, her collar, a prairie preacher’s, was plain.
Read MoreJessica Sequeira: Good Friends, Associates
Blind Spot smashes multiple genres into a single space, blending and fusing romance, thriller and existentialist novel into a hybrid entity. Its form tests the notion that there is a singular aspect to the world.
Read MoreOwen Vince: The Possibility of Kindness
Now more than ever, it is crucial that we stand up to and reject this normalization of racism and populist, far-right ideology. That we reject the narratives of the far and extreme right.
Read MoreUp Morden Tower
While on the Wapping picket line opposing Murdoch, I was inspired by the best piece of street poetry that I’ve ever heard, when an old cockney printer shouted at a scab ‘you’re so low you could walk under a snake, wearing a top ‘at’.
Read MoreHe was a Road
Since November 9th, many Americans have been searching for ways to incorporate political activism into their everyday lives, to get out of the echo chambers that keep them among only like-minded people.
Read More
A response — Bartleby’s response — foregrounding the fact that it is the “I” that “prefers not to”: not that ‘I cannot’ nor ‘I...
Read More
As a poet, you are your grandmother; you are browsing the obituaries with a red pen and an address book in your hand. The...
Read More
Eric Weisbard wrote twenty years ago, introducing the voluminous, era-summarizing, contrarian and contradictory Spin Alternative Record Guide.
Read More
What, then, is sociocide? Sociocide resonates with the term demodernization formulated by A. V. Tishkov to account for the consequences of the war in...
Read More
Poet Fiona Sampson is a former career violinist, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, overt references to music appear in her work.
Read More
In May, in the garden of the elevated house at the bottom of the hill, four shrubs of stunning azaleas come into full blossom....
Read More
Florence showed me what she called the most famous of Chinese poems. She had made her own translation from a Chinese language newspaper clipping....
Read More
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...
Read More
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....
Read More
The persistence and proliferation of pseudoscientific thinking in contemporary culture demands explanation. Clearly there are some pragmatic reasons for its expanded existence, and people...
Read More
The memories are like stutters. Sometimes I inhale for air, and exhale a shaking chain of memories. A choking hazard. I for the ghost....
Read More
As many former Eastern Block countries in the EU display a hardly dissimulated form of racism and religious hatred, Albania, always a little behind...
Read More
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...
Read More
![‘For black boys [at night] on the internet’ by Legacy Russell](https://www.berfrois.com/uploads/2017/02/Leonid_Meteor_Storm_1833-110x90.jpg)
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.
Read More
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,
Read More
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?”
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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.
Read More
In the spring of 1793, the entomologist Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Herbst, as a means to supplement his lectures at the newly founded Berliner Tierarzneischule
Read More