Berfrois

Goodbye, Hello

Goodbye, Hello

Thank you for reading Berfrois (2009-2022)!

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Toni Hildebrandt on Ana Vaz

Toni Hildebrandt on Ana Vaz

Atomic Garden, an experimental film by Ana Vaz, opens with a purely textual prologue: Aoki Sadako, an elderly Japanese woman, visits her flower garden...

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Jesse Miksic: Robert Graves’ Mythology in Tokyo-3 and Fódlan

Jesse Miksic: Robert Graves’ Mythology in Tokyo-3 and Fódlan

The boy walks slowly across the wasteland, a lone figure—eyes in shadow, looking vaguely at his feet, but knowing, somehow, where he is going.

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Albert Rolls: Pynchon in the Low Countries

Albert Rolls: Pynchon in the Low Countries

Martin Eve is able to demonstrate in “Historical Sources for Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Peter Pinguid Society’” that Pynchon consulted a single source...

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Eli S. Evans: The Writer vs. the Pandemic

Eli S. Evans: The Writer vs. the Pandemic

If you played an instrument before the pandemic, but so badly that it would not have occurred to you to publicly disseminate videos of yourself playing it...

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Advice for Isolated Writers

Advice for Isolated Writers

Welcome to the new order. It’s not going to be fun or easy. But maybe you finally can carve out time to finish (or begin) that novel. You can read and write poetry.

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Dancing Nietzsche

Dancing Nietzsche

Friedrich Nietzsche’s body of work is notoriously difficult to navigate. He wrote in multiple styles, including essays, aphorisms, poems, and fiction.

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Drying Up

Drying Up

It didn’t happen all at once. I didn’t wake up one morning to find myself unable to write creatively. For months, I could eke out a story or group of poems...

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Wager for Happiness

Wager for Happiness

In the summer or fall of 1943, La France libre, the London-based provisional government led by General Charles de Gaulle...

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Green Thumbs

Green Thumbs

Not long after he arrived in Machilipatnam, Thomas Bowrey began to wonder what it was that the people of Machilipatnam were smoking.

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A hurricane across the green fields of life…

A hurricane across the green fields of life…

A little over one hundred years ago, a novel virus emerged from an unknown animal reservoir and seeded itself silently in settlements around the world.

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Remembering SARS

Remembering SARS

The experience of SARS traumatized Hong Kong, and the memories have endured in the territory’s collective consciousness....

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Voted, Ran, Isolated

Voted, Ran, Isolated

On the dot of noon yesterday, we received text messages from the government telling us to observe the ‘strict rules’ laid down by the president of the republic.

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Elias Tezapsidis: Plato’s Academy

Elias Tezapsidis: Plato’s Academy

While I had much success in my multiple attempts to create relationships where I was the person switching the intimacy dimmer higher or lower based on how well my expectations...

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Turning to f116v

Turning to f116v

I think I'm finally ready to come out as a Voynich scholar. I've been studying hi-res scans of the manuscript off and on for four years or so...

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Crüe’s Cover

Crüe’s Cover

Evan calls them “bitchin’,” betraying his California roots and never-ending supply of boyishness. I embrace that Gen-X-y “meh”

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Now Pepe was going to be president…

Now Pepe was going to be president…

The recent chaos at the Iowa Democratic caucus was exacerbated by eager Anons responding to a 4chan call to “clog the phone lines”...

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Amit Majmudar on Anthony Madrid

Amit Majmudar on Anthony Madrid

Not all limericks are not-quite-nonsense, but the most limerickish ones are. As Anthony Madrid, author of a new collection of limericks illustrated by Mark Fletcher, says in a short essay...

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Mumbai Diary by Medha Singh

Mumbai Diary by Medha Singh

It is November. I'm on a train through India. North to South. Delhi to Mumbai. 26 hours. I'm with a friend, Esther. She is falling in love.

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