Berfrois

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France as Tourist Brothel

France as Tourist Brothel

Bercy Village, Paris, described by locals as “faux French village in the heart of Paris.”  by James Warner A prophet-provacateur faithful to French traditions of lucidity, sensuality, and alienation, Houellebecq believes we are all doomed. The Map and the Territory continues his great project of exposing the limits of individualism. Michel Houellebecq condemns the soullessness of…

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Nympho Librarian

Nympho Librarian

From The Paris Review: Porn books and librarians have always had a passionate, mutually-defining relationship—it was, in fact, a prudish French librarian in the early nineteenth-century who coined the word “pornography.” So it comes as no surprise that the sexy librarian, a fixture of the pornographic imagination, is most at home in books. Each year,…

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Patti Smith was aiming at once higher and lower than Paul Simon or Jim Morrison…

Patti Smith was aiming at once higher and lower than Paul Simon or Jim Morrison…

Patti Smith at Jim Morrison’s grave, Paris, 1976 From The New York Review of Books: I first heard of Patti Smith in 1971, when I was seventeen. The occasion was an unsigned half-column item in the New York Flyer, a short-lived local supplement to Rolling Stone, marking the single performance of Cowboy Mouth, a play…

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X & Co.

X & Co.

Melvin B. Tolson by Harris Feinsod Whenever a new anthology of modern U.S. poetry comes along, it seems that some distinguished critic or other is fated to take up arms, defending his or her vision of canonical distinction against the treachery of “inclusiveness.” The latest eminence to cast herself as such a centurion is Helen…

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‘The Dead’ by James Joyce

‘The Dead’ by James Joyce

Phoenix Park, Dublin. Photograph part of the Clarke Collection, Irish National Library by James Joyce Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet. Hardly had she brought one gentleman into the little pantry behind the office on the ground floor and helped him off with his overcoat than the wheezy hall-door bell clanged…

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Queer Gaming by Evan Lauteria

Queer Gaming by Evan Lauteria

A Closed World, Singapore-MIT GAMBIT Gamelab, 2011 by Evan W. Lauteria Last month, I spent an evening wandering through a mystical forest, desperately trying to move through the fog to find a clearing between the trees. I felt more and more anxious as I explored the wooded maze, haunted by the sounds the forest’s insect and…

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Piped

Piped

3D pipes From The Believer: At a Pittsburgh gallery in 2006, artist Keny Marshall exhibited 3D Pipes, an elaborate, freestanding installation of aged metal plumbing. “Everybody’s got 3D Pipes on their computer,” said Marshall in an interview. “The only difference is this 3D Pipes took months to build and weighs three to four thousand pounds.”…

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Hilary Plum: Behind the Headlines

Hilary Plum: Behind the Headlines

by Hilary Plum The Room and the Chair, by Lorraine Adams, Vintage, 366 pp. The Submission: A Novel, by Amy Waldman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 320 pp. Zone, by Mathias Énard, Translated from the French by Charlotte Mandell, Open Letter Books, 517 pp. Lorraine Adams’ The Room and the Chair opens with a plane that…

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OOO

OOO

Sirius B by Tim Morton The world is teeming. Anything can happen. John Cage, “Silence” 1 Autonomy means that although something is part of something else, or related to it in some way, it has its own “law” or “tendency” (Greek, nomos). In their book on life sciences, Medawar and Medawar state, “Organs and tissues…are…

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‘That brief window in the 1950s’

From N+1: The humanities have been looking a little haggard lately. The UK recently saw government-mandated cuts to university programs; American universities have experienced more of a war of attrition, a steady drainage of students and dollars. The humanities’ abiding self-defense—that art and literature defend values that the free market fails to support—may persuade in…

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As an antidote to Modernist despair, Les Murray recommended a dose of late nineteenth century Australian verse…

As an antidote to Modernist despair, Les Murray recommended a dose of late nineteenth century Australian verse…

Les Murray, David Naseby, 1995 From The New York Review of Books: The New American Poetry both captured and helped to create the spirit of the 1960s. In its first decade it sold a hundred thousand copies; in 1999—by which time half the young rebels it had announced were in the grave—it could be republished…

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Frida Kahlo’s corsets remain to this day in her famous blue house…

 The Broken Column, Frida Kahlo, 1944 From The Paris Review: Frida Kahlo wore plaster corsets for most of her life because her spine was too weak to support itself. She painted them, naturally, covering them with pasted scraps of fabric and drawings of tigers, monkeys, plumed birds, a blood-red hammer and sickle, and streetcars like the…

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“No, you’re the dummy”

“No, you’re the dummy”

Talky Tina, aka the Living Doll, from The Twilight Zone, CBS, 1959-64 From The Paris Review: I’m waiting for the elevator in a medieval-themed hotel in Fort Mitchell, Kentucky, when the elevator doors open to reveal a heated exchange between a bald man in a Hawaiian shirt and a puppet shaped like a toucan. My presence…

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“The novel, you know”

Aeropainting, Giovanni Korompay, 1935 From Vanity Fair: Almost. Almost. There. He squeezed the toggle switch that released the bombs. Immediately, his pilot, Lieutenant John B. Rome, banked up, away from the target. Rome, about 20, was one of the youngest pilots in the squadron, with little combat experience. The co-pilot, fearing this green kid was…

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IALYAAT, ta, thanks

Woman Writing, Pablo Picasso, 1934 From The Paris Review:  Anyone who wants to study writers’ idiosyncrasies need look no further than their acknowledgments. One contemporary author thanks her therapist, another his probation officer, a third someone he calls the “Infamous Frankie G.” In the backs of books I’ve found shout-outs to the Ship Manager of…

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‘The Empty Room’ by Jonathan Lethem

‘The Empty Room’ by Jonathan Lethem

From The Paris Review: Earliest memory: father tripping on strewn toys, hopping with toe outraged, mother’s rolling eyes. For my father had toys himself. He once brought a traffic light home to our apartment on the thirty-somethingth floor of the tower on Columbus Avenue. The light, its taxi yellow gone matte from pendulum-years above some…

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A Staring Back

A Staring Back

Figure 1: Lavinia Warren, c. 1880, Charles Eisenmann, photographer, Ronald G. Becker collection of Charles Eisenmann photographs, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library  Figure 2: Ann E. Leak with her husband and son, c. 1884, Charles Eisenmann, photographer., Ronald G. Becker collection of Charles Eisenmann photographs, Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University Library  …

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Binary

From The Matrix, Warner Bros., 1999 From The New York Review of Books: A Google search—which Chorost would have us doing in our own technologically modified heads—”curates” the Internet. The algorithm is, in essence, an editor, pulling up what it deems important, based on someone else’s understanding of what is important. This has spawned a whole…

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Ship Out

Ship Out

Allen Ginsberg dressed up for working at his Market Research job, Berkely, 1954, Allen Ginsberg Project by Joe Linker When did literature become an elitist game? When we started writing? Literature both reflects and influences culture, society, and the individual, but there are many things that reflect our values (what we want; not to be confused…

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“NO IDEA”

Paul Giamatti and William Hurt as Ben Bernanke and Henry Paulson, Too Big to Fail, HBO, 2011 From The Paris Review: The fiction of pervasive cluelessness is so vital to this movie’s very essence that the CNBC clips interspersed between scenes as a narrative device had to be “reread and, in some cases, reshot”—faked is…

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