Guericke – Gerlikaerika, Alexey Akindinov, 1997/span> by Joe Linker It’s No Good: poems / essays / actions, by Kirill Medvedev. Edited and introduced by Keith Gessen. Translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen with Mark Krotov, Cory Merrill, and Bela Shayevich, n+1 Foundation, Inc. / Ugly Duckling Presse, 280 pp. Kirill Medvedev’s poems are easy…
Read MoreOlga Krause speaks in front of a poster proclaiming the Communist Party as the ‘mind, honour and conscience of [the] epoch’. Of course, there was little room in the Party for openly gay men or women: men faced 5 years in prison, and women risked losing custody of their children. Photo: courtesy of Olga Krause…
Read MoreWould texts by Aristotle, Hegel, and Kant on computer screens have provided the same relief from the trauma of war?
Read MoreFrom First Light, James Turrell, 1989-90 by Alexander R. Galloway In the early 1990s François Laruelle wrote an essay on James Turrell, the American artist known for his use of light and space.1 While it briefly mentions Turrell’s Roden Crater and is cognizant of his other work, the essay focuses on a series of twenty…
Read MoreWoolly Mammoths, Charles R. Knight, 1915 by Leonard Finkelman I need two things to start my average weekday. One of them is coffee. The coffee, of course, goes into a mug [1]. Mugs reflect our deepest-held values, proudly displaying the logo of a faceless corporate monolith or the title of that conference that you kind…
Read MoreStudy for a Portrait, Francis Bacon, 1952 by Joe Linker After Midnight, by Irmgard Keun, Melville House, 176 pp. “A writer in the act of writing must fear neither his own words nor anything else in the world,” Heini tells Algin in Irmgard Keun’s After Midnight. Algin is considering writing a historical novel that will…
Read MoreThe 1695 frontispiece to the manuscript pages which, in 1697, were to become the first edition of Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du temps passé. On the door, behind the old woman telling the tales, is written “Contes de ma mère l’Oye”, Tales of Mother Goose, a subtitle which was to take prominence in the first…
Read MoreTaksim Gezi Park, 4th June 2013. Photograph by Vikipicture by Dimitar Bechev The eruption of protest in Istanbul and other Turkish cities expresses vigorous opposition to the political direction of prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Turkey is living through remarkable days which will be long remembered. Many thousands of people have taken to the streets…
Read MoreFrom Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes, 1906 edition. Illustration by Gustave Doré by William Egginton Critics have long held that, even if Cervantes was at least somewhat aware that his work would be successful, this was only because he knew it was funny, and hoped that, in reading it, as he famously wrote in…
Read MoreL-R: Oswald de Andrade; Albert Camus by João Cezar de Castro Rocha In 1946 Albert Camus traveled to South America. During this journey, he took random notes published posthumously, in which he produced irregular (and sometimes brutal) remarks on both cities visited and on persons he met. In São Paulo he had dinner with Oswald…
Read MoreFrom The Cubies’ A B C, illustrated by Mary Mills Lyall and Earl Harvey Lyall, 1913. Via by Guy Aitchison Writing in response to the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the first systematic attempt by the US government to police the internet, John Perry Barlow – former lyricist for the Grateful Dead – made a celebrated Declaration…
Read MoreHypatia, Alfred Seifert, 1901 by Linda Zionkowski While straitened budgets and shrinking resources present difficulties for all of us within the university system, some of the most vulnerable people affected are graduate students. Occupying a liminal space as apprentices within the profession, students enrolled in master’s and doctoral programs often find themselves facing a situation…
Read Moreby Henrik Lübker Artworks are not being but a process of becoming. — Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory In the everyday use of the concept, saying that something is grotesque rarely implies anything other than saying that something is a bit outside of the normal structure of language or meaning – that something is a…
Read MorePhotograph by Michael Gumtau by Lailufar Yasmin Secularism was one of the cornerstones of Bengali nationalism, but its spirit was enforced only by pen and paper. How can demands to ban religion from politics be satisfied? The United Nations categorizes Bangladesh as a moderate Muslim democracy. Meanwhile, the current Foreign Minister called Bangladesh a secular…
Read MoreFrom The Birth of Venus, Sandro Botticelli, 1483-85 by Meredith Tax Last month Amina Tyler, a 19 year old Tunisian blogger, posted a nude photo of herself as a protest; she is now under death threat. In her defense, the Ukrainian group Femen staged a global “topless jihad” on April 4, causing widespread debate about…
Read MoreFigure 1: “The Fly-Catching Macaroni” (1772), engraved by Whipcord, published by M. Darly (from the New York Public Library, not openly licensed) – Source. by Patricia Fara Piece originally published at Public Domain Review. Benjamin Robert Haydon, the artist who helped bring the Elgin marbles to the British Museum, was scathing about portraiture. It is,…
Read MoreAllegro Strepitoso, Carel Weight, 1932 by Vincent Barletta Two summers ago, my family and I decided to spend an afternoon at Lisbon’s Jardim Zoológico. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that our eldest daughter made the decision to go and wouldn’t relent until we took her there. She was six years old at the…
Read MoreEuropa regina, Sebastian Munster, 1570 by Paul De Grauwe and Yuemei Ji A recent ECB household-wealth survey was interpreted by the media as evidence that poor Germans shouldn’t have to pay for southern Europe. This column takes a look at the numbers. Whilst it’s true that median German households are poor compared to their southern…
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