The newspapers are, sir, blight, disorder of the first order, just like everything that’s printed; but I tread all over it.
A Rendezvous with the Censor: Notes and a Translation of Jaroslav Hašek Read More »
In “The Little Typewriter,” Kracauer offers a cautionary tale against commodity fetishization with humor, while also conjuring an uncomfortable metaphor to do with the purchase of women and the use of their bodies for pleasure. The reader is left to wonder: is the story an exercise in making an object woman, or thinly describing a woman as object?
I’ve never seen the author of Tender Buttons and Three Lives look as she looks in this painting by Picabia from 1937. Her head is small, perched on wide and rounded shoulders draped in brown. Beneath the cloak, a soft blue blouse with a large brooch peeks through. On her face, a sort of “oh well” smirk on thin, taut lips.
Gertrude Stein: A Portrait of the Artist Read More »
In 1872, Susan B. Anthony cast a ballot in the presidential election in which Ulysses S. Grant would win his second term in office. Nearly half a century before women would actually get the right to vote in this country, this was of course an illegal act, and one for which Anthony was ultimately arrested and tried.
The Only Question Left To Be Settled Now Read More »
When I told people in New York that I was moving to Texas, the conversation pretty much always went the same way: “To Austin, I assume?” (Yes.) “Oh, well, Austin isn’t Texas. I hear people love Austin.” In fact, Austin is in Texas, as evidenced by the very name of the university at which I now work, and the fact that the capital of the state is here. From the iconic bell tower on campus, one can look upon the domed and columned capital building down below, the largest state capital in the United States (no surprise there).
Don’t Take Your Guns to Town, Son Read More »
At the same time I see that the academy has its ways of inuring too many of its chosen ones against a compulsion to apply their research and writing to contemporary issues that ought to demand all of our attention. Perhaps it’s that American campuses are so leafy and idyllic, allowing us to pretend that this utopic vision is but the world on a micro-scale.
What’s the Point? The Relevance of the Irrelevant and Daring to Get it Wrong Read More »
Diski’s essays on death hold these things together brilliantly, somehow even beautifully. Her writing, which weaves without warning between a methodical, detailed account of treatment and the daily life of the dying and more ethereal, abstract passages, suggests the experience of losing lucidity and finding it again that a drugged body undergoes. It is to the LRB’s credit that they let Diski, who has been writing regularly for the publication since 1992, do whatever she damn well pleased. And in this way, Diski transcends her clinical status as body-cum-puzzle-piece to be wedged in a machine; she is throughout an active observer and writing subject, who tells us on the other side of chemo that, “the entire process makes me think of clubbing baby seals.”
Jenny Diski is Getting On With It Read More »
Early in the hour-long film, “The Judicial Murder of Jakub Mohr,” the central protagonist, a patient in a psychiatric ward, shouts in Czech, “My words are not my own!” [“Moje slova nejsou moje!”]. He is on Kafka-esque trial for saying out loud what is visibly true: a series of wires—“Threads!” rebukes the prosecutor—extend from his back and connect to an ominous box, which is held by a man who in turn dictates in whispers what the patient says. At one point, Mohr lists to the jury in indignation what he has become: a gramophone, a radio, an instrument. He is something between human self and machine, a cyborg, his agency mediated by the state and psychiatric institution.
Eva Kot’átková: ERROR Read More »
Traveling around Europe in the midst of all this, conducting dissertation research on the Czech interwar avant-garde and its relationship to other major artistic centers of that period, I could not but think about renewed border controls in the EU territory within the context of, and in comparison to, travel in the period between the two World Wars. At that time, Europeans (as well as travelers from further afield) enjoyed a newly open, post-war terrain. The physical movement of bodies, facilitated also by new and faster modes of travel, helped to open up an unprecedented level of exchange between artists and intellectuals of diverse backgrounds and languages. In that brief window of freedom of movement between the two World Wars, Paris was a hub of such traffic, and many visitors came from Prague.
A Postcard from Paris Read More »
“The problem I have with contemporary culture is that today everything is treated as a product. Culture is a huge and shiny supermarket. As all products are announced as ‘brilliant,’ the risk inherent in buying those product falls entirely to me. In that respect, I often miss ‘my butcher’ and ‘my baker’ and ‘my vegetable lady,’ people I could rely on. These days, shopping and consuming—including consuming culture—have become more difficult. In such a context, I behave like any other cultural consumer: I buy books randomly, because I’ve heard of the author or the title, or I know the publisher’s taste, or a friend recommended something to me.”
Between Reader and Writer: An Interview with Dubravka Ugrešić Read More »
