Jacob Israël de Haan’s Palestine, Arnold Zweig’s novel of post‑Zionist disillusionment, and « Israel’s first political murder ».

On Paleolithic painters & speculative criticism.

The most important unreviewed books of our times, reviewed. On Xi Jinping’s The Governance of China, Volumes I to IV

A story about afterlife. « A saint! What do you mean he’s a saint! the scholar says. He’s a librarian! Are librarians saints? »

→ Setting of the Sun at West Mountain / Puffing & panting ←
→ Worm-eaten Rimbaud / Always knowing whom ←

Forensic Architecture charts state-organized crimes, genocide and other disasters in three dimensions. «Flat maps can’t convey the politics of water and shit.»

On the untranslatability of Ukrainian jokes

On Edda Mussolini & fashionable fascism. Can a woman be dangerous yet powerless?

On artificial intelligence, murderous elephants & Elizabeth Bishop

On the travels of Karl-Markus Gauß, and the unlikely guardians of the dream of Europe.

On language invention. To desire some other perfect language is at once to acknowledge and to overlook the miraculousness of what we have.

An excerpt from The Archipelago Conversations with the late French Carribean philosopher and poet. « The archipelagos of the Mediterranean must encounter the archipelagos of Asia, and the archipelago of the Antilles. »

Like plots in a garden cemetery, with lamentations, good-riddances or other epitaphs.

The grapes are tiny, burnt to a crisp. It’s day two of the harvest, in late August — freakishly early in a year of drought and heat waves. What is wine?

On two tales of racial metamorphosis, salted or sugared, one hundred years apart.

The first word I ever wrote was stsikukha: « pisser ». This is how my nanny Frosya called me to my face. On poetry and pathos in a bastard tongue.

Imagine your therapist assigned you to write your autobiography, after which you decided you were cured, so your therapist published it as revenge. Zeno’s Conscience turns 99.

Tight pants. Fashionable coats. Music. Defiant looks. On the last men & women who passed through the Bulgarian gulag.

→ → Pursuing / you lead me to come to the future.
← ← coming to the future, I lead you / demanding.

He spoke of painting like a starving man speaks of food. On Józef Czapski, Memories of Starobielsk and the art of observation.

« I like my tyrants like I like my heroes. That is, crushed by a giant chandelier. »

Lose, delete, restore. What to remember when everything is always, forever, in a digital now?

Citizen’s day in Fiesole, December 2021. In the EU, Christian Europe stands in quantum superposition, both here and not here. Can Cretan Europa help us imagine better futures?

Shoulders were slapped, fingers pointed, hearts fired up. Perhaps a little scuffle broke out after class, a boisterous wrestling over insults exchanged. Nothing to be concerned about. Acquiring knowledge was, after all, a combative affair.

Google’s rise to dominance can seem inevitable, and its power over publishers monolithic. Yet Google’s wanton disruption of publishing resembles evolution more than intelligent design. Journalists, publishers, regulators, and scholars are left grappling with our new, random god.

On unrecognized states, micronations and curious border zones.

No one would have understood both the sentiment and the absurdity more keenly than Marx himself, whose face has adorned real currencies in more countries than anyone else’s, with the possible exception of Elizabeth II.

On orthodoxies & heresies of typography. To serif, or sans-serif?

What does modern mean? In Brazil, it often meant an embrace of newness as the possibility of reinvention. In Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890-1945, Rafael Cardoso unravels the myth of 1922.

How do literary movements arise? About thirty years ago, I watched one emerge out of nothing: the subgenre of « literary » football books and magazines. Not exactly the birth of modernism, but it still taught me something about how cultural transmission works within Europe.

An excerpt from I padri lontani / Distant Fathers (1987), the rediscovered memoir of Marina Jarre, available in English translation from New Vessel Press.

There sits a donkey before an open book, held between his forehooves in such a way that we can clearly see the pages. It is a family tree of sorts, with eight rows of seventeen standing donkeys.