I just became acquainted with the fine German word Wehrwirtschaft while simultaneously reading a book article on Sebald that kaiserin is writing and a blog post titled Iraq: Deaths Rise, Pretense We Care Fades (which brought the word into stark relief for me). I looked it up to try and get a fuller sense of [...]
One of the many reasons I love Los Angeles: the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. People who roll out the tired, “LA has no culture” trope can sit on it, Potsie-style; we’re not New York or Berlin, but there’s excellent stuff going on here. The newish Broad Contemporary Art Museum (which is on the LACMA [...]
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Kafka-related links from McSweeney’s:
Adjectives Rejected in Favor of “Kafkaesque”
Kafka at Camp: The Lost Diaries
Iris’s Metamorphosis
Gregor Samsa, Coach
Social Security Denies Gregor Samsa’s Disability Claim
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“Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named ‘World’s Most Alienating Airport’” (yeah, the embedded video breaks my layout, but this is a post about Kafka after all so fuck it):
I also think that women are excellent social critics, basically because we have nothing to lose, anyway. It’s like we’re not in a position of power, so we don’t risk a lot by being critical of it. [Laurie Anderson, 1983]
Today is Ada Lovelace Day, “an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling [...]
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The scene evokes an abbreviated pastoral—but the birds are shackled to their perch, which is in turn connected to the hand crank.
Somewhere between nature and the mechanical, between the comic and the tragic, his birds “twitter” with a music that expresses how frail and vulnerable existence is, especially in the post-WWI modern world.
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“Birdhouse In Your [...]
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My favorite painting by Magritte is The Treachery of Images (referenced in this post). But The Art of Conversation is amazing as well.
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Michel Foucault on L’Art de la Conversation:
In a landscape of battling giants or of the beginning of the world, two tiny persons are speaking–an inaudible discourse, a murmur instantly reabsorbed into the silence [...]
The whole point of this post is to make people cry. (I’m pretty sure Casey will do so first.)
The Giving Tree (1973), animated short based on Shel Silverstein’s 1964 children’s story and narrated by the author:
This was the first book I ever read, at age 4 or so, thus giving me an unassailable excuse for [...]
Seen on MetaFilter: Write Your Own Irish Memoir
I normally don’t listen to NPR’s A Prairie Home Companion… Garrison Keillor is an amazing storyteller and has one of the best voices ever, but the folksy aesthetic usually isn’t my cup of tea. I caught the first bit of last Saturday’s show though, and he said something at the beginning that really resonated with [...]
Oh, wow. Meghan McCain’s column in The Daily Beast is worth reading and rereading. The alchemical experiments that fuse narcissism and incoherence to pure lack of content have finally borne fruit. Fun fact: She went to Columbia.