2024-12-19
I read 74 books this year. I’m not reviewing them all; I don’t remember them all. However, a few of them stuck with me for various reasons. The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing Did nobody think to tell me about Doris Lessing? The name had a familiar ring, the kind of sound a name gets when it’s called great, but only ever in the middle of a list of other great names.Hi
Here I mostly update the blog and keep track of things I’m reading or watching. I post few photos as I take them.
Recent posts
today it's raining but only on my street. spring does that
2024-04-16
2024-03-10
For the past few months the days have been long and dark. Somewhere in the middle there it snowed and it stuck for a couple of weeks, slowly hardening into sheet ice. We’re through most of it now. Last week, in the courtyard behind the apartment the trees started to bud, and now there’s sun enough to catch the green rippling along all their branches. Spring, maybe. In the dark months I kept my head down and worked.
2023-12-28
Berlin has cash only bars, stickers to put over your phone’s camera before you can come into the party, and a strong poster culture. The surfaces of the city are covered in a growing, shedding, and regenerating skin of posters. Most are good. Here are the ones I liked this year. A flyer for the 2030 Berlin Klimavolksentscheid, which did not pass An exhibition, an experiment. Poster on the bridge over the Treptow/Neukölln/Kreuzberg canal corner Matrix Nightclub hiring poster, Warschauerstr Brutalismus 3000's Ultrakunst Tour, poster at Warschauerstraße.Notes from Granta 165 (Deutschland)
2023-12-27
p8 WG Sebald was the last German author to make an international breakthrough. He grew up a few miles from the Austrian border, grew up in England, and considered himself a student of Peter Handke of the Grazer Gruppe. Wenderoman authors Monika Muron and Uwe Tellkamp turned to The New Right. Later authors of the genre bucked the trend: Lutz Seiler, Jenny Erpenbeck, and Felix Stephan. p9 The best West German art came from people who saw the Americans not as liberators but as those who ran a system that allowed the Nazis to integrate into the new government and elite: Gerhard Richter, Jörg Immendorf, Alexander Kluge.2023-12-16
The world is enough to make you crazy. The city is enough to make you crazy. The building is enough to make you crazy. The way lint builds up on the desk right in front of you, given enough of everything else, is enough to make you crazy. I’ve deliberately contracted in the past couple of years. I’ve tried to become less of a jangly ball of reactive nerve endings. I think I used to be a gaping maw that inhaled current affairs from near and far and exhaled analysis and anxiety.i pine for my cold bolthole in berlin
2023-11-27
2023-11-27
It feels like there’s a lot of war going on. Whenever that happens I really feel my ignorance; it seems like if thousands of people are dying about something, I should understand what that something is. So here’s what I’ve been reading lately about war. I didn’t start reading Kaputt by Curzio Malaparte because of the present wars but because it was recommended to me by a friend. However, it’s been instructive.2023-11-22
Right now I am in England. It’s the first time I’ve been back since we moved away to Germany and being here has immersed me back in some old themes… like the British class obsession. A little while ago I read Bright Young People, about a certain set of upper class enfants terribles who were the first of a kind of person that is now splashed all over Hello magazine. One of that set was Evelyn Waugh, who wrote a send up of the whole gang that I’ve just finished reading: Vile Bodies.