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.
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.
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.
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.
I think I’ve given up on systems that organise the world, even the world right around me. Even so, it’s nice to dream about a way of living where everything is fast, smooth, organised… easy. That’s why I still look at consumer electronic products and software even though I have long accepted none of them will make me happy in an enduring way. Picture then, a world where everything (everything) I have is organised into numerical folder trees.
So Popbitch (a very catty UK media gossip newsletter) reports that Fred Again’s people have been trying to keep the fact that he is minor gentry out of his Wikipedia article. Fair enough. I understood his story to go as follows: young South London guy makes poppy dance songs during the pandemic, goes viral, becomes instant stadium-packing act once the restrictions lift, and boy he just can’t believe his luck. Shucks!
Well, we moved to Germany (we know!), so I’ve been correcting some of my gaps in recent German history by reading the lengthy Wikipedia page on German reunification. In terms of online life, that’s the only real giveaway that I’ve moved in the real world. The rest of the anglophone media roar rolls along as before with two notable edits. I’ve completely cut out the very high volume Westminster insider newsletter I used to read first thing every morning (why?
First off, here’s a DJ set I liked.
Right now a lot of people are talking about leaving Twitter (here’s mine). Many of those that go ahead with it and turning up in Mastodon (here’s mine) and talking a big game about how the collapse of Twitter will beget a golden age for the decentralised internet. That’s nice. I don’t believe it’s really going to be that simple, though.
On the topic of decentralised internet things: the FBI seized the Z-lib ebook archive!
First I have a whole collection of maps. There’s a map to show where in the world Wikipedia edits are coming from. There’s a map that shows all the different kinds of planning boundaries that overlap the in Britain. There’s an incredibly detailed weather map. Finally, here’s a whole series of maps that examine how much various governments fudged their COVID-19 infection, hospitalisation, and mortality rates.
There are a couple of websites about making websites to share.
First I have this amazing oral history of the production of certain aspects of the video game Red Alert 3. Specifically the story is about how this incredible cut scene, starring Tim Curry as a high camp Soviet general blasting off into space, came to be. It’s astonishingly detailed and manages to go far beyond “pretty funny clip”. It talks about how casting and producing these little fragments of video for video games works.