Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
The Congo, I Presume? is a sculpture group by Tom Frantzen in the garden of the AfricaMuseum in Brussels. Zoey Poll writes in Lapham’s Quarterly: It’s hard to imagine that a passerby would pick up on the work’s supposed anticolonial…
Apparently, one of the bigger Brexiteer bugbears has been the belief that a Briton could be criminally prosecuted for breaking the EU directive on the production and sale of marmalade, jam and other preserves (Council Directive 2001/113/EC) – and, crucially,…
Back in 2014, more than two years before Trump’s elevation to the presidency, Edward Luttwak summed up his thoughts on grand strategy in application to the Napoleonic wars: In retrospect the fight against Napoleon seems to have engendered a new…
Dr. Bedřich Welfer is an episodic but memorable character in Jaroslav Hašek’s great novel, The Good Soldier Švejk. Welfer’s uncle left him a generous allowance in his will, enabling the lucky nephew to remain a student of medicine for as…
BTW, why QAnon and not, say, XAnon? Because it looks mysterious enough – and cute enough – even when mirrored or reversed? Nona Q, Susie Q‘s lost sibling – or grandma. Karen Bennhold reports from Berlin for The New York…
Madame de Genlis appears twice in War and Peace. First, as the author of books for children, “de nombreux ouvrages édifiants à l’usage de la jeunesse” to quote Wikipedia, much disliked by some of her involuntary readers for her oppressive…
Speaking of translations — after Sandie Shaw won the Eurovision contest in 1967 with Puppet on a String, she went on to record it in God knows how many languages. Actually, French, Italian, German and Spanish, if Wikipedia is to…
It is said that the 1967 song Comme d’habitude, the French precursor to My Way, was …a bleak reflection on the breakup of his [Claude François’s] affair with [France] Gall. François co-wrote the lyrics with Gilles Thibaut; Jacques Revaux composed…
The infamous Minnesota policeman shares a last name with Nicolas Chauvin, the “legendary, possibly apocryphal” French soldier who inspired the term “chauvinism.” In its turn, the surname Chauvin can be traced back to the French adjective chauve, “bald,” ultimately from…
Not that I know much about Joseph Beuys‘s work but this episode from his younger years – perhaps invented – keeps interjecting itself into my random thoughts. Actually, I’m pretty sure he did invent it now. Here’s the deal: When…
Here’s Christine Smallwood in Harper’s Magazine on Kleist’s Michael Kohlhaas in a new English translation by Michael Hofmann (use the Wayback Machine if inaccessible): Here is how Kohlhaas ends: We learn, more or less out of nowhere, that the horse-dealer…
Even before I saw The Favourite, I knew from an outline of the plot that I had heard some of the characters’ names at an early age – thanks to a performance of Le Verre d’eau by Eugène Scribe. Neither…