Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
Maria Dimitrova writes on the LRB blog: In Laurent Binet’s novel The Seventh Function of Language (2015), Julia Kristeva is cast as a spy for Bulgarian intelligence, responsible for the death of Roland Barthes. Last Tuesday, the Bulgarian Dossier Committee,…
On a meager data plan in this Alpine cottage, I’ve limited myself to reading news stories – no images, no streaming video, no podcasts. That’s my preferred way of getting news anyway. Unsurprisingly, I’ve been aware of the Iranian protests,…
What’s the principal connection between this song, which Juliette Gréco recorded in 1952 and sang at concerts for decades afterwards, and this 1984 number by the semi-underground Soviet-Russian band called (the?) Strange Games (Strannye Igry; here’s the same song performed…
On a slightly lighter note, Dmitry Bykov, “one of Russia’s most colorful, versatile, and recognizable public intellectuals” and currently a visiting professor at UCLA, occasionally suffers from a condition typical of preternaturally productive speakers and writers: getting facts wrong in…
Corey Robin, the author of The Reactionary Mind, wrote on Crooked Timber: Schumpeter famously said that taxes are the “thunder of world history.” In The Guardian, he put it this way: Taxes are the “thunder of world history,” wrote Joseph…
The Polish historian Jan Gross, the longtime target of nasty attacks by right-wing populists for his work on the Jedbawne massacre, is comparing the Warsaw marchers to the pre-WWII fascists from the anti-Semitic parties led or inspired by Roman Dmowski:…
The background in this photograph from last weekend’s nationalist march in Warsaw would not look out of place in Moscow. The “palace of culture and science” in Warsaw, a product of late Stalin-era Soviet architecture, resembles the seven Stalin towers…
My thoughts keep coming back to the story of the postmistress from the Sedlčany district as told by Švejk in Jaroslav Hašek’s novel. You can find it near the end of Part III, “A Glorious Spanking.” I’m relying on Cecil Parrott’s…
A little fewer than 38% of the eligible voters answered “yes” in the Catalonian independence referendum yesterday. That is, 42% turned out to vote and 89% of them voted “yes” to independence. Or, to count directly, 2.02 million out of…
In a review of Michel Houellebecq’s H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, Lee Rourke quoted the opening lines of the French author’s 2001 novel Platform: Father died last year. I don’t subscribe to the theory by which we only become…
I’ve been trying to find a YouTube comment that I enjoyed greatly after first reading it, years ago. Only a few months back, I could easily find it but now, no luck. I hope my retelling does justice to the…
Another excerpt from Charles Rosen’s 1997 NYRB article on La Fontaine and French prosody: Most American and English students have a hard time understanding why Alfred de Musset literally fainted with ecstasy at the Comédie Française when he heard the…