Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
I doubt that Zhukovsky was deeply taken in by Thomas Moore’s oriental romance, with the likely exception of the Peri poem. But the “Lalla Rookh” fête in Berlin undoubtedly made a lasting impression on him, as if a furtive draft from some…
Schumann’s second oratorio, Der Rose Pilgerfahrt (The Pilgrimage of the Rose, 1851) is firmly set on European soil: it begins with elves in a round dance on Midsummer hearing a quite, plaintive voice, the voice of the Rose. In contrast,…
Ivan Krylov published The Mouse and the Rat in 1816. My rough translation follows, without the last quatrain, or the “moral” of the fable. “Dear neighbor, have your heard the good rumors?” Said Mouse to Rat, running in. “They say the cat has…
Alex Ross, the author of The Rest Is Noise and the musical critic of The New Yorker, wrote in his 2007 article on Jean Sibelius: Finns are strangers to the European family. Descendants of an errant Mongolian tribe, they speak a…
…by voting down proposed changes to that status quo. Italy’s system of government needs to be reformed and everybody seems to know that, within and without the country. Instead of doing something to that end, the referendum turned out a…
Professor Jan-Werner Müller from Princeton claims in the London Review of Books: But the peculiarity of Trump is that he seems the equivalent of Grillo and Silvio Berlusconi merged into one person. I don’t think he is, but Müller’s view…
They should have done it in 2014: Lawmakers [MEPs] voted on November 23 in favor of a motion condemning Russian state media outlets like the television channel RT and the news agency Sputnik for disseminating “absolutely fake” news. They said…
Via Arts and Letters Daily, here’s Timothy Snyder’s little pamphlet in Slate, a brief synopsis of Hitler’s progress hinting at Trump’s possible trajectory. A parallel here, an analogy there, et voilà, here’s a case for Bush Trump as Hitler. Yes, I’m…
Owen Hatherley writes of British architects active in the first post-WWII decade: In the first ten years after 1945, the pure white style of Bruno Ahrends’s Berlin had been Anglicised, but not in the direction of the monumental dissonance of…
In his latest LRB review, Owen Hatherley writes about Modern Forms: A Subjective Atlas of 20th-Century Architecture by Nicolas Grospierre: Grospierre puts next to each other the Vilnius House of Ritual Services (a Soviet type sometimes known as a ‘Sorrow Palace’, where funerals were…
No matter who gets to occupy the New Shaab Palace and the White House, the Kremlin’s occupants will still have to admit that Russia, viewed as a country rather than merely a strutter on the global stage, is not getting anywhere.…
In the Oregon standoff trial, the defense has presented evidence of FBI infiltration verging into entrapment: Defense lawyers rested in the Oregon standoff case Monday after they called a witness who confirmed he was an informant for the FBI and…