Fragments of a blog
Fragments of a blog
About a month ago I noticed that the opening two lines of T. S. Eliot’s Grishkin poem from Whispers of Immortality (1920) mimic the respective lines of Théophile Gautier’s Carmen (1852). Compare Eliot’s half-stanza Grishkin is nice: her Russian eyeIs…
In dealing with Russian authorities, Exxon has always stood out among its peers for toughness. The company has steadfastly rejected opportunities that would not put it in control of a project: it would rather stay away altogether. As a result,…
Apologies for quoting from the Daily Mail. Occasionally it does render a valuable public service: The national editor of Politico’s weekly news magazine resigned his position on Tuesday after he came under fire for advocating baseball-bat attacks on a white…
There is no arguing with Gary Shteyngart that much Old-World nastiness, including anti-Semitism, has lately spread from the fringes of online alt-rightism. We would likely disagree on the dimension and perniciousness of those fringes. In the eyes of the novelist,…
Those for whom the world ended with Hillary Clinton’s loss of the electoral college must have led lives basking in sunshine and boundless opportunity. But how does it feel – as years go by – to shed illusion upon illusion, wade through disappointment…
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…
Some brutalist architecture is great – but when it’s bad, it can be very, very ugly, depressing and miserable. Sometimes it ages disgustingly, especially if the concrete is of poor quality. And if there’s a fire… Look at what happened to…
They say there are three Vladimirs in Moscow now: one lying, one sitting, and one standing. That is, Vladimir Lenin’s body is in the mausoleum in Red Square in a horizontal position; Vladimir Putin “sits” in the Kremlin (as in…
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.…
One of the two protagonists in Atomized by Michel Houellebecq reminisces: Oh, maybe I felt a little sad—but in a very general sort of way. “God Himself cannot undo that which has been done,” as some Catholic writer said somewhere.…
Another extract from Sergei M. Soloviev’s Notes for My Children and for Others, If Possible concerning the historian’s sojourn in Europe in 1842-44. (Earlier selections: on Belgium, on alternating bald and hairy rulers; on Count Uvarov, the author of the A-O-N triad.)…