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At Spike Magazine, Tim Black reviews Helen Guldberg’s Just Another Ape
At Quarterly Conversation, George Prochnik considers the complicated escapes of Stefan Zweig: “What makes the “good exile”? Is there a calculable equation of inner fortitude, openness of mind and external support networks that determines a refugee’s odds of survival? Why did Thomas Mann, Zuckmeyer and Zweig’s friend the conductor Bruno Walter flourish in the United States, while Zweig, Brecht and the dramatist Ernst Toller recoil from almost every aspect of their New World experience”
Stefan Auer at Eurozine considers the ways that narratives of European unity have been used and abused for political purposes: “The juxtaposition of uplifting narratives produced by the European Commission, with the many, messy histories of participating nations points towards the limits of the usage of history for political aims, however worthy those aims might be. Yet, there are also some positive lessons that can be drawn from the dissonance caused by the EU attempts to appropriate the legacy of 1989.”
Barrie Jean Borich explores the limits of redemptive narratives in women’s memories and fiction at Women in Literary Arts: “Which leads me back to resisting redemption, or resisting a reliance on only redemption, or complicating the meaning of redemption. Book editors so often use the word redemption when describing what they are looking for in women’s literary nonfiction—which even some independent presses want to squeeze into the classic conversion narrative arc dating back to St. Augustine, an admittedly lovely story form replicated in every AA meeting in which the teller is asked to tell what it was like, what happened, and what it’s like now, but which assumes that a sexual past is something to recover from.”
At Artslant Joyce Cronin returns to the F-word and rediscovers some feminist artists in two London galleries. “I wonder about the phenomenon of thinking about something or learning a new word and then seeing it everywhere – what is that called? Is there a name for it? If not, there should be.”
Anwyn Crawford at Overland considers the relationships between feminism, anorexia, and capitalism: “Feminism, as I have discovered rather painfully over the years, is not a prophylactic against patriarchy or against capitalism. It is possible to know, intellectually, that starvation is a viciously self-destructive tactic while still actually starving; the self-destruction is in part an inability to inhabit a self – a body – that capitalism has constructed.”
Johanna Gohmann writes about the pleasures and disappointments of shopping at American Apparel at The Morning News. “I craned my neck around the store to look at the other merchandise—at the pastel jumpsuits, the reflective bikinis. I was about to scowl an emphatic “No” when suddenly I spotted it, sitting in the display case right before me. So oddly out of place. And yet so eye-catching. A Hitachi Magic Wand. The mother of all back massagers. The fabled sexual machinery I’d heard about for years, but had never attempted to seek out.”
Also at The Morning News Ester Bloom reflects on her adolescent transformations and the hidden story behind her name: “It was my friend Deb who made me see the light. Deb was a well-dressed, sophisticated pixie who lived in Manhattan, went to Hunter College High School, and knew infinitely more about the world than I did. “You’re a loser,” she explained to me one day on the phone. “In the eyes of society, you’re a loser.” This was a ploy to make me invest in contacts and hair gel, and it worked”
The photos with this week’s collage come from the beautiful photo essay by Serge J-F. Levy at the recent issue of Drunken Boat.
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