Europe
>First it kills one nation and then what?
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Barys Platrovich remembers Chernobyl @ Eurozine.
The dust has gone already…
There’s no dust – it’s been blown away… Great gusts of wind pick up tiny grains of sand and slash you with them, in your face, on your legs and chest: it hurts like you’re pushing your way through thorny bushes of raspberries or blackberries. And meanwhile there I am, walking round the town, Homel, amazed by the wind: where has it come from today, this wind – biting, strong, insistent, nasty… Why has it suddenly got up, blowing the sand from Ukraine into Belarus and from Belarus towards Moscow?
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I didn’t know anything yet, didn’t have the slightest idea of what had happened, but I well remember that day and that evening in Homel, 26 April 1986, I remember that I was unable to do anything because of the silent scream that, as it seemed to me, filled all the space around me. The silent scream uttered by all things animate and inanimate, even dust and sand, as they try desperately to escape from disaster. This is how elk and wild boar, wolves and deer, hares and squirrels flee from the merciless forest fire, in silence with their eyes wide open in panic. With the same terrifying scream adders and grass snakes, beetles and caterpillars try to crawl away from the fire, and with the same silent scream they die in it…
>A city of ghosts and guests
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Jim Cocola on the visible and invisible in Venice @ n+1.
Not a letter from Venice, but a letter on Venice: for during the two months I passed in Venice, I never really felt like I was doing anything from Venice, though my sense of being on Venice never dissipated. On clear days, which proved exceedingly rare, I was struck by how closely the Alps hovered beyond the plains of the Veneto; on foggy days, which proved the rule, I was reminded that the city is nothing if not a series of loosely connected marshy berms soaking in the northern reaches of a fickle tidal lagoon.
Snow, already a quiet phenomenon in any setting, falls even more quietly in Venice. When it rains above a dry St. Mark’s Square, the stones echo with the sound of falling water, and when it rains above a flooded St. Mark’s Square, the floodwaters amplify the sound of the downpour. But when it snows there are no plows to be heard, and scarcely even a shovel. Reluctant schoolchildren in Venice do not pray to the god of snow: they pray to the god of fog. For snow has a minimal effect on the circulation of people on foot or by boat, whereas a sustained fog can alter or even shut down water traffic, confining the amphibious Venetians and their bewildered visitors to a most peculiar land habitat.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Rather than living by the Rialto, or along some other stretch of the Grand Canal, I stayed in the far eastern end of the city, on the island of San Pietro di Castello, which was described to me as one of the few remaining instances of the real Venice. There were scare quotes placed around either “real” or “Venice”; I can’t remember which. The land route to San Pietro runs along Via Garibaldi, a wide swath of street—a filled-in canal, really—unlike anything else in the city. At one end of the street the vista opens to the Campanile of St. Mark’s Square, the Santa Maria della Salute, and the island of San Giorgio Maggiore; at the other end the canal re-commences with a picturesque vegetable boat. The narrow walk beyond leads to a wooden bridge for San Pietro, the seat of ecclesiastical authority in the city for many centuries, far removed from the temporal locus of power at the Ducal Palace.
>Icon of the new
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| Justine Frischmann @ Sensitive Skin |
Petr Fischer on the paradoxical image of America for Europe @ Eurozine.
“Business–Answer–Solution” reads the advertising banner of the subsidiary of a foreign company in the centre of Prague. At first sight, the banner is not particularly interesting, in this case meaning that it is not particularly surprising. Surprising things are those that capture our attention, that shock us in their particular way. This corporate motto repeats the famous, infinitely repeated mantra of aggressive global capitalism, its focus purely pragmatic: give us a problem and we will come up with a solution that profits both you and us. “Win-win capitalism”, one could say in today’s international newspeak.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )What is interesting – in other words disconcerting – is the fact that the banner covers the window of a small shop situated directly behind the National Museum, a building that – as in every other European city – symbolizes a certain perception of historicity cultivated on the old continent at least since the nineteenth century. The National Museum preserves the history of the Czech nation, and the people who work in it analyse and reflect on Czech national existence, its peculiarity, uniqueness, difference or connectedness. This activity is not governed by the pragmatic slogan of performance, of completed things, of faits accomplis; rather, it is ruled by a different three words, directed at thinking and its incessant, uncertain movement: Discussion–Question–Searching.
>Politics of bad memories
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| Nina Katchadourian @ X-TRA/ |
Markha Valenta considers the real motives for attacks on multiculturalism in Europe @ Eurozine.
You always know something is up when the leaders of Germany, France and Britain are in happy agreement. Their most recent cheery confabulation is that multiculturalism in Europe has been a failure. In quick succession first Merkel, then Cameron, then Sarkozy seized the limelight and declared diversity’s demise. They stated this as a truism rather than as an argument. Equally striking is that these political leaders seem more relieved than troubled: as if, for a while, western Europe had lost its bearings but now is regaining them. Diversity is out, they seem to say, and common sense back in.
But of course, given the diversity of our societies, it is diversity that is common sense.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )Even as I say this, it is very much to be wondered if Europe, notably Germany and France (of all places), ever gave multiculturalism a real chance. To paraphrase Gandhi’s famous quip on western civilisation, European multiculturalism would be a good idea. With the exception of the Netherlands and Sweden, there have been no serious attempts in continental Europe at implementing comprehensive policies for accommodating the new cultural and religious pluralism. So in fact what Merkel, Cameron and Sarkozy actually are saying is that western Europe’s response to immigration has been a failure. This we could perhaps discuss: but in that case as a failure of western European politicians, policies and imagination, rather than of an invented multiculturalism that Europe never tried (if by “multiculturalism” we mean a society that offers full possibilities, membership, and respect to all its members – regardless of cultural and religious differences – yet also creatively accommodating of them – in a fashion that is both morally persuasive and practically effective for the majority of society).
>In the margins of each other’s life
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Clara Paulino remembers a childhood love affair amidst the last years of Salazar’s Portugal @ Lost Magazine.
The grapes hang from the vine, full, ready, but my father can no longer drive up the Marão mountains to get a few baskets of them: an autumnal ritual, the remains of a centuries-old way of life which included a wine farm in northern Portugal.
In my family’s memory there is only an end to this story; the mythical beginning lives on in a fog of deeds and letters, some lost, others too faded to read, all dating to the late 17th century. Down the generations came the terraced mountainsides covered in braids of vineyard stalks and branches, the corn fields in the lower lands, closer to the river, the orchards bordering clusters of granite dwellings, grey and earth-toned, invisible to a stranger’s eye. With it came laborers, gamekeepers, vineyard pruners, and wine pressers whose legs moved up and down to millenary rhythms.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )In my lifetime we moved up there every summer from the big bustling city of Porto, from the good schools, from my mother’s practice as a psychoanalyst, from my father’s boardroom management he carried on via couriers. Not long after we arrived the peace of the mountains began to inhabit each one of us and my memory of a life filled with school, piano and ballet lessons receded like a bad dream. I roamed barefoot on the hills, swam in the river, watched the boys kill tiny fish with pebbles and helped the young girls wash their families’ clothes with hard soap, beating them rhythmically on the smooth river stones. I learned to feed cows, donkeys and pigs with vegetable peels and fruit fallen from the trees, and came to know well the inside of thatched huts: one bed, one mattress on the floor, two or three stools, and an iron pot in a twig fire in the corner of the room.
>The more I looked, the more there was to see
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| Kunsthistorisches Museum |
Janice Galloway recounts her many encounters with the paintings of Pieter Breugel @ Edinburgh Review.
As a child, I knew what I loved. Pictures and growing things, words and animals – any or all of these and I was in seventh heaven. Animals delighted in their openness and purpose: curious, non-judgmental and never prey to self-pity, they simply were. Coloured pencils to draw with, flowers, trees and folk tales, yielded delight for much the same reason. All could be played with. I had no desire for exotica, for everything was exotic by default; new, fresh-peeled and incontrovertibly present. That intense pleasure in my own back yard remained till I reached puberty, when – as happens with so many of us – a notion of more insinuated its way into a craving and would not insinuate back out. I had no idea what kind of more I wanted, or even what it looked like, but I lusted after it anyway, sure it was out there somewhere, waiting for me to find and pluck it, straight from the tree. And by somewhere, I meant somewhere else. The local was, or so I thought, seen-it-all territory: like mangoes, more might be found only further, much further, afield.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )To help, my aunt and uncle hit on the idea of taking me, as a birthday treat, to the bright lights of Glasgow with £2 to spend. Millers – Queen Street, just off the bustle of George Square – was where genuine out-in-the-world art students went to buy supplies, and, knowing I loved drawing, it seemed an ideal place to drop me off. I was fifteen, clueless and drunk on the smell of linseed from the moment I opened the door. Inside were walls of specialized, beautifully-packaged, colour-blazoned stuff. There were inks and chalks, charcoal and 6Bs, brushes in hog, squirrel and sable; bottles of oil and albumen and varnish and turpentine like ingredients for a secret spell and jars of powders whose purpose eluded me altogether. Even the paint were mysterious: so many types! From watercolours wrapped in foil-backed blocks to fat tubes of acrylics, oils and gouaches and on again to tiny pots of lacquer, enamel, finishes and topcoats. The only bad bit was on the price-labels. Everything cost a fortune, and £2 was not going to make much of an impression on what I’d need to begin. More, it seemed, was not to be mine in this shop , unless … unless I found it another way. In something smaller, more contained; something complete in itself yet full of possibility. And that meant – it always meant – a book.
>The most conceited city I know
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| Sze Tsung Leong @ The Morning News/ |
Javier Marías on the conceits of Barcelona @ Threepenny Review.
One of the innumerable ways of differentiating large cities would be to divide them into the boastful and the conceited, in the certain knowledge that there isn’t a city in the world that doesn’t fit one of those two categories. It might seem, at first sight, that the categories are too alike, inhabit the same semantic area—that the frontier between them is too blurred and therefore pointless. For me, though, there is a big difference, which has to do above all with character, because ultimately it is character, far more than the look of a place or the customs of its inhabitants, that leaves its mark on you as visitor and stays with you when you leave.
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Boastful cities tend to be insecure, child-like, and chatty (even vociferous), unenigmatic and exhausting, impatient places eager for praise and in a hurry to captivate. If you don’t watch out, they’ll take you off on a tour, or plunge you into the hustle and bustle, and thus not allow you, as a visitor, to go poking around on your own account and at your own pace; they’ll try by every means possible, however disrespectful or loutish, to impose their own wishes on anyone who dares to tread their streets. In other words, they try to draw you in, to subdue and overwhelm you. Boastful cities like Paris or Rome or Madrid are completely changed by the presence of foreigners, not so much because they rely on them (if that were the case, they wouldn’t be so boastful), but because they simply cannot leave them in peace to do their own thing. It could be said that the only reason they pay them any attention at all is in order to intoxicate, stun, befuddle, and even corrupt them as much as possible. Their boastfulness definitely has a totalitarian streak: they don’t allow for difference or even distance, for impartiality or the cool spectator’s eye. They are all-pervading and require wholehearted commitment: they demand it, and yet they are the ones doing the committing.
>Kafka’s Prague
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| Martina Steckholzer @ ArtSlant/ |
James Hawes on the secret life of Prague @ Eurozine.
It is axiomatic among artists – they declare it with particular vigour when applying for cultural subsidies – that wonderful creative acts can mythologise an entire city, propel it into the realms of the symbolic. In our postmodern world (so goes the happy theory) such apotheoses can have mighty (if vaguely defined) benefits to the general citizenry: “Joyce’s Dublin” and “Kafka’s Prague” are most often quoted as proof.
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Actually, it was the cities that helped make these writers so popularly famous, not the other way around. Joyce had no need to put his unloved home town on the map of the world. Whilst he was writingUlysses, it did so itself, in spades and to the infinite aid of Joyce’s novel, whose first readers thus found themselves introduced not to an obscure regional city, but to a new-fledged capital, site of a terrible beauty, the names of whose buildings and streets had already made themselves bloodily familiar. Franz Kafka owes the dubious privilege of his coffee-mug fame as a Middle-European Nostradamus (which so obscures the true delights of his social satires) to the fact that the city he longed all his life to escape became the fulcrum of Europe’s twentieth-century tragedy twice in the fifty years after his death – having already (in a way which Kafka himself found highly irksome) become the focus of its ill-founded hopes during his lifetime.
>A world that was both familiar and strange
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Paul Wilson explores the life and landscapes of Stieg Larsson @ The Walrus.
I was late coming to Stieg Larsson and his wildly popular Millennium Trilogy. Last spring, when I started reading the first volume, some 20 million people had already beaten me to it. By August, when I finished the third, that figure had almost doubled. Numbers that big — phenomenal even beside such recent literary juggernauts as Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code — almost always result from word of mouth. But the buzz over Larsson’s books began even before they were published.
It started shortly after he submitted the manuscripts of all three novels to his Swedish publisher, Norstedts, in April 2004. Word spread quickly, and when the Frankfurt Book Fair rolled around that October publishers from all over the world were clamouring for a look. Translations were commissioned shortly after the first book appeared in Stockholm in early 2005, under the title Men Who Hate Women, and from there the groundswell grew, country by country. By the time it reached North America in 2008, as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, not even a bad review in the New York Times could stop it.
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I’m a fan of crime and espionage fiction, but the Millennium books were different. There was something mysterious about how, despite their obvious flaws, they drew you relentlessly into a world that was both familiar and strange. Instead of seeing that world from the perspective of a police force, detective agency, or newsroom, you saw it through a small magazine with big ambitions. Like his main character, Mikael Blomkvist, Larsson had been a journalist and a magazine editor, and I wondered how much of his own life had gone into his books? Or was I simply fascinated with Larsson’s Sweden, a country I’d always dismissed as being pretty much like Canada, only with more blondes, fitter grandmothers, and a better sense of design? His books made me want to know more.
>Why do we preserve buildings?
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Laura Raskin on the ethics of dust, dirt, and preservation @ Design Observer.
Jorge Otero-Pailos desperately needed a wall to clean. It was January 2009, and he had been invited to participate in the 53rd Venice Biennale, the flashy and prestigious art fair opening later that year, in May. Instead of contributing, say, a painting, or a video installation or sculpture or room-sized light exhibit, Otero-Pailos intended to clean the wall of a gothic monument with a high-tech latex solution; to wait for the latex to dry and peel it off; and then to display the gauze-like material that results — a 40-by-23-foot pelt — as a work of art with an unintentional aesthetic. Dirt settles where it wants.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )But the building where Otero-Pailos thought he had identified an ideal wall — the early 17th-century Procuratie Nuove, one of three connected buildings on Piazza San Marco — proved unworkable. At best that site would have posed a formidable logistical challenge. The three-story classical building incorporates an intricate design: on the first floor, half-round pilasters are built into square columns, a motif repeated with varying levels of detail and additional flourishes as the floors rise. So instead of cleaning a vertical wall and displaying a flat pane or panes of latex, as he had done once before, Otero-Pailos would have had to contend with a meter-and-a-half of sculptural depth. And then how would he have hung the latex?
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