December 2010

From Lapham’s Quarterly: In a New Hampshire apartment during the winter of 1923, this typewritten notice was fastened squarely against a closed door: NOBODY MAY COME INTO THIS ROOM IF THE DOOR IS SHUT TIGHT (IF IT IS SHUT NOT QUITE LATCHED IT IS ALL RIGHT) WITHOUT KNOCKING. THE...

From Sign and Sight: When “The Coming Insurrection” (here in English) was published anonymously in France the state authorities came down hard on its presumed authors. Based on the theories of the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, the manifesto calls for political violence and fulminates against democracy and the rule...

Mott grave monument, Mississippi. Photograph by Walker Evans, 1935 From The Design Observer: The grave or tomb is the body’s last bed, or its last house. This last house is in many cases more permanent, if not more splendid, than anything occupied in life. This was clearly the case...

Battlefield Earth, Warner Bros., 2000 From New Humanist: I once knew a man who sat next to a couple of guys in a Los Angeles diner and overheard them starting a religion. “So. We’ll need a saviour,” said one, “and a prophet.” “Well,” said the other, “I don’t know...

From The New Yorker: Just five years after his death, the C.C.P. officially blamed the “mistaken leadership of Mao Zedong” for the “serious disaster and turmoil” of the Cultural Revolution, and the garishly consumerist and inegalitarian China of today seems to mock Mao’s fantasies of a Communist paradise. Nevertheless,...

From AGNI: Ingrate. My daughter the beautiful ingrate. It was supposed to have gone with her to college, to Boston. That was the plan, and she left it in her closet. Look here, my flight jacket, with the green ticket stub from the dry cleaner safety-pinned to one of...

  by Michael Gardiner Eng Lit (English Literature), as a discipline of study and textual circulation, is not English. On the contrary, English Literature is a thoroughly British discipline – in a sense the cultural form of the British state – and its greatest period of blossoming was during...

by Stephen Gaukroger The core question dealt with in The Collapse of Mechanism and the Rise of Sensibility concerns the way in which, and the extent to which, natural philosophy comes to occupy the position of the paradigm bearer of cognitive values in the period between the 1680s and...

From Eurozine: We have all seen the blonde-fringed Tintin wriggle his way out of one sticky situation after another. But early 2010 saw the Belgian national hero’s past catch up with him; a past most of us had forgotten he had. Congolese Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo believes the comic book...

Conversations at the End of the Avant Garde | by Ann Kjellberg

Little Star

Of all insects, crickets make the most loyal spouses, like zebras among animals. I used to keep two crickets in a cage, male and female. When the...

Atelier Tee From European Alternatives: The world economic recovery, permitted by a massive injection of public spending into the economy, is fragile but real. One continent lags behind, Europe. Finding again the path of growth is no longer its priority policy. Europe has embarked on another path: the fight...

Deadly Premonition, Twin Peaks and Cult Fandom by Nate Garrelts When it was released in the United States and Japan during the Spring of 2010, the game Deadly Premonition (Xbox360) received a disparate set of reviews. Notable among these were those featured on two popular game sites, IGN and...