February 2013

Located in Kleinbasel close to the Rhine, the Kaskadenkondensator is a place of mediation and experimental, research­- and process­-based art production with a focus on performance and performative expression. The gallery, founded in 1994, and located on the third floor of the former Sudhaus Warteck Brewery (hence cascade condenser),...

by Dave Mesing “Together, we might be able to do dangerous subversive things, mischievous things.”1 Such is Andy Merrifield’s opening promise in his recent book Magical Marxism: Subversive Politics and the Imagination. Merrifield situates the work between two poles of people: those who are more or less orthodox Marxists...

C. P. Cavafy by Gregory Jusdanis If asked to select a writer to dine with tonight, I would name C. P. Cavafy (1863-1933), the Greek poet of Alexandria. I would do this for many reasons but mainly to see his reaction when I tell him that he is one...

In Oulipo’s running debate over whether to make the constraints it employs explicit, Perec usually came down on the side of letting the cat out of the bag - but La Boutique (remains) Obscure. Perec’s dreams are the same kind of crazy as most people's. He discovers hitherto unnoticed...

Mina Loy by Christina Walter Mina Loy’s “Feminist Manifesto” is a polemic against women’s subordinate position in modern Western culture, penned in 1914 by Anglo-American writer and painter Mina Loy, who was then living in an expatriate community in Florence, Italy. This polemic, unpublished in Loy’s lifetime, is one...

But it could very well be that Harvard University Press is smart enough to recognize a Harvard edition of LTYP will have an imprimatur. Whatever its relative virtues, the Harman translation out of Cambridge, as Banville points out, is “likely to become the standard one.”

From its very first issue in 1986, Spy Magazine was a radical project. It was not the product of celebrities and their PR teams, nor did it aim to please those in the public sphere. Voicing the frustrations of intelligent journalists in a sardonic way, it acquired a thinking...

“The Siege of Namur by Captain Shandy and Corporal Trim”. Engraving by Henry Bunbury in The Life & Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne, 1773. by Virginia Woolf In making any survey, even the freest and loosest, of modern fiction, it is difficult not to take it...

by Irakli Zurab Kakabadze Nino Chubinishvili has created her own Alter-Modern world in Tbilisi. She is not a self-described adherent of Deleuzian Multiplicities or Hardt and Negri’s Multitude. She has just created her own world. Sometimes this happens at her own studio in Arts Academy, in some cases in...

The lone survivor of traditional Western European ‘scientific’ culture is science. It has survived because it is now the handmaid of technology, without which contemporary civilization would collapse utterly. Anyone who doubts this should try to get a research grant for genuinely “pure” research.

Beppe Grillo addresses a crowd in Trieste, February 2013. Photograph by Triesteprima.it by Jamie Mackay Beppe Grillo’s Five Star Movement has often been called a shake-up for Italian politics. But what if ‘M5S’ really obeyed an established paradigm that is far from the revolutionary ideas it claims to convey?...

In the essay "Hallowe'en? Over Already?" (1999), Thomas Pynchon writes about some of the fall 1998 goings on at the Cathedral School in New York City, where his son, Jackson, was enrolled in the second grade. They included a picnic, though not for Hallowe'en; the Blessing of the Animals,...

Photograph by Nick Dimmock A million followers is nothing. Voice is everything. by Michele Catalano It was April of 2009 when everything changed. I had been on twitter almost two years at that point, as @abigvictory, using it mainly as a platform for crude jokes and observations about sports....