Issue Two
DECEMBER 2022
Issue Two of Europe’s new république des lettres. Essays, reportage, interview, photography and experiment by writers from Europe and beyond. Wisdom for an anxious age and well-sharpened profanity for a vulgar one. New books, invented languages, resurrected darlings, and to every reader their own Dichter und Denker. Plus paranormal detectives and Chinese palindromes (read it twice!).
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The Van Leer headquarters is not a fish tank
« The office of the future » is all well and good, but what can be learned from the offices of the past that have sustained? Like: The Van Leer Headquarters in Aalsmeer.
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Curtain call
An iron curtain makes a powerful canvas. Images from Sven Johne & Falk Haberkorn’s Aus Sicht des Archivs, documenting life in the former East Germany in the 1990s.
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No money off a dead woman’s body (& other poems)
« I like my tyrants like I like my heroes. That is, crushed by a giant chandelier. »
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When the world makes rags of us
He spoke of painting like a starving man speaks of food. On Józef Czapski, Memories of Starobielsk and the art of observation.
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Coagulated soy juice
〖 A killed darling. 〗 Lucia Berlin belonged to a less sanctimonious age than ours.
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Vlaggen & botten
Over het Europa van Curzio Malaparte – en het onze. Een nieuwe lezing van het oeuvre van de schrijver, over de nasleep van oorlog en een transatlantische romance. Wat is dit « naoorlogse Europa » eigenlijk?
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Flags & bones
On Curzio Malaparte’s Europe — and ours. The midcentury novelist read anew, on war’s aftermath and transatlantic romance. What was, or is, « postwar Europe », anyway?
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Of human children & language children
The first word I ever wrote was stsikukha: « pisser ». This is how my nanny Frosya called me to my face. On poetry and pathos in a bastard tongue.
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Two palindromes
→ → Pursuing / you lead me to come to the future.← ← coming to the future, I lead you / demanding.
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Kill your darlings
Like plots in a garden cemetery, with lamentations, good-riddances or other epitaphs.
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Gerard Croiset & the adventure of the psychic detective
The clairvoyant Dutch grocer who charted the frontiers of parapsychology and lent a hand to the FBI. « Unbelievable but true! »
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Skinned alive
Imagine your therapist assigned you to write your autobiography, after which you decided you were cured, so your therapist published it as revenge. Zeno’s Conscience turns 99.
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A sangre fría
Fernanda Melchor’s prose hits you square in the face, but its lyricism works differently in Spanish. On Veracruzano modernism, lyrical slang, and worlds so new that style falls apart.
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The Archipelago Conversations, an excerpt — Interview with Édouard Glissant
An excerpt from The Archipelago Conversations with the late French Carribean philosopher and poet. « The archipelagos of the Mediterranean must encounter the archipelagos of Asia, and the archipelago of the Antilles. »
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Marx and the art of natural winemaking
The grapes are tiny, burnt to a crisp. It’s day two of the harvest, in late August — freakishly early in a year of drought and heat waves. What is wine?
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The room I am in
Tight pants. Fashionable coats. Music. Defiant looks. On the last men & women who passed through the Bulgarian gulag.
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Glossomania-mania
On language invention. To desire some other perfect language is at once to acknowledge and to overlook the miraculousness of what we have.
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A recipe for word vomit
On pregnant silences, and how to abort them — via Jane Austen’s Lady Susan, Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship and our own manners & morals.
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Of Anders & Kreuzwendedich
On two tales of racial metamorphosis, salted or sugared, one hundred years apart.
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A can-can dancer performs a Christmas tree
〖 A killed darling 〗 Being alone in a new city over the holidays was wonderful and, as it happened, not to be repeated.
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The Shizuoka Press and Broadcasting Center is a Metabolist pearl
« The office of the future » is all well and good, but what can be learned from the offices of the past that have sustained? Like: The Shizuoka Press and Broadcasting Center in Tokyo.
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Aarhus City Hall is a Gesamtkunstwerk
« The office of the future » is all well and good, but what can be learned from the offices of the past that have sustained? Like: Aarhus City Hall.
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Planes, tanks & automobiles
You could tell the US army had arrived because the local garages had sold out of whiskey. Old maps, new wars & vanishing memories along the Polish-Ukrainian border.
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How Americans edit sex out of my writing
What is editing? Two people who both lead a literary life — an augmented reality where the connections between existence and sentences are investigated daily — wage sensual war for the soul of the page.