Bordernotes
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Fleur Jaeggy’s Gift of Detachment
For this period, detachment is the state of things. Easier, safer, recommended. No noisy, unmanageable, untidy passions. No individual cluttered urgencies with ends and tags askew. Each her own island country, complete and selfsufficient, an isolationist policy in place for all.
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Lovely Leonora
With a head full of the Irish folk stories on which she was raised and her own adept young mind inclined to the metaphysical, to which was added the enchantment of a world filled with all the possibilities
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Say, Bird: A Consideration of Interspecies Romance
This story has been told before. It’s largely an urban romance, for a number of reasons. In one telling gold coins are involved and this implies structures…
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Picasso’s Guernica, Walter Benjamin, war and peace
For Picasso, the bombing of the Basque city of Guernica in April 1937 marked a new terrifying industrial and anonymous warfare, a warfare of the modern period.
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A Moral Place in the World
Incredulous, exhausted by disbelief I, among others, find myself speechless in this time when the necessity for speech is urgent. - Meeka Walsh
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Nostalgia for the Present, Max Blecher
“Staring at a fixed point on the wall, I occasionally have the feeling that I no longer know who or where I am. At such times, I experience the loss of my identity from a distance: I feel for a moment that I have become a complete stranger, this abstract personage and my real self vying for authenticity with equal strength.” —Max Blecher
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What We Talk About When We Talk About Writing About Art
What I responded to in Berger—because the manner of his writing and its meaning or subject were a coherent piece—was his disavowal, his disengagement with power, and here I include using language as an instrument of power…
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House of Illusion
Meeka Walsh’s introductory essay to Art + Architecture
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Robert Walser: looking at pictures and the soft, cold, lethargic sun
Engaged with art writing as I am, it is with some nervous reluctance that I ask myself, what is it? What is it that art criticism, art writing is supposed to do?
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Vagaries, Quirks and a Cracked Kettle: The Way of Translation
“I am not frightened of the truth. I am not afraid to tell a secret. But until now, words have been frailer and more cunning than I would have liked.”
–from Meeka Walsh’s introductory essay to Issue 136: Son et Lumière.
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Life is Puzzling
Édouard Levé wrote Autoportrait in 2005. It was followed by his book Suicide in 2007, and then by death at his own hand so shortly after. The English edition appeared in 2012, seamlessly translated by Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, if you can say about a book of apparent fragments that it is seamless…
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Kim Gordon: Star Turns
Meeka Walsh’s introductory essay to Issue 134, the all women issue.
Kim Gordon has just published her memoir, Girl In A Band (William Morrow, Dey Street, 2015) and the opening chapter is called “The End.” After 30 years Sonic Youth, the band she co-founded with Thurston Moore, whom she married three years later, was playing its final concert in a small town outside São Paulo, Brazil, in the rain. Their marriage of 27 years had just ended. The South American tour was a final commitment, the last one to be met as Sonic Youth…
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