Selections @Berfrois to read while waiting for 2014 #PWPicnicReunion

Hamlet's Nothing

Russell Bennetts and Daniel Tutt interview Simon Critchley

Shakespeare isn't a philosopher. Shakespeare is someone who leaves us in the dark as to what reality might be. What we get instead is an experience of ambiguity and opacity. Love is where we end up and it's this activity that Hamlet doesn't possess.  More

Suzanne Ruta: Check the Wall for Thilde Stein The only one we've got A reply came at once from the Jewish Museum Frankfurt. Mathilde Stein, born March 22, 1882, has her own tablet in the memory wall. (Not a monument, mind you, we're not scolding here, we're remembering.) The museum is gathering biographies for a database and asked if our family wouldn't like to contribute something about Thilde. Perhaps a photo of her, they asked, since they had no knowledge of her beyond her name and date of birth.  More

Nicholas Rombes: 70-Minute Mark The workers shield their eyes There are five frames with no human figure, bringing to mind all those moments in film where the space is filled with nature or buildings or empty rooms or fields or hallways or stairwells or the sky or the ocean or empty streets or streets at night.  More

K. Thomas Kahn: Generation Gap Reading Doris Lessing while watching my father die Is there any way of still speaking to you, of still reaching you, when you are like this? In films, there are those moments just before death. I cannot envision such a scene with you. My husk, my shadow on the wall, I hope, says all that I cannot.  More

B. Alexandra Szerlip: Sonata for the Dispossessed Mexicans in 1930s San Francisco Industry welcomes cheap immigrant workers, but there's little respect for those who answer the call. Diego Rivera's glorification of the working class in his murals was the exception, not the rule. Though they worked the land and layered the bricks of its buildings, they were, in some deep sense, homeless, and so forced to create a 'country' of their own. More

Brenna Hughes Neghaiwi: Tattarrattat A walk through Joyce's Zurich Young and trailed already by a history of brawling and drink, Joyce left Dublin for Zurich in 1904 and spent the following four decades between Switzerland, Austria-Hungary and France. He arrived with his lover, Nora Barnacle, along with word of a possible job opening at the Berlitz Language School.   More

John Beckman: Fun-Loving Criminals A kinder, gentler Blackbeard A shining example of pirate civility took place in late September 1718, on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina. Edward Teach, the fearsome Blackbeard, a flamboyant criminal who entered battle with matches flaming in his hair and whiskers, was lying low with his multi-racial crew after having held the town of Charleston for ransom.  More

Daniel Bosch: Made Man Time is a transposition Peter Cole almost always writes beautifully and I never feel in his lines any touch of Midas. His work never lapses in the warmth of its humanity, whether he is anchoring a concise elliptical narrative with excerpts from historical documents he's re-written in verse lines or he is infusing an ancillary set of images with complex music.  More

Bobbi Lurie: N.E.U.W.D.E.Z.Z. Watching Girls Marcel Duchamp blew smoke in my face, bringing my focus back to him. He stood up slowly and started to walk ahead of me. I was afraid I'd never see him again. Thinking quickly, I asked him if he'd like to go with me to the Museum of Modern Art for an opening that night. "I have a horror of openings. Exhibitions are frightful…"   More

Legacy Russell: The Female Foil Standing by your man Both Mayor Kilpatrick and Carlita Kilpatrick are dressed in suits. The mayor wears a black suit and yellow tie, while his wife is in a boxy suit and pale blue shirt, unbuttoned at the neck. Whereas Wendy Vitter captures attention by way of visual hierarchy with her height and her figure-hugging wrap dress, Carlita Kilpatrick complements her husband's attire with a near-exact replica of his power suit.   More

John Gaffney: Europe's Fascists in Suits Europe, I don't love you anymore The far-right – oblige of fierce nationalism– find it very difficult to work together. They are worse than Trotskyists for fissions, splits, schisms and general punch-ups as soon as they try to co-operate with one another. It is like bringing together the rowdiest supporters of all the national football teams and asking them to form a reading group.   More

Margarita Tupitsyn: The Art of Style An interview by Masha Tupitsyn There was a mindful austerity and asceticism to these clothes; no accessories, visible make-up or fashion scenes. Everything had been stripped down to the bare essentials, while in today's cultural economy aesthetics function as pure excess. There is also the fact that people essentially stopped paying attention to avant-garde clothing.   More

Rauan Klassnik: True Brit An interview by Russell Bennetts All I know about Britain comes from Hyacinth Bucket in Keeping Up Appearances. So I can only assume that Boadicea is one of Hyacinth's sisters and while I love Hyacinth's sisters they are absolutely not Hyacinth: a star, a Goddess, an ethos.  More

David Palumbo-Liu: Listening to Achebe A realistic image of Africa Many years ago, in an interview with Bill Moyers, Chinua Achebe was asked, "What would you want the West to do?" Achebe replied, "Listen, just listen." I would like to add that there is listening, and there is really listening.  More

Sumana Roy: Didi Are we a palindrome people? My conscious awareness of having a palindrome fetish however came only in 1991, the year I took my school leaving examination. It was the first palindrome year I would encounter, the other being 2002. 2112 is quite obviously beyond my reach.   More

Adam Staley Groves: Money Fight night Floyd 'Money' Mayweather represents American decline, where the gospel of wealth's invisible hand has written the lion's share of fiscal policy just as Mayweather has chosen all his opposition. Mayweather's unsportsmanlike conduct is analogous to disrespecting the Geneva Convention, the shady record of A-Rod or the occasional neo-fascist football player.  More

Elias Tezapsidis: Nyquil or Benadryl On Grant Maierhofer's fiction The notion of an art world devoid of dark subjects is dangerous. Art needs sinister themes to continue being a catalyst for meaningful discourse. The tediousness of depression is perhaps inherent in the creative force of artists who have struggled with it.   More

Vincent W.J. van Gerven Oei: No Stopping The unofficial view of Tirana (79) As I worked on the legislation myself last year I would really like to see it pass, but in general I've grown more sceptical about the practical value of the Human Rights discourse in the new phase that Albanian LGBT activism seems to have arrived at.   More Is she implying that in the EU you always have to state your sexual orientation because otherwise you might confuse the state? Is that what they mean with European love?  More

Victoria Brockmeier: Spinning Somewhere The fallen world Matthew Cooperman and Marius Lehene seek to elucidate an image of the world we have, for the world we have; they base their critical interventions in an ethics of affirmation: poetry and art matter. The senses matter. Kindness matters. Politics matters. Human action, for good or ill, matters.   More

Vernon Lee: Against Talking Thinking is reputed to impede action, to make hay of instincts and of standards, to fritter reality into doubt; and the career of Hamlet is frequently pointed out as a proof of its unhappy effects. But one has not very often an opportunity of verifying these drawbacks of thinking. And I am tempted to believe that much of the mischief is really due to its ubiquitous twin-brother, Talking.   More

Paolo Gerbaudo: Occupybook Rather than creating an alternative internet (one that is free, self-managed and non-commercial), contemporary tech activists seem far more concerned with harnessing the potential of the capitalistic internet, making use of the capabilities of gigantic corporate social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Activists invade spaces they know do not belong to them and over which they have little control. More

Lauren Berlant: Love Theory I am a love theorist. I sometimes feel dissociated from all my loves. I sometimes ask them to hold more of an image of me than I can hold. The love and the images available for it are in a Thunderdome death-love match, yet we act as though affect could be held within a steady-state space like meat on a hook, or the image of meat on a hook, since actual meat turns green.  More

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