Holocaust
From the train I could look out onto the infinite blue of the sea. I was still exhausted, wakeful from the overnight transatlantic flight to Rome, but looking out at the sea, that Mediterranean sea that was so infinite and so blue, made me forget it all, even myself. I don’t know why.
Adorno wrote that there could be no lyric poetry after Auschwitz; Duchamp made art an afterword.
A scholar not only of literature, but of culture, horticulture, and above all the human body and its communications, Nádas presents a picture of temperament and elegance in the great tradition of the European intellectual.
“The one thing you can rely on in any situation is that the feelings you’re going to have are not the ones you think you’re supposed to have.”
“Götz and Meyer. Having never seen them, I can only imagine them.”
Melissa Gould’s ongoing installation From Adler to Zylber uses iconographic artwork and the alphabet to organize a haunting pictorial catalogue of Jews sent to Auschwitz on Convoy No. 42.
“The psychoanalytic paradigm, which was dominant, seems to be losing ground to a more materialistic neurological model. You might ask not what someone’s behavior or dreams or desires mean, but what their causes are. If our picture of the self does change like that, it would signal a major cultural change.”
Sometime in the mid-1970s Errol Morris read a headline in the San Fransisco Chronicle—“450 Dead Pets To Go To Napa”— and decided to make a film about pet cemeteries.
In an early scene of Life is Beautiful, Guido (Benigni), an assimilated Jew, poses as a Fascist official in order to steal a moment with the woman he loves, and finds himself in the awkward position of having to expostulate on racial superiority to a room full of schoolchildren
Few fiction writers have captured the painful realities of the Holocaust as well as Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld. He speaks here of the power of memory, the power of the spirit, and the place of religion and homeland as he has come to know it.
Stellan Skarsgård is everywhere, from Breaking the Waves to Good Will Hunting and a tour de force performance in the thriller, Insomnia. Screenwriter Larry Gross charts the course from regional theater in Sweden to the big screen in Hollywood.
This First Proof contains an excerpt from the novella Guided Tours of Hell.
Speaking through materials, Joshua Neustein recalls cultural memory and history. His elegant and earthy installation Light on Ashes does just this.
David Humphrey speaks with fellow painter Lawrence Gipe. With both humor and candor, the two artists tackle questions of power struggles and past lives, addressing the artist’s capacity to unpack the fictions of authority.
Edek Zepler used to fuck Polish girls. They were mostly maids, and he fucked them, standing up, in the hallways of the buildings in which they worked.
“When you see a film, you can analyze the director. You know if they’re emphatic, energetic, sensitive or not, empty or full. Everything. To direct you are naked, absolutely.”
Christian Boltanski discusses his MOCA installation (Summer 1988) with Irene Borger. Boltanski’s somber installation reflects his concern that the Jews face a fate similar to that of the American Indians.
As I reread the pages that follow I do not know anymore whether this is truth or fiction.
German novelist Gregor Von Rezzori on his masterpiece, The Death of My Brother Abel, the decline of postwar Europe, and the insurmountable influence of Nabokov.
