A book is a sequential collection of pages, loose leaf or bound, and it is circulating in multiple reproductions. But today, we are no longer only talking about books anymore—more capacious than book, the term publication is better because it can encompass digital files, hybrid media, and forms we have yet to imagine.
By Michalis Pilcher.
The work I do in my home is not strictly illegal, but I would lose my home if my landlord found out. There’s a clause in my contract, “These premises must not be used as a place of work.” Who defines the workplace? What do these definitions mean for the worker? According to Federici, the fifteenth century was significant when, following the defeat of peasant revolts against oppressive feudal systems, there began an active process of separation between the home and the workplace, housework and ‘real work’: men’s work and women’s work. The delegitimisation of work done at home continues to benefit everyone who profits from a foundation of unpaid labour, and state interference in every opportunity a working class person might have to bolster their income means that social mobility is made harder. These structures ensure that we remain dependent on an under-waged job market, frustrated, and forever in debt.
By Tamara MacLeod.
Can I say I’ve had the privilege of living a life tending solitary? I didn’t choose it as a child or a teenager—it’s just what happened. Divorced parents, a sister seven years older, the ostracization of being taller than everyone else my age and fairly chunky—these facts strafed me and made me separate. I learned to play by myself, creating my own universe and my own reality, taking the role of two players in Monopoly and many other games, and then gorging myself on TV, movies, and reading. It can’t be a surprise I traded the usual collaborations of my first passion, filmmaking, for the quiet, orderly hours of writing.
Read an extract from Greg Gerke‘s new collection of essays, See What I See.
On 16 July 2019, Folgert Karsdorp, a postdoctoral research assistant at the Dutch Meertens Instituut, tweeted: ‘I’m thinking about developing a workshop/event/journal/community for computational research in the humanities that doesn’t exclude people with profound computational skills and knowledge. Who’s in?’
By Leah Henrickson.
In the words of Pharrell Williams’s dance floor hit, going out to clubs implies “we’re up all night to get some” and “we’re up all night to get lucky”. If this assumption were wholly true, a lot of the art in this retrospective would not exist. The works gathered from around the world aim to shed light on important artistic, social and political ideas at the heart of these clubs and cabarets along with the more obvious playful and sensual energy of the dance floor.
By Mersiha Bruncevic.
Separated from the surrealists, Bataille soon expanded his intellectual inquiries beyond the realm of sexuality. Through his political and theoretical writings he confronted the fascism and bigotry he saw in his native France. Living in occupied Paris, Bataille gathered a group of anti-fascist intellectuals working to fight totalitarianism. He was a staunch supporter of European Jews, vowing never to shake hands with an anti-Semite. In light of the political and historical turmoil he witnessed in twentieth-century Europe, one might wonder how a thinker with such diverse interests would understand the unlikely rise of a politician like Donald Trump who echoes dictatorial rulers in an uncomfortable, if seemingly haphazard fashion.
By Ethan Weinstein.
He was smart and political and very funny — and versatile, writing for the FT as well as music journals. He was also a nice guy: he had a conscience and embodied the opposite of the laddish yob ethos that was prevalent back then in some chippy hip circles. I wrote a piece about his book at the time and ended by summarising it thus: “Udo is stomping around in the language used by his contemporaries. He is writing with the fast-paced humour of the social critic buckled to the stand-up comic. His book is a meaty fart in the presence of anti-democratic forces symbolised by the British monarch and the Pope. And yet it is also delicate like a child’s drawing is delicate because it writes out in its bold, unrefined lines the mute sanctity of the oppressed and the uncultured, their voices and desires in a kind of Molly Bloomian ‘Yes’.”
Richard Marshall and Andrew Stevens pay tribute to Tommy Udo.
It’s a bit like the story of the three little pigs and the wolf, in that the police were trying to blow it all down, day after day after day. Huffing and puffing. It definitely added to the atmosphere in a strange way. It wouldn’t have been the same without the police trying to take us away. And it possibly made it more beautiful. And more symbolical — there was a sort of symbolism of the fact that this joy was happening on little islands being battered by waves of police.
Susana Medina and Roc Sandford discuss Extinction Rebellion.
Austrian author Clemens J. Setz is wearing a Doom t-shirt in a 2017 video shot in a park in Müllheim, Germany where his first theatre play, Vereinte Nationen (“United Nations”) has just been staged at a local theatre festival. As he chatters about his effort to let somebody else (the director, in this case) have a go at his material for once, he gesticulates wildly, and as the camera zooms in on his hands, the Doom logo looms large in the viewer’s face, causing one to wonder how many theatre goers coming in from the festival might actually be able to recognize the reference. His bushy beard and his mumbled delivery only reinforce the impression that he’s a nerd in a world of nerds—as most literature buffs are, nerdiness being more defined by a general attitude than a definite object—he just comes from a province of nerdiness that is traditionally unexplored by most members of the literary establishment.
By Giorgio Chiappa.
An essay is a type of construction in which an author enters the world and gathers its facts, its ideas of itself, from which he or she builds. It should have a guiding structure that leads to discovery, to illumination, to a point towards which everything aligns in revelation.
Architecture gives actual construction, with thought behind. Making a model of a building offers a way to experience its physical presence close hand, over time, to examine its structure, the relationship of its parts, to think about one’s possible place in it and its place in the world, about its meanings, as well as engage in the practice and ritual of construction. A model also provides a platform to contemplate structures and relationships in general, what might be suggested analogically, what might be applied elsewhere.
By Gary Garvin.
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