For anyone that has read Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss, be sure to read Helen Rittelmeyer’s post The Redemption of Nathan Leopold, Maybe. While the circumstances have important differences, there are some eerie similarities. In all its externals, Leopold’s life followed the arc of a basic redemption story. He felt remorse for […]
Publicity card from The Collected Works’ production of Princess IvonaSaturday night my wife and I attended The Collected Works’ production of Witold Gombrowicz’s Princess Ivona at the Performance Art Institue in San Francisco. I provide a cursory overview of the play in this post. As a director, I know a good play through working with […]
A Novel Without Lies by Anatoly Mariengof, translation by Jose Alaniz (Glas Volume 23: 2000) The friendship between Anatoly Mariengof and poet Sergei Esenin started when they met during the summer of 1918 and lasted until Esenin’s suicide in 1925. These tumultuous times and their extraordinary events provide a backdrop for the “unvarnished portrait” Mariengof […]
Patience: After Sebald is available for instant viewing on Netflix. Grant Gee’s documentary brings to life Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn with readings from the book and images of the places mentioned. I wouldn’t call it an adaptation of the book…more like an homage and supplement. The movie tends to polarize reviewers, either loving or […]
It’s Friday so I’m continuing with a chapter from Off the Beaten Track in the Classics by Carl Kaeppel (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1936). In studying any long period of history, one frequently realizes that great ‘discoveries’ which have profoundly influenced civilization are, after all, only rediscoveries—though the later discoverers showed every whit as much […]
I am supposed to attend a performance of Princess Ivona (the English title) by Witold Gombrowicz this weekend and I wanted to write about the play in advance. For the record, there will be lots of spoilers in this post. Gombrowicz wrote Ivona, Princess of Burgundia from 1933 to 1935 and it was first published […]
Rustic Baroque by Jiří Hájíček, translation from the Czech by Gale A. Kirking (Brno: Real World Press, 2012) As I mentioned in the post on Rustic Baroque there were also four stories from Hájíček’s collection The Wooden Knife included in the book. Memories of a Village Dance in 1986 The Wooden Knife Horses are Supposed […]
Posting will resume soon…I’ve been assisting my wife lately with her website. For anyone with kids check out her site “kids + love + acupuncture: tips from A – Z to keep your kids healthy” and follow her on pinterest. Thanks to the last article I know more about kids’ constipation than I ever wanted […]
10th century CE Greek copy of Aristachus Samos’s 2nd century BCE calculations of the relative sizes of the Sun, Moon and the Earth Picutre source Off the Beaten Track in the Classics by Carl Kaeppel (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1936) So stupendous is the work of the Greeks in art, literature, and philosophy that there […]
Marginalia on Casanova by Miklós Szentkuthy St. Orpheus Breviary, Vol. 1 Translation by Tim Wilkinson Introduction by Zéno Bianu (Translation by Rainer J. Hanshe) Afterword by Mária Tompa (New York: Contra Mundum Press, 2012) ISBN 9780983697244This is one of the strangest and most enjoyable books I’ve read in quite a while. I have hesitated to […]