More than a hundred years after its first publication in German, NYRB Editions has released the collection “Bright Magic: Stories”—edited and translated by Damien Searls and with an introduction by Günter Grass—which allows us to read Alfred Döblin’s early expressionistic work along with some later fables and “incomprehensible stories”. One of its entries “The Ballerina…
Category: Essays
Praise for the Siesta
I’m no fan of the term “downtime” which reinterprets leisure as a kind of absenteeism from productivity (by analogy with outages in industrial systems and power networks), and only grudgingly concedes that “human capital” needs to “resource” itself. Many cultures across the world, not least those around the Mediterranean, long ago adapted to the human…
Music and metabolism
This tongue-in-cheek homage to the Indonesian composer Slamet Abdul Sjukur was written after I visited him in April 2009 in his home city of Surabaya, where he very kindly put me up for the night in his modest kampong house and showed me around the city. Born in 1935, Slamet owed his interest in music…
Mad on Metrics
As the Indo-European languages tell us, medicine and religion have much in common, not least in offering a measure of salvation to the sinful. In her ambitious novel Corpus Delicti (English title: The Method), the socially committed German novelist Julie Zeh considers how much personal liberty we would be prepared to forego in a future…
Being Nice to Nietzsche
In his vagabondage around western Europe in the decade of white-hot creativity that was granted him after he resigned his chair in philology at the University of Basle, three other cities were of particular importance to the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: Nice, Genoa and Turin—all cities with an Alpine background. The last of them impressed…
Picking Olives in Apulia
Over the past two years the olive plantations in the province of Lecce and other parts of Apulia have been attacked by a proteobacterium never previously seen in Europe known as Xylella fastidiosa. Up to a million trees are thought to be affected, with withering of the growth shoots rapidly leading to tree collapse. The…
Peristalsis and Epiphany
The artist “is like a pump”, Gustave Flaubert told Louise Colet in 1853, “sucking up what lies undisclosed in the deepest layers and squirting it out “in great jets to the sunlight.” If Nature is the supreme artist, no need to get involved in the effort and mechanics of deep topography: simply push Flaubert’s conceit…
Science & Letters 