I have no idea. But you can’t read the last paragraph of “Civilization and Its Discontents” without believing he had written it only yesterday or without believing he had hope for the future. The fact that the book was written in 1929 does throw his hope into doubt, if it was intended as prognostication, which — to be frank — it was. But it’s still a great read.
Archives for March 2022
Two Writers, Two Legacies
![Nelson Algren, 1962 [Photo: Steve Deutch]](https://www.artsjournal.com/herman/wp/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Nelson-Algren-1962-Stephen-Deutch-copy-200x200.jpg)
Nelson Algren, as great a writer as ever came out of Chicago, was born on this day in 1909.
A Poet Recalls Odessa
No more crowding those Kiosks
That look like guard towers
Protected by hard currency
And the insect eyes peering out of them
Human eyes preying off their own kind
No more tram drivers drinking their coffee
While you wait for hours to get home to your child . . . — William Cody Maher
Slaughterhouse 6
‘The crows scream
and fly to town in whirring flight:
soon it will snow —
happy he who now still has a home!’ …
The world — a gate
to a thousand wastelands dumb and cold!
Whoever has lost
what you have lost, rests nowhere. … — Friedrich Nietzsche
That’s the Way to Travel
Jan Heller Levi & Marlies Pekarek
Thinking of rasPutin, we laughed when a friend joked about the availability of refurbished Geiger counters on Amazon. Gallows humor helps to ease the anxiety of current conditions. Here’s a serious kind of distraction: Moloko Print’s volume of selected poems, ‘That’s the Way to Travel,” by Jan Heller Levi, with illustrations by Marlies Pekarek. (Levi’s first book, “Once I Gazed at You in Wonder,” earned the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets.)
Zelensky Thanks Russian Anti-War Protesters
… especially this one: Marina Ovsyannikova, who held up an anti-war sign on Russia’s main TV news broadcast. She was reported missing but has now appeared in court.
Until There Is No Dream to Dream
This is balm for dreamers.
‘Dream’ by George Herms
Where does George Herms and his 1985 assemblage “Dream” fit in the continuum of American art? After reading “The Nature of Art” by Armand Marie Leroi and having a look at the Connect Vermeer website, I wondered whether a similar analysis could be done about Herms and “Dream.”
Vlad the Impaler
‘You’re occupiers. You are fascists. Why the fuck did you come here with your guns?’ Ukrainian woman confronting Russian soldiers in Henichesk, in southern Ukraine. ‘Take these seeds and put them in your pocket so, at least, sunflowers will grow on your graves.’ (Translated by Alex Abramovich)
‘Bells ring / silently the evening / rolls in its void’ — Paul Celan
To Kingdom Come?
life is / kkkkrrrraaaazzzzy / for reasons / having nothing / to do with / rasPUTIN but / he could spitball / a nuke our way / in the time / it takes to say / ”oh shit.”