Kafka read “The Penal Colony” in a Munich gallery one evening in November, in front of some paintings by Van Dongen and Vlaminck, to an audience of about fifty people. He felt as cold as “the empty mouth of a stove.” A woman fainted during the reading; other people walked out, and still others complained [...]
The best moments are like watching people decorate a Christmas tree that’s spinning at 400 rpm, with every bauble hung for a moment before it zings off to explode against the club wall in a glittering shower of spicules of red glass The moment of shock when, deep inside a knockout whirling solo, you could [...]
“[Goethe's] ingenious experiments with pin-holes allowing light into dark rooms, heating his penknife to high temperatures so as to have sheets of color spread across the blade, having films of oil catch the light by dropping oil onto water, brandy and other fluids, opening up fissures in rock crystals, plunging transparent heated glass into water [...]
Following the theoretical work of F.W.H. Myers and William James came the German psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, in his lab in Harvard, working with two students — Leon Solomon and Gertrude Stein. The experiments were with automatic reading and writing: “The subject reads in a low voice, and preferably something comparatively uninteresting, while the operator reads [...]
To relax I’m rereading a book I loved in my childhood: Freya Stark’s The Valleys of the Assassins. She was a hero of mine, speaking Farsi and Arabic (and Latin, Italian, French) and walking all over the Arabian Peninsula in the late 1920s, particularly remote corners of Iran, hanging out with Lurs and Kurds, transcribing [...]
Random but unshakable thought of the afternoon. There’s a particular way that bodies are scattered as the result of an explosion — a particular way limbs are splayed and human corpses arranged by the shockwave. In characteristically bland military language this is called “response to impact.” And on a given afternoon in Washington Square Park [...]
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