Michael Ampersant

Sep 24, 2014

Spot the difference

We had this interview on The Way She Writes about "linguistically challenged" writers like us, where we were saying typical &t-things like...

I am (and have always been) fairly absent-minded. Absentmindedness is a strength, I think, not a weakness, in general it’s a good thing to be somewhere else with your mind.

...and there was this author picture...

...and people responded with nervous emails along the lines of...what's your secret, what's your secret...?

Here it is (the secret):

Spot the difference.

PS: Cathy Ulrich from Hollywood Hates Me writes: "What difference? I can see no difference."

Wednesday matinée

The view from Chang's room this morning

Sep 14, 2014

"After Auschwitz---no more poetry!"

"Alles hängt mit allem zusammen," (everything is connected with everything) would Norbert Elias say, the German sociologist and first recipent of the Theodor W. Adorno Price. It wouldn't be an Adorno saying however, because the man himself, the heavy thinker of "Critical Theory" and its Frankfurter Schule, would never say (or think) things as simple as this.

Theodor W. Adorno

But there you have it. We wake up, tumble upon a link to The New Yorker and read an article on Theodor W. Adorno and his Frankfurter Schule and learn that "he died of a heart attack in the shadow of the Matterhorn."

The Matterhorn

That's us here in Switzerland, folks, the Matterhorn is right around the corner. And yes, alles hängt mit allem zusammen, Adorno suffered his attack, was brought to the nearest hospital and died there, an unassuming Spital located in Visp, Valais, Switzerland, unassuming except that yours truly spent a whole week in the same hospital, his first time ever as a hospital patient, waiting for his foot to unswell so that Dr. Ursprung could repair his broken fibula.