Sep 23, 2014
Sep 22, 2014
Sep 19, 2014
Sep 15, 2014
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.
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| 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."
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| 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.
Sep 12, 2014
Sep 11, 2014
Sep 10, 2014
Sep 6, 2014
Gallery (11) (Michel Plaisir)
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| "Le coeur tout zébré d'amour" Michel Plaisir (oil on canvas) |
(All rights reserved; reproduction in whichever form only with the permission of the artist)
(More artwork in our gallery)
Aug 23, 2014
Aug 22, 2014
Aug 18, 2014
Aug 11, 2014
Today
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| The view around 17:00 --- the view is downhill, and the weather is also downhill, since four weeks |
Aug 9, 2014
Gallery (9) (Steve Walker)
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| "At five in the morning," Steve Walker (1961-2012) |
(There's more art on our gallery page)
Aug 1, 2014
Jul 30, 2014
Coming out and of age in China (1) (reblogged)
Cool, folks, cool, the first part of a wonderful story by Massoud Hayoun, an Arab-American who went to China at the age of 19 to learn Mandarin. The piece---originally published by Gawker---is here reblogged with the permission of the author. It will easily count as one of the best examples of gay writing this year...
He would have been my first, I suppose---a Korean student at some other school in Beijing's Wudaokou university district.
I'd met him on a website. You're the first and only person I've ever admitted that to, handsome reader. I suppose I want to feel closer to you.
I was 19, Arab-American, studying Mandarin and poli sci at a Chinese university. I was exceptionally awkward, and still under the impression that no one knew I was gay. They all knew and indulged me my illusions of illusiveness.
He was in his mid-20s. School was hard for him, he said, in our brief chat on a website for gay men in Asia.
I'd heard of a class of Korean students like him---unsuccessful and blowing their family's money away learning Mandarin, while China busily worked itself into the world's second-largest economy. Their parents wouldn't let them come home until they obtained a certificate of completion, and the Chinese universities appeared keen to keep accepting international student tuition fees, even if they were from the same students, year-in, year-out.
He was foreign---not just in the sense that we were of two different nationalities, living in China. He was a bad student, a rich kid, a magnificently athletic loser with a Rocky-like neanderthal chin and tall nose, the kind of man who is called, in Chinese, a baijiazi, a son who spoils his family's wealth. Fresh, preppy. He wore clothes my Chinese friends paid twice as much for at the bazaars: Korean fashion. His man-bag was made of real leather. He was a petit bourgeois; every lock of hair had been calculated and every pore tightened, perhaps surgically, because he had the time, money and inclination. He turned me on.
He would have been my first, I suppose---a Korean student at some other school in Beijing's Wudaokou university district.
I'd met him on a website. You're the first and only person I've ever admitted that to, handsome reader. I suppose I want to feel closer to you.
I was 19, Arab-American, studying Mandarin and poli sci at a Chinese university. I was exceptionally awkward, and still under the impression that no one knew I was gay. They all knew and indulged me my illusions of illusiveness.
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| (Just an illustration) |
He was in his mid-20s. School was hard for him, he said, in our brief chat on a website for gay men in Asia.
I'd heard of a class of Korean students like him---unsuccessful and blowing their family's money away learning Mandarin, while China busily worked itself into the world's second-largest economy. Their parents wouldn't let them come home until they obtained a certificate of completion, and the Chinese universities appeared keen to keep accepting international student tuition fees, even if they were from the same students, year-in, year-out.
He was foreign---not just in the sense that we were of two different nationalities, living in China. He was a bad student, a rich kid, a magnificently athletic loser with a Rocky-like neanderthal chin and tall nose, the kind of man who is called, in Chinese, a baijiazi, a son who spoils his family's wealth. Fresh, preppy. He wore clothes my Chinese friends paid twice as much for at the bazaars: Korean fashion. His man-bag was made of real leather. He was a petit bourgeois; every lock of hair had been calculated and every pore tightened, perhaps surgically, because he had the time, money and inclination. He turned me on.
Jul 29, 2014
The view this morning
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| The Signalhorn seen from our chalet |
(How to explain this? You've heard of Trotzki vs. Stalin? Along those lines. The snowflakes are fake, but the rest is not. This morning, around 7 AM)
Jul 25, 2014
Gallery (5) --reposted
(Pedro Palanca died yesterday from HIV-related liver complications --- we posted this only 10 days ago:)
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| "Drinking men," Pedro Palanca |
(For more art, go here)
"That's not enough!" (French for beginners)
Please read this...it's only one paragraph from the London Review of Books connecting our recent Foucault post (by Mr. E.) with our own faux-French background with our quest for happy endings (just so that you know, Alain Robbe-Grillet was the inventor of the nouveau roman)...please read this:
"By now, most readers in France had ceased to care [about Robbe-Grillet]; even his intellectual champions lost interest, although [Roland] Barthes stood by him. ‘Transgression’ had come to mean l’écriture féminine and gay erotica; Robbe-Grillet’s hetero-sadist fixations looked decidedly démodé, quite possibly reactionary. (Fredric Jameson wondered whether his books had become ‘unreadable since feminism’.) At the party for Barthes’s 1977 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault confronted Robbe-Grillet: ‘I have told you this already and I will say it again, Alain: when it comes to sex, you are, and always have been misguided!’ Barthes rose to his defence, reminding Foucault that Robbe-Grillet was, at the very least, a pervert. Foucault replied: ‘Ça ne suffit pas!’"
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| Alain Robbe-Grillet |
"By now, most readers in France had ceased to care [about Robbe-Grillet]; even his intellectual champions lost interest, although [Roland] Barthes stood by him. ‘Transgression’ had come to mean l’écriture féminine and gay erotica; Robbe-Grillet’s hetero-sadist fixations looked decidedly démodé, quite possibly reactionary. (Fredric Jameson wondered whether his books had become ‘unreadable since feminism’.) At the party for Barthes’s 1977 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault confronted Robbe-Grillet: ‘I have told you this already and I will say it again, Alain: when it comes to sex, you are, and always have been misguided!’ Barthes rose to his defence, reminding Foucault that Robbe-Grillet was, at the very least, a pervert. Foucault replied: ‘Ça ne suffit pas!’"
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