Transatlantic.: Archive

“Switzerland’s vote to ban minarets is a disaster for its image, write German commentators. The vote doesn’t just reflect a fear of ‘Islamization’ but also shows that setbacks in recent years have shaken its national self-confidence. But Germans would probably vote the same way, warn some observers.”

David Crossland translates passages of commentary from some of the major papers at Spiegel Online. Meantime, the Atlantic Wire has a rather chilling roundup of defenses of the ban from the US the UK. On the one hand, compared to the suitably robust roundup of opinion “damning” the ban, it’s a straggly bunch, while on the other, we have to keep in mind that these are the defenders willing to out themselves.

Nov 30, 2009

Nov 29, 2009

Nov 27, 2009

“Would a Tobin tax solve all our problems? Of course not. But it could be part of the process of shrinking our bloated financial sector. On this, as on other issues, the Obama administration needs to free its mind from Wall Street’s thrall.” —Paul Krugman, NYT

Nov 27, 2009

“But that’s me, angry, angry!” — Elizabeth Fraser talks about why she finds it too difficult to even think about her old Cocteau Twins bandmates

Nov 27, 2009

“As people become increasingly comfortable with drawing their culture from a rich range of sources—cherry-picking whatever makes sense to them—it becomes more natural to do the same thing with their social, political and other cultural ideas. The sharing of art is a precursor to the sharing of other human experiences, for what is pleasurable in art becomes thinkable in life.” —Brian Eno, “The death of uncool,” Prospect

Nov 25, 2009

Launched today.

Nov 23, 2009

“It cannot be denied that much hauntological art seems to regard twentieth-century progressive ideals with irony and even suspicion. In this way it’s a kind of satire, yet it’s rarely explicitly or decisively clear one way or the other whether the ghosts are satirising us by accusing us of betraying and derailing the future, or whether we’re satirising the ghosts by accusing them of being tragically idealistic or ‘wrong’. But a major part of hauntology’s nature (indeed, its aesthetic power) is this ambiguity over who’s haunting who and why, or more specifically, the finality that that which haunts is irresolvable, unreachable, always ambiguous, suspended in time. In the end, hauntology certainly won’t directly show the way to Utopia, nor will it ever be able to truly ‘show’ anything except a lack. This lack is represented by the ghost, and can never be removed – genuine hauntology is the awareness that the ghosts will always win.” —

Rouge’s Foam: Hauntology: The Past Inside The Present

Glad to have finally had the chance to catch up with this very fine primer. Recommended (and a lot more fun than the snippet above might suggest).

Nov 22, 2009

Nov 20, 2009

Nov 19, 2009

With runners-up, links to the designers’ sites, etc.

Nov 18, 2009

The last time Bookforum posted a roundup on the work of a single person, that person was Shakespeare.

Nov 18, 2009

Nov 17, 2009

You heard the man: “Make it so.”

Nov 16, 2009

“But one group of people that are kind of enjoying this awful economy are bosses and financiers. Corporate profits have been holding up well, and the financial markets have gone from circling the drain to revelry. But their gain is tightly assoicated with everyone else’s pain. Earlier this week, we learned that productivity—the value of output per hour of labor—rose at a stunning 9.5% annualized rate in the third quarter. Output was up and employment was down. That follows a near-7% gain in the second quarter. Employers have been very aggressive in cutting on employment and working the surviving staff harder. We saw this early in the decade, and it looks like we’re seeing it again. To use the old language, which seems as fresh as a daisy to me, the capitalists are greatly increasing the rate of exploitation. The working class is scared and mounting not even a hint of a fightback.” —Doug Henwood

Nov 15, 2009

An awfully strong issue of the Guardian’s Review this week - Martin Amis on Nabokov, Will Self on Ballard, Simon Callow on Diaghilev, reviews of the new novels by Roth, Auster, even Stephen King - but I was drawn first to Christopher Tayler’s profile of the Italian collective Wu Ming, whose latest book, Manituana, is just out in English. I was not disappointed.

“Was the plan to write a kind of genealogy of American exceptionalism? ‘A prelude to a genealogy, maybe - it’s not exhaustive. But yes, it’s about American exceptionalism and also about the way we Europeans perceive American exceptionalism.’ Like all of their novels, though, it’s also a page-turner, filled with chases, fights and exotic locations. When I mention this, they laugh, as if to say: ‘What did you expect?’ ‘It’s popular fiction,’ [Roberto] Bui says. ‘We try to bridge the gap. Our books are readable on two levels: as complex political allegories, and as pulp fiction or adventure novels.’”

If all you’ve got time for is a skim, slow down for the latter section of the piece on the New Italian Epic.

Nov 14, 2009

“The extreme turbulence that hit the American economy in 2008 offers a rare window of opportunity to hit the re-set button on consumer culture as we know it — to re-tool market capitalism along greener, more socially conscious and, crucially, more profoundly satisfying lines. Because an age of repurposing, recycling and retrofitting needn’t be a Beige New World of Soviet-style austerity measures. On the contrary, while we’ll likely have far fewer status totems in the near future, the quality of our experiential lives could be far richer in diversity, if we muster the political will to make them so. ‘The most important fact about our shopping malls,’ the social scientist Henry Fairlie told The Week magazine, ‘is that we do not need most of what they sell.’ Animated by the requisite ‘sense of public purpose,’ the post-mall, post-sprawl suburbs could be exuberantly heterogeneous Places That Do Not Suck, where food is grown closer to home, cottage industries are the norm and the nowheresville of chain restaurants and big-box retailers and megamalls has given way to local cuisines, one-of-a-kind shops and walkable communities with a sense of place and social cohesion.” —Mark Dery, “Dawn of the Dead Mall,” Design Observer

Nov 14, 2009

Transatlantic.

November 2009

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