You enter the cave of horrors in the basement of an Ottoman-era house that is now a small yeshiva just outside the medieval walls of the Old City. On the one hand, there could be no better encapsulation of Jerusalem than this: disjointed histories piled one atop the other like dishes in the sink, all…
“This is Jane calling from central Kenya. Sasa, so, I am in a lesbian relationship, and we are hoping to get married, and I would like to pay bridewealth to my partner’s father, but we don’t know how to bring this issue up with him because he thinks we are just friends.” The voice spills…
One of the many extraordinary powers that the progressive Israeli Supreme Court has given itself is the authority to invalidate a government action based on the Justices’ conclusion that the government did not weigh, or properly weigh, all relevant public interest considerations before acting. This “reasonableness” doctrine is an open-ended judicial check to ensure that…
On the evening of June 7, 1914, police officers were dispatched to break up a crowd of over a thousand people assembled outside the Comedy Theatre on West 41st Street in Manhattan. Hoping for a last-minute ticket, they had been turned away at the doors and were now blocking traffic on Sixth Avenue. Inside the…
God has not shown me in nightdreams and no sorcerer has divined where my last day will overtake me and how my end will look, that I may know. Whether in my tent, on my couch, I will die with all my cherished close to me, every one of them camped mutely around me, sentries…
Elizabeth Hardwick is having a moment — and why not? The last two years have brought The Uncollected Essays, an addendum to The Collected Essays of 2017; Cathy Curtis’ biography, A Splendid Intelligence; and Come Back in September, Darryl Pinckney’s memoir of his writerly apprenticeship at Hardwick’s feet. Like Joan Didion, a very different sort…
In August 1990, the recently retired Dutch ethnologist Johannes Jacobus Voskuil had a dream: he lay in his coffin and was carried to his grave while a song he had heard hundreds of times — Sidney Bechet’s rendition of “Nobody Knows When You’re Down and Out” — played in the background. He heard the crunch…
Roland Barthes asked if we are “condemned to the adjective” when speaking of music, when attempting to put into words music’s special way of pulling heartstrings and twisting guts; and in the case of Gustav Mahler one feels especially so condemned. It is difficult not to rhapsodize about Mahler. The descriptors accumulate on the tip…
Past the fences of beds we are movie sheds of sleep. We can’t stamp or clap. At best we shriek in monkey speech, our old dialect, about the latest things. And then we truly live through our own civilization. Translated by Clara Cavanagh and Michal Rusinek
Night. The bridge’s scent. The fence lets in roots. Water shines for the earth. A listening stone. A hair sings. Night. Road. Your own knees lost in suppositions. There is no separate green. A different epoch of the…
A chair stands: article of truth sculpture of itself tied into one knot reality’s abstraction It broke. That’s a form too yes — candelabra yes — bull’s face. A chair’s abstract calling now summons whole crowds of reality ties them in one knot inside the stockroom of truth reality’s…
To Artur Sandauer Higher reveilles of shape habitations of touch all weathers of the senses . . . Lowest — I the staircase of reality rises from my breasts. And I feel nothing. Nothing succulent. Nothing colorful. I’m not only not a testament hero I’m worse…
