Thursday, October 31, 2013

Arthur Danto, 1929-2013

Arthur Danto's obituary and a reminiscence by one of his colleagues at The Nation.

Akeel Bilgrami remembers Danto:
Premonitions of that defection were there for us to see for some years before, when in his editorial judgements at the Journal of Philosophy and in his stray remarks he would betray a mild weariness with the way Philosophy had gone: the tedium of some of its professional protocols, the barbarous idiom of some of its writing, the lack of chivalry in some of its argumentative combat, and the routines of its reinvention of familiar and tired ideas.
Santiago Zabala on Danto:
Not only was Danto a leader within the academy as the author of classical studies on Nietzsche and aesthetics and as president of the American Philosophical Association and the American Society of Aesthetics, but he was also among the most important art critics in the world. Since 1984 he was an art critic for The Nation and Artforum and received several international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990, the Frank Jewett Mather Award in 1996, and the French Prix de Philosophie in 2003.
Michael Kelly's interview of Danto in 2000 at BOMB Magazine.

Update (Nov. 4): Here's Leonard Schwartz's 1-hour interview with Danto from Feb., 2007.


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Arthur Danto: 01/17/2006 from MFA Art Crit on Vimeo.

Some Weimar links

In this 1922 photo are (from left to right): Wieland Herzfelde, Eva and George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, and John Heartfield.

A new collection of papers on Weimar culture from Princeton University Press: Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy. In includes an article by Frederick Beiser on the neo-Kantians. Here's the Table of Contents with abstracts for each paper.

Eileen Battersby reviews Erich Kästner's Going to the Dogs: the Story of a Moralist.

'Kurt Tucholsky -- Advocate of the dying Weimar Republic'.

Friedhelm Greis on Tucholsky. More Tucholsky: 'In Berlin, Kurt Tucholsky discovered his stage, he wrote the lyrics for revues and literary cabarets - honed, polemical texts with a shot of ribald humor. His first record appeared, a shellac treasure with the song "When the Old Motor Ticks Again." It was a massive hit.'

Entries on Tucholsky and others at Berlin: The City as Body, The City as Metaphor, which is the site for a course at Stanford University.

Avner Shapira on Irmgard Keun:
If the two novels she published in the twilight era of the Weimar Republic turned her into a literary star, then the Nazi ban led to her being forgotten for a very long time. Only near the end of her days was she rediscovered and the recipient of widespread recognition. ... "Doris may be a refreshing character - funny, charming and very human," continues [Hanan] Elstein. "But she also embodies the ignorance, systematic blindness and apathy - blinded by the materialistic plenty and the lack of political awareness that aided the rise of the Nazis in 1933."
From 2008, Ian Buruma on Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Recordings of George Mosse's 1979 lectures for a course called 'European Cultural History: 1880-1920'. The lectures that begin with Lecture 23 seem to focus on Weimar.

Historical Dictionary of the Weimar Republic.
 

Monday, October 28, 2013

Links concerning Polish literature in the former Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria


Krakow is now a UNESCO City of Literature. Here's a long list of authors who lived in Krakow.

Sławomir Mrożek, a playwright and native of Krakow, died last August.

'Basia Howard writes about Tadeusz Różewicz, Poland’s most translated author, considered by many to be of the same stature as Szymborska and Milosz.' Here's Różewicz's bio and a page about one of his translated collections of poetry (They Came to See a Poet). He studied in Krakow but has spent much of his life in Wroclaw.

Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, an M. D., critic, and satirist, spent part of his youth in Krakow. He moved to Lviv, where he was among the professors who were massacred by the Germans in July, 1941.

Gabriela Zapolska was active in the theater scene in both Krakow and Lviv. Her play The Morality of Mrs. Dulska is available in English translation.

Józef Wittlin received some of his education in Lviv. He studied philosophy and linguistics in Vienna, where he befriended Joseph Roth, whose works he would translate into Polish. Wittlin also translated Homer into Polish. He was in the Austro-Hungarian army in WWI, which was the subject matter of his only novel, Salt of the Earth (reviewed in this pdf). In his diaries, Gombrowicz identified Wittlin with 'bourgeois demonism. ... He is a bourgeois who got the bourgeois pulled out from under his feet. In this lies his demonism'. G's diary contains more remarks on Wittlin, who also tuns up in the diary of Marc Szeftel (of Pnin fame). Wittlin eventually moved to New York.

The YIVO entry on Polish Literature has a photo of Wittlin with his wife in Lviv and ends with several brief bios of other Galician Jewish authors who wrote primarily in Polish, chief among whom was Bruno Schulz.

Monday, October 21, 2013

Essays, aphorisms, facts

Vienna Court Opera, 1902
From Michael Hofmann's review of the new Franzen-Reitter-Kehlmann book of Kraus:
Can aphorism be a secure repository for a reputation? I think only by accident, and if there are no more than one or two of them. And better one than two. ... Kraus, of course, took care to write essays as well. Many of his aphorisms are taken from his essays, whose typical mode is to fog or struggle or tunnel or insinuate themselves from one aphorism to the next, sometimes three or four to the page. Just as Shakespeare seems to be full of quotations, so Kraus is full of aphorisms.
More about Franzen-Reitter-Kehlmann-Kraus.

Noel Gallagher has no time for Shakespeare, who just made stuff up. Noel Gallagher likes reading only factual stuff, so he might have time for Morrissey's brand new autobiography, a Penguin Classic. Autobiographies are factual, classical ones more so. (Then, again, Gallagher might be turned off by Morrissey's literary references.)

As someone pointed out on Facebook,  it's not true that Gallagher will ever be found in a champagne supernova or that he will never die. When he sang lyrics to the contrary, he was just making it up.

More about Morrissey's brand new classic autobiography, which is already #1 with a bullet on the UK charts.

Kraus stalked the actual-factual in cafés. Kurt Wolff on Kraus:
It was only on rare occasions that I witnessed the side of Kraus that flourished in café conversations, an activity to which he sacrificed thousands of hours--although "sacrifice" is probably the wrong word, since he clearly thrived in this atmosphere. ... The café was where he picked up a great deal of information not to be found in the newspapers, which sooner or later he could put to good use.
But then, Wolff adds, Kraus worked on this material in long hours of nocturnal hard work, like Kafka, which implies it wasn't just information that Kraus wrote. He, too, was makin' stuff up.

The Wolff quotation is from Kurt Wolff: a Portrait in Essays and Letters (1991), which the University of Chicago Press has just this month issued as a paperback. Probably the letters are factual.