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On Benjamin’s Public (Oeuvre)-Public Domain Review

Posted by Radical Jew on October 31, 2013 with No Comments

Benjamin

On the run from the Nazis in 1940, the philosopher, literary critic and essayist Walter Benjamin committed suicide in the Spanish border town of Portbou. In 2011, over 70 years later, his writings enter the public domain in many countries around the world. Anca Pusca, author of Walter Benjamin: The Aesthetics of Change, reflects on the relevance of Benjamin’s oeuvre in a digital age, and the implications of his work becoming freely available online. – See more at: Public Domain Review

The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, by Walter Benjamin

 

On the Concept of History, by Walter Benjamin

Prison Letter – Rosa Luxemburg

Posted by Radical Jew on October 30, 2013 with No Comments

 

Rosa_Luxemburg

EXCERPT from letter to Sonja Liebknecht, written from prison, Mid-December, 1917

To Sophie Liebknecht,

Karl has been in Luckau prison for a year now. I have been thinking of that so often this month…

Last night my thoughts ran this wise: ‘How strange it is that I am always in a sort of joyful intoxication, though without sufficient cause. Here I am lying in a dark cell upon a mattress hard as stone; the building has its usual churchyard quiet, so that one might as well be already entombed; through the window there falls across the bed a glint of light from the lamp which burns all night in front of the prison. At intervals I can faintly hear in the distance the noise of a passing train or close at hand the dry cough of the prison guard as in his heavy boots he takes a few slow strides to stretch his limbs. The grind of the gravel beneath his feet has so hopeless a sound that all the weariness and futility of existence seems to be radiated thereby into the damp and gloomy night. I lie here alone and in silence, enveloped in the manifold black wrappings of darkness, tedium, unfreedom, and winter– and yet my heart beats with an immeasurable and incomprehensible inner joy, just as if I were moving in the brilliant sunshine across a flowery mead. Do not think that I am offering you imaginary joys, or that I am preaching asceticism. I want you to taste all the real pleasures of the senses. My one desire is to give you in addition my inexhaustible sense of inward bliss. Could I do so, I should be at ease about you, knowing that in your passage through life you were clad in a star-bespangled cloak which would protect you from everything petty, trivial, or harassing…

Sonichka dear, I had such a pang recently. In the courtyard where I walk, army lorries often arrive, laden with haversacks or old tunics and shirts from the front; sometimes they are stained with blood. They are sent to the women’s cells to be mended, and then go back for use in the army. The other day one of these lorries was drawn by a team of buffaloes instead of horses. I had never seen the creatures close at hand before… The buffaloes are war trophies from Rumania… They had been unmercifully flogged… Unsparingly exploited, yoked to heavy loads, they are soon worked to death. The other day a lorry came laden with sacks, so overladen indeed that the buffaloes were unable to drag it across the threshhold of the gate. The soldier-driver, a brute of a fellow, belabored the poor beasts so savagely with the butt end of his whip that the wardress at the gate, indignant at the sight, asked him if he had no compassion for animals. ‘No more than anyone has compassion for us men,’ he answered with an evil smile, and redoubled his blows… You know their hide is proverbial for its thickness and toughness, but it had been torn. While the lorry was being unloaded, the beasts, which were utterly exhausted, stood perfectly still. The one that was bleeding had an expression on its black face and in its soft black eyes like that of a weeping child… Far distant, lost forever, were the green, lush meadows of Rumania. How different there the light of the sun, the breath of wind; how different there the song of the birds and the melodious call of the herdsman. Instead, the hideous being at one with you in my pain, my weakness, and my street, the fetid stable, the rank hay mingled with moldy straw, the strange and terrible men– blow upon blow, and blood running from gaping wounds. Poor wretch, I am as powerless, as dumb, as yourself; I am longing.

Meanwhile the women prisoners were jostling one another as they busily unloaded the dray and carried the heavy sacks into the building. The driver, hands in pockets, was striding up and down the courtyard, smiling to himself as he whistled a popular air. I had a vision of all the splendor of war!…

Write soon, darling Sonichka.

Your Rosa

(A postscript): Never mind, my Sonyusha; you must be calm and happy all the same. Such is life, and we have to take it as it is, valiantly, heads erect, smiling ever– despite all.

Jerome Rothenberg

Posted by Radical Jew on October 30, 2013 with No Comments

Poetry and Poetics/Blog
WikipediaJerome_Rothenberg

Lee Konitz Then and Now, Approximately

Posted by Radical Jew on October 29, 2013 with No Comments

This Rabbi Says Eating Soy Makes You Gay | Heeb

Posted by Radical Jew on October 29, 2013 with No Comments

This Rabbi Says Eating Soy Makes You Gay | Heeb.

Lou Reed and Red Shirley | Jewish Currents

Posted by Radical Jew on October 28, 2013 with No Comments

April 12: Lou Reed and Red Shirley | Jewish Currents.