By Alessandro Columbu
Although first published in 1999, Edward W. Said’s Out of Place feels uncannily contemporary. Said’s prose retains a clarity and ethical attentiveness, a book whose voice continues to speak in an extraordinary eloquent tone, directly to the present. The book is at once a personal testimony and a reckoning with memory, language(s), family, and formation.
By Eve Wood
At thirteen, I knew I had been chosen. There were fleeting signs early on, whispered cries of sedition and always the faintest echo of a woman’s voice fanning the flames of my own wild heart. Who was she and what did she want with me? Sometimes I would catch a glimpse of the side of her face, suffused in blue light and always the scent of mandarin when the headaches came….
By Briá Purdy
An avant garde artistic movement of Mexicanidad emerged, forefronted by artists like Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. Although their part in the revolution was hardly recognised, the contributions made by female artists to the movement cannot be undermined. There are two major photographers who were crucial in reconstructing Mexican national identity: Graciela Iturbide and Lola Álvarez Bravo.
By Susan Horowitz
“Barbara Neski was an inspirational figure to so many, and shaped the Hamptons at a special time.” —Paul Goldberger
Initially studying art, art history, and mathematics at Bennington, Barbara Goldberg was inspired to become an architect after viewing Marcel Breuer’s Robinson House. This led her to choose the Bauhaus-oriented Harvard GSD program created by director Walter Gropius, becoming one of its first women graduates in 1952. There, she was especially drawn to the teaching of Buckminster Fuller.
By Glenn Harcourt
Waller Newell’s new book, Tyranny and Revolution introduces us to a long philosophical discussion initiated in eighteenth-century France by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, but for the most part played out in Germany across the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries. The author quite successfully draws out the intertextual particularities of this discussion, essentially providing a critical history of what he describes as “The Philosophy of Freedom.” … In some ways, this program was doomed from the start, but it produced some of the most elegant and powerful system building in all of philosophy…
By Ed Schad
As people, later in life, begin to mourn the lives they were never able to live, common laments involve time and undeveloped talents, misplaced priorities, and lack of attention to what could have been the great loves of one’s life. I personally mourn a never achieved facility with languages. … I can only stare at Paul Celan’s poems through the wet glass of translation.
By Hadi Abdullah
هادي العبدالله
Tarad and I were covering the battles for the media in those days. The revolutionaries started trying to rid the area of the regime’s suffocating grip by taking control first of the checkpoints that separated different areas of the city, then of those that kept the city shut off from its countryside, which required an enormous military effort. Despite the magnitude of the task, the revolutionaries did it. Then it was the villages’ turn. … The civilians started preparing for the big day, while revolutionaries planned the liberation. They headed north like one big human river, “God be on our side” was their weapon.
by James Buchanan
Hillary Sachs looks at it with disgust then empathy. She considers calling Walt Sachs—her husband—but she believes he couldn’t handle it. It would hurt him, maybe even piss him off. And to what purpose? Their poor daughter needs comfort and love, not Walt’s inability to deal, is what Hillary Sachs also believes.
Ilya Kharkōw is a queer writer living in exile from Ukraine, where his native town is now under Russian occupation. His writing is a testament to the power of resilience, creativity, and a refusal to be silenced.
Boris Grebenshchikov, a founding father of Russian rock music and voice for peace, has been creating music for over fifty years. The following interview was conducted in two parts in 1984 by Joanna Stingray, an American who smuggled tape recordings of Aquarium, along with several other bands, out of the Soviet Union.
The Nomadic Journal 