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Zero G Sound (Free subscription) | 10/05/2008
. Walter Benjamin prepared and delivered some 30 broadcasts for German Radio between 1929-1932 specifically for children, maybe 7-14 or so, each consisting of a 20 minute talk or monologue. A main emphasis was on introducing the youth to various, some of them classical, natural catastrophes, for instance the Lisbon earthquake of the 1750's that so shook the optimism of Voltaire and the...
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Zero G Sound (Free subscription) | 09/26/2008
. 68 years ago, Walter Benjamin committed suicide attempting to escape from the Nazis: Benjamin failed to reach Portugal (officially a neutral country) through Spain, on his way to the United States. Apparently, he took his own life on September 27, 1940 at Portbou, a border town in the Pyrenees, swallowing an overdose of morphine compound, after the group of Jewish refugees he...
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kottke (Free subscription) | 09/02/2008
A list of writing tips from Walter Benjamin . Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it. I find that when I develop an idea for too long in my head, I forget most of it when I...
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French Politics (Free subscription) | yesterday
A "mixture of the Villa Medici and a Berlin squat," runs the description in Libé. The chimerical object in question is the new artists' residence and exhibition space at 104, rue Aubervilliers. To judge from the picture, it looks like a sort of po-mo homage to Walter Benjamin's "Arcades Project." How about one of you Parisian readers hopping over there and writing an architectural review?...
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Marginal Revolution (Free subscription) | 08/23/2008
An occasional MR reader sent me these: I. Anyone intending to embark on a major work should be lenient with himself and, having completed a stint, deny himself nothing that will not prejudice the next. II. Talk about what you...
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Harvard University Press Publicity (Free subscription) | 09/25/2008
Especially the cool ones ... Big Walter Benjamin event coming up October 3-4 at Princeton. Details follow. WHAT: Image Necessities: A Symposium on the Media-Theoretical Writings of Walter Benjamin WHEN: October 3-4, 2008 WHERE: Princeton University, 106 McCormick Hall WHO:...
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documents (Free subscription) | 09/30/2008
I From Branden W. Joseph 's excellent " Beyond the Dream Syndicate. Tony Conrad and the Arts after Cage ": " For Walter Benjamin, who theorized an 'optical unconscious' in relation to photography and film, the camera's ability to capture spaces and events not 'informed by human consciousness,' particularly through its capacity for enlargement (as in a microscope) or slow motion, was...
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smokewriting.co.uk (Free subscription) | 09/18/2008
Here’s something excellent on 90s genii Disco Inferno (the Walter Benjamin of pop-collage, contraposed to the Young Gods as Deleuze & Guattari) from Owen H. And the context of that post brings us to the subject of empathy and its limits. As Gillian Rose wrote in Mourning Becomes the Law, In a nature film, we could be [...]
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Harvard University Press Publicity (Free subscription) | 08/26/2008
A trenchant analysis of Walter Benjamin's media theory as it applies to 21st-century technology (such as the maybe-too-much-talked-about Facebook--by the way check out HUP's page!) from someone who would know--former Gawker editor Emily Gould, she of the New York Times...
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Metroblogging Seattle (Free subscription) | 08/25/2008
- Walter Benjamin I have to agree with The Stranger that this might be the worst title ever: Vi Agra Falls. No. Just, no. Ask the author, Mary Daheim, what her publisher was thinking, I mean, really, OMG! at Seattle Mystery Bookshop at noon today, Monday, August 25th. Do you need directions? HURRY! And report back, because [...]
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Erudite Redneck, B.S., B.S., M.A. (Free subscription) | 08/27/2008
A Yankee editor, friend of mine, once christened me an "erudite redneck." That about sums it up. WHAT I'M READING: Larry McMurtry, "Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond" (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999. Keith Olbermann, "The Worst Person in the World and 202 Strong Contenders" (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2006). William H. Rehnquist, "Centennial Crisis:...
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Artdaily (Free subscription) | 08/25/2008
... the key to all our questions. From the close up of faces, where we can still find, according to Walter Benjamin, the last traces of the aura, the experience of the artist, collected like a unique fetish object and which the development of technology has diluted through recollection and multiplication, gradually zooming away from the human being, his actions and the effects these have...
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Vulture (Free subscription) | 08/22/2008
Walking the line between fact and fiction, this book can’t be called a straight-up history (despite what Verso says). But it is a serious sociological study of the city and its mythomaniac pathologies. Norman M. Klein’s method, which at one point involves imagining Walter Benjamin in L.A., raises what could have been a much drier tome into the rarefied realm of those books that weave...
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{ Never Neutral } (Free subscription) | 08/22/2008
Fire alarm (redux)… — Michael Löwy profiles Walter Benjamin for Platypus…
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Valleywag (Free subscription) | 08/20/2008
Gould argues that dependency on services like Twitter and Facebook to define ourselves gives us "inauthentic" relationships — representations of human connection, not the connection itself. But I stopped reading when she invoked theorist Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay, "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." Benjamin's worries are still legitimate — his...
