How saints are made: Father Capodanno, sanctity, and ducks
OH GOSH, I BET MY BROTHER KNOWS THE GUYS DRIVING THIS IDEA: Spain urges women to swim topless to ‘fight discrimination’.
It’s like getting naked or sleeping around to show how liberated you are. I can’t hear this kind of argument without hearing my brother and his friends snickering in the corner.
Reading suggestions
At The Guardian they: "asked 14 writers, editors and publishers to tell us their current favourites from around the world", in Page turners: the most exciting new fiction from Africa, Latin America and south Asia.
The Satanic Verses” wasn’t the first – and won’t be the last – novel to provoke the rage of a fanatic who has no grasp of literature’s nuances.
In 1922, an Austrian writer named Hugo Bettauer published a novel set in Vienna called “The City Without Jews.” It sold a quarter of a million copies and became known internationally, with an English translation issued in London and New York. A silent movie adaptation, which has recently been recovered and restored, appeared in the summer of 1924. The following spring, a young Nazi burst into Bettauer’s office and shot him multiple times. The author died of his wounds two weeks later.
A novel published in a polarized city
As in the U.S. today, there was a major gap between rich and poor in early 20th-century Vienna.
The impressive architecture of the inner city sheltered immense wealth, while there was desperate poverty in the working-class districts beyond. The opulence of the banks and department stores, the culture of the theaters and opera house – especially in the predominantly Jewish district of Leopoldstadt – inevitably stirred deep resentment.
In the years immediately preceding World War I, populist mayor Karl Lueger saw his opportunity: He could win votes by blaming every problem on the Jews. Many a Jewish refugee would later say that the antisemitism in Vienna was worse than Berlin’s. An impoverished painter living in a public dormitory in a poor district to the north of Leopoldstadt was inspired to build a new ideology following Lueger’s blueprint. His name was Adolf Hitler.
Hugo Bettauer was born Jewish. Though he converted to Christianity, he never lost touch with his roots. He worked as a journalist and became a prolific novelist.
The inner west’s Enmore Road has always been a melting pot, home to shoe cobblers, African hairdressers and punk record stores.
It has hosted some of the world’s best performers at its landmark Enmore Theatre - where none other than Prime Minister Anthony Albanese was spotted last week - and offers everything from fast food to hatted restaurants within a few blocks’ walk.
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| John and Farhana’s street |
But the street has often played second fiddle in Sydney’s imagination to the more famous King Street, in neighbouring Newtown further down the road.
Pasan Wijesena, who runs Jacoby’s Tiki Bar on the strip, said King Street “always gets the shine as being the place you go to”.
“But you actually want to be going to Enmore Road to get some of the better food, go see a show or go to one of the better pubs,” he said.
“It’s been doing a lot of heavy lifting in the shadows. And now it’s getting better.”
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‘It’s not all chocolate strawberries and balcony sex’: Osher Günsberg unmasked
Furukawa Hideo Q & A
At Japan Forward Stefania Viti has a Q & A with Furukawa Hideo -- see parts one and two.
Several Furukawa titles are available in English, including Slow Boat and Horses, Horses, in the End the Light Remains Pure, but not, alas, the one discussed at greatest length here, サウンドトラック ('Soundtrack').
Two decades of the Literary Saloon
The complete review was started in 1999, and this Literary Saloon opened in 2002 -- on this date, as a matter of fact, making it twenty years old today.
The bigger site-anniversary will follow in a couple of weeks -- probably around the beginning of October, when the complete review reaches 5000 titles under review, but two decades of this is something too, isn't it ?
Good to see that even after all this time there are still some readers interested in what gets posted here. It still seems to serve a purpose, so you can expect things to continue much the same at least a while longer.
In long-term relationships, people get to a point where they wonder: Is this the person I want to spend the rest of my life with? Is the man/woman next to me the chosen one?
THIS EXPLAINS A LOT, ACTUALLY: Average Testosterone Levels Have Dropped 30%.
Here’s the original paper.
LOUISE PERRY: I’m 30. The Sexual Revolution Shackled My Generation.
I used to believe the liberal narrative on the sexual revolution. As a younger woman, I held the same opinions as most other millennial urban graduates in the West. I conformed to the beliefs of my class.
Of course freedom is the goal, I thought. What women need is the freedom to behave as men have always behaved, enjoying all the pleasures of casual sex, porn, BDSM, and indeed any other sexual delight that the human mind can dream up. As long as everyone is consenting, what’s the problem?
“… strong accents of punk rock”
Why are K-pop groups so big?, a visual analysis at the excellent Pudding. Also worth a click, How artists get paid from streaming, all about online music economics, and the self-explanatory The Unlikely Odds of Making it on TikTok / closely related: Hollywood economics: a directory of lost films / from 2012, but still fun: Stories We’ve Seen Too Often, the Strange Horizons directory of sci-fi tropes and cliches / in a megastructure-stuffed news cycle, an opinion: The World’s Tallest Building Should Never Have Been Built. Change My Mind. (see also the phenomena of ‘non-functional’ vanity height) / architecture on album sleeves / music by Frenchie Death Yodel; It Was a Good Dream; Noveller’s Wrapped in Plastic, a tribute to Twin Peaks / synth gods covering synth classics. All the synths / the Ghostsigns Archive and London’s Ghost Signs (both via MeFi) / old photos of old Korea / the collage wall in Pauline Boty’s Studio / designing a book cover (both via Meanwhile) / a fine old barn / indie archaeology: how I tracked down the class of NME’s C86 album. The album in question, and the book / sort of related, a walk around the disconcertingly bland world of new Denmark Street, the city-block-sized version of those cased guitar-and-rock-ephemera vitrines you see decorating ‘edgy’ pubs. The ultra-processed foods version of alternative culture.
