Joy Division & Marketa Lazarová

It will be a little bit before I write on Marketa Lazarová by Vladislav Vančura, but I wanted to share something I stumbled across yesterday. Someone (I'm assuming Stefano Leone, who posted it) paired Joy Division's "Shadowplay" with scenes from Marketa Lazarová, a stunning combination. The scenes are as haunting as the song.

Speaking of the movie, I watched it again after reading the novel and was surprised the changes it made from Vančura's story. More on that later, hopefully.

Recent online reading

Public Seminar has Andrei Platonov's short story "Antisexus",

a provisional translation by Anna Kalashyan of an occasional piece by Platonov. In ‘Antisexus’ (1925-26), Platonov writes in a parodic vein about what Béatriz Préciado calls the sex-gender industrial complex. The production of gendered and sexualized bodies via technologies of the image and the orgasm appears here as something that might be implicated in both the western and Soviet modes of spectacle.

Please note the article also has a link to Platonov's Chevengur (pdf)!


Llewelyn Morgan posted about a tale from the Alexander Romance feeds into a scene in Shakespeare's Henry V. And more.


I'm so intrigued by Michael Orthofer's review of Leg Over Leg (Vol. 1) by Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq that I've added it to my TBR pile.


Speaking of the to—be read—stack, I'm anxiously awaiting the upcoming translation of Marketa Lazarová by Vladislav Vančura. In the meantime, enjoy Alex Zucker's essay on the novel and its film adaptation. There's quite a bit on Vančura, too.


Stefany Anne Golberg has an essay on how a crisis in Miguel de Unamuno's life led to his philosophical outlook:

This “crisis of 1897” marked the crossroad of Miguel de Unamuno’s spiritual and intellectual journey. The philosopher would build no system that would eliminate his inner turmoil. He would not turn his back on the Angel of Nothingness. Rather, he would embrace this angel as his wife had embraced him in his grief. Miguel de Unamuno would develop from his nightmare a messy, passionate philosophy of conflict, a philosophy of tragedy. In short, a philosophy of himself.

Greg Grandin looks at fact and fiction behind Herman Melville's Benito Cereno. As is often the case, real life proves to be stranger than fiction.