"When we met at the conference Recovering Forgotten Histories of the Austro-Hungarian Imperial Hinterland held in Budapest on those lovely days in June, you asked me to tell you more about M. Stanić after I divulged to the audience present at my talk that I have amassed quite a collection of documents pertaining to this figure. To remind you: three large boxes full of diaries, letters, military honors, photographs, news clippings, peer-reviewed articles, and of course the one monograph which mentions M. Stanić (even if in a footnote, where his name is misspelled as M. Štanić): Julia Offernacht’s The Spectrality of Austro-Hungarian Military and Masculine Ideals, 1867-1919 (published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016).
"It brings me immense joy that a younger historian has taken an interest in the fate of this man, over whom I (a very old historian, I must admit) have obsessed for decades. Obsessed, researched, dug in the archives, interpreted. But let me be frank: in the end I have nothing to show for it. Nothing. M. Stanić remains an enigma for me. I feel in none of the explanations on offer (be they psychoanalytical, hermeneutic, contextualist, micro-historical, postmodern, existentialist, sociological, Marxist, feminist, and so on) the pulse of the man. Besides, they contain numerous factual inaccuracies and, on occasion, contextual frivolities.
"Is there, in the end, an explanation to be had of any life, of life as such? Or do you, as I, feel the absurdity of such a pursuit in the first place?"
Link in comment.
I've always wanted to write a story with Ajvar as a kind of magical character. So I did. Enjoy it like you would a spoon of this caviar for the ordinary people, or something.
"Nothing scientifically exciting has happened in my work for decades, which says a lot given that I work on top-secret projects. That changed today, for today I came across something truly wondrous, a potential scientific discovery that could fundamentally change the world, change the nature of human experience. As unlikely as it sounds, it has everything to do with Ajvar.
"I, Dr. Mirsada Brajlović, have started keeping this personal log for the historical record as the events unfold."
Some feverish thoughts on time, nostalgia, and I guess the metaphysics of copies or something.
"Listen: DNA copies itself. I learned to write by copying A, a, B, b, C, c… from a teacher writing A, a, B, b…. on the blackboard. I learned to speak by sounding mama after mama sounded “mama.” I smile when I see that the shape of my child’s hands copies the shape of my hands. I smile when I see how our breath copies the breath of the atmosphere. I’m in awe when I see how our lungs copy the pattern of a leaf’s arteries. I’ll copy a song for you and you’ll tell me it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard.
"Listen: DNA doesn’t take a little part of itself and sections it off somewhere else and says it’s sacred and untouchable. I didn’t learn to write by putting A, b, and F on a paper, locking it behind a glass case, and then looking at it. I’m not in awe when I see how the pattern of a leaf’s arteries is rendered in isolation by some plastic model at an exhibition. I’ll copy a song for you and you won’t tell me it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard, because you insist that only authentic sound is worthwhile listening too, and you’ll say that authentic sound is precious, like a valuable piece of ancient clothing in the museum, a rare species cared for in safety at the zoo… "
"Not long after I started reading it, it dawned on me that the ghost of my story is the prisoner from London’s story, and all the other lives he revisited through the prison-breaking travels of his spirit, and something more still.
"Somehow, the editor calling the review “Shades of the prison-house” led me to this realization: I hadn’t come up with the ghost, I was being guided by it. And when you’re guided by a ghost, all kinds of weird things happen with how you perceive time, where things come from, what they mean, and so on. These sensations I had were both mundane and incomprehensible. The story basically wrote itself."
New short story...
"As part of our inheritance, we’re drawn to symbols and mysteries. We search for clues to unravel the mystery of the hairy ones, which is this: did some of them really see that what they called the End of Days wasn’t an event, that it couldn’t have been an event? It’s a meaningless mystery, and we pursue it only because of our inheritance, to echo back the echo.
"We’ve found that at least in some of their writings the End of Days was an idea which, when unfolded in its infinite implications, simply pointed to the infinite doors through which reality entered into the rooms of its own unreality.
"I’d like to quote some of these."
"What this genocide has shown me is that despite all the tools of repression mobilized against dissidents and protesters and ordinary people just speaking up, despite layers and layers of attempts to dehumanize and dispose of Palestinians, many people are still willing to risk their reality, because they know that that reality stands on the soil of genocides past and present, and occupations past and present. And risking your reality to give support to your fellow human beings, and to demand a new reality where they’re included, seems like a risk more than worthwhile taking."
Over the years, I’ve developed several courses at different universities on topics ranging from modern political thought to Existentialism to political theology to sociology to the history and politics of immigration. Looking over my lecture notes recently, I felt that they’re still useful as general introductions to key thinkers, movements, developments, political and social issues, and philosophies. So, I’ve decided to publish them here for the first time. In this essay, I’ve heavily edited my introductory notes for a course on political theology, which focused on Christian, Islamic, Jewish, and radical perspectives. I’ve removed as many technical philosophical terms and references as possible for the sake of readability.
New episode of the Migrating Words Podcast is up! In this episode, I had the pleasure of speaking with @sofistambo , an award-winning Bulgarian-American writer whose collection of short stories People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much, will be published by Restless Books in May. Here’s a description of the book:
"A nervous dog takes flight over Manhattan. A woman soothes her neighbors with multilingual telepathy. A purse snatcher inherits her victim’s scribbled lists—and her worries. In these stories, immigrants to New York City work their way through absurd situations into even messier ones, communing with their fellow diners, officemates, and the local cemetery geese, and greeting chaos with a grin. From Bulgaria to America, People Who Live Alone Talk Too Much pulls at the threads of daily life, unwinding the ordinary into scenes of hilarity, introspection, and surprising connection."
As soon as I started reading it, I couldn’t put it down.
Listen here: /p/episode-11-award-winning-writer-sofi.
New short story:
"Some others say we’re actually not the last of our kind on account of our reproduction and general otherness: These say the hairy ones are the last of the human kind, and that we’re a new kind. Some whisper that we’re actually better than the hairy ones, that’ll we’ll still be here when they’re gone, and then we can build something where everyone’s decent toward each other."
