The perfect friendship of butter & grilled sourdough, the hard-to-place fruity scent of cactus candy, the joy in anticipation of pizza delivery, all gloss over a deep, universal, inevitable melancholy.
The story begins like this. No. It does not. There is no story. Or, they shoveled a load of speed and shuddered toward the coast. Saltpans. Sparse groupings of pine. Dust. A bar at the side of the road. A woman beneath a tattered palm of tarpaulin, cigarette and sunburnt fingers. Vegetables, assorted fruit in plastic buckets. Flies.
He sat with the body for almost ten...
As a reader who has grown increasingly interested in a particular species of postwar fiction from the German-speaking countries—which traffics in introspection, anomie, and melancholy—to hear Wolfgang Hilbig referenced as part of a general literary/philosophical/intellectual cohort which included Ingeborg Bachmann, Thomas Bernhard, and W.G...
And now we’re standing, and I noticed that even with great attention and inasmuch as I had turned to my reading with great attention, that is, took up every word, every phrase, with the greatest devotion, I could not stop unexpected images from arising in my head and changing into other new images, that is, the images...
Tosh Berman can never be separated from his pedigree—that his father Wallace was an artist of such originality and aesthetic coolness he was on the album cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—but his father passed in 1976, and Tosh is here now and doing great work. Tosh Berman manages his father’s artistic estate...
I moved from Wedding to Schwabing, from Leopoldplatz in Berlin to Leopoldstrasse in Munich, from migrants and an enduring German underclass to posh Bavarians and global citizens. There is probably no starker contrast between any two German metropolitan districts. I offer just three examples: chilled drinks, dog poop, and street music.
They met in an open field at the compound with the sky bright and empty overhead. No drones or wireless signals infiltrated the space. Or so he was told. Joseph sat before his senior commanders, Mitchell and Jeanine, at a long portable table, among several other patriots, each handpicked for the militia’s most sacred mission. A private meeting held in secret...
I always want to feel some kind of intellectual searching and an emotional charge in a poem. My experience with poetry is a lot like my experience with movies. I just want to sit in the dark and think and feel. But I can admire and be made better by poems I don’t connect with or understand, too. If someone writes something and calls it, with any sincerity, a poem...
Nimrod builds a higher tower
this incarnation.
Bigger. Better. Badder.
Crows bring trinkets.
Suits shake hands.
At the Roy Chalk building
in Georgetown a staircase
circles down and around
into the belly of the beast.
A belated witness
tells what they saw, what they didn’t—
see the verses all lined up
and shot, out back, one by one;
how they fell into the lake which
was there for claiming them.
And the dog...
We at StatORec are proud to welcome Jordan A. Rothacker to our editorial team in the position of Books Editor. Rothacker brings with him over twenty years in magazine editorial experience and a deep commitment to honoring the word in all its forms and expressions. Along with a background in journalism, in 2016 Rothacker completed a PhD in Comparative Literature with a dissertation...
Food cashless/contactless society now also card-free & chequeless except France + uncontacted tribes fewer & fewer in no. or perhaps more uncontactable? vs. mass-produced interiority everywhere else see Shulevitz 2018 & cf. AMAZON, BEZOS, DATE, DESERT, WASTE.
Statement of Record