Ingeborg Bachmann
From Christopher Fowler's list of nearly forgotten but good authors: 'Asked for his opinion of literature, [Ronald Firbank] admitted that he adored italics; a typically oblique Firbankian remark. His books contain party chatter consisting of disconnected words and phrases, much as we actually perceive them. Infamously, one chapter consisted of the exclamation “Mabel!” repeated eight times.'
An NPR segment on Patrick Leigh Fermor's Time to Keep Silence AND Werner Herzog reading Roger Ebert's review of the animated movie based on J. R. Ackerley's My Dog Tulip
Patrick Hamilton gets a blue plaque in London but it isn't on a pub
Some Anglican evangelicals in literature
Sir Isaac Newton's alchemical forays
A short piece on Friedrich Torberg and Vienna café writers
Five questions for Jenny Erpenbeck
Mooks & Gripes reviews Gert Hofmann's Lichtenberg & the Little Flower Girl
A neat-looking British horror anthology from 1969
Tess Lewis on Victor Serge's novels
F. R. Leavis remembers Wittgenstein
Steven E. Aschheim in Mittelweg: 'The critique of liberal-bourgeois instrumentality and mass modernity invariably informed the nature of their projects and the political positions they adopted – conservative, Zionist, Marxist, or religious. These sentiments were very much in the mould of Weimar intellectuals. ... Now, I want to compare them to another intellectual who ... occupies a remarkably iconic position precisely because he is a liberal. I am referring, of course, to Isaiah Berlin.'
Vince Taylor, on whom the character of Ziggy Stardust was partly based:
