It’s a strange gig, editing pages for Berlin’s English-language print monthly. We assume our readers know a few German phrases — many have lived here for years — but we cannot assume fluency, obviously, otherwise we’d be publishing in German, or indeed not at all. Using bits of local language in our pages avoids repetition and adds colour; it also helps generate a sense of community — this isn’t just some anglo mag, it’s a mag for Berliners, auf Englisch. It’s a rather ironic way for me to pay the bills. I did German history at university; I moved here to inhabit the land of Goethe, Neu! and Judith Schalansky. And here I am now, making my living — as an editor, occasional translator, anglophone critic of German literature — in the cracks between the languages, materially reliant on the existence of thousands of Berliners and Berlin-watchers who don’t speak the national tongue.
One of my favorite dishes to eat while growing up was budae-jjigae, which literally means “army base stew” in Korean. Typically, the stew’s bubbling broth fuses traditional Korean flavors—the spice of gochugaru, the earthiness of mushrooms, the pungency of kimchi—with an unlikely yet essential addition: Spam.
I once wondered aloud to my mom: “Is Spam Korean? How did it get in here?”
In a literary career spanning five decades Allende's storytelling walks a lyrical romanticism on roads imposed by social and political turmoil. This story is a fable joined by today's hard news. In her latest novel, Allende disrupts the mainstream narrative about our southern border. She discovers something in Nogales, via El Salvador and Vienna: the human capacity for hope and decency in the midst of despair.
The Wind Knows My Name is a tale of two child immigrants--- a boy who escapes Nazi occupied Vienna in 1938 and a girl who escapes military gangs in El Salvador in 2019. Allende's narrative commingles past and present, and follows their migrations to the United States and the day when the immigrant from Vienna — Samuel Adler — and the refugee from El Salvador — Anita Diaz — finally meet.
Still, many music lovers, especially those with scant formal knowledge of music, long for written descriptions that can take them inside a piece, explain how it comports (or not) with the prevailing styles of the time, and account for how the music makes them feel. That’s what music critics try to do, without going too far, indulging in historical generalizations or turning all philosophical.
The British poet Patrick Mackie shows no such trepidations in his erudite, ambitious and elegantly written “Mozart in Motion: His Work and His World in Pieces.” He presents Mozart as a kinetically restless, socially observant musician constantly in dialogue with his culture and his times — the age of the Enlightenment, in all its idealism, revolutionary fervor and entangled contradictions. Mackie’s assertions about the ways Mozart’s identification with his era come through in the music are intriguing and insightful, even when overly sweeping and, at times, too speculative.
“Say Anarcha” is an important book and deserves to be widely read, especially by those in medicine. I challenge any Sims supporters to read it and continue to defend his ethics. At a certain point, Hallman reveals that Sims was inspired partly by his contemporary P.T. Barnum, the greatest showman on earth. This makes perfect sense, because in many ways Sims was the original American medical huckster.