Sailing against the tide
In George Orwell’s classic novel “1984”, the records of past history are constantly being modified by workers at the Ministry of Truth. As a Party member observes: “He who controls the past, controls the present. He who controls the present, controls the future.” Orwell had been, of course, inspired by Soviet communism, where Stalin would…
We have published three new books by our imprint Contrarium. The first one is a bilingual Spanish-English edition of a selection of Horacio Quiroga’s short stories. Quiroga was a South American master of the short story genre. Many of the stories presented here are translated into English for the first time. Others are classics but…
Pablo is dead. Who is Pablo, you may ask? I had no idea either, but the main street downtown suddenly appeared full of flowers and written notes and candles and teddy bears. “R.I.P. Pablo”, said a graffiti in the shape of a heart. I started to think he was a victim of terrorism. Turns out,…
While most people were understandably driven to fear, rage or despair over the most recent massacres in that eternal conflict in the Middle East, while thousands were protesting in the streets for their preferred side and a few were even driven to violence over it, I, after an initial panic, spent my time trying to…
I knew something was afoot when they said that it was “Israel’s 911”. I mean, I guess it depends if you believe the official narrative or not. But for those of us who don’t necessarily believe the official story, this is a red flag. Now, I’m not saying people didn’t die. People also died in…
In February 2022, no one expected that Covid would suddenly disappear from the headlines from one day to the next due to some war in the Ukraine. In October 2023, I guess few people were expecting that the Ukraine war would suddenly disappear from the news because of another war between Israelis and Arabs, although…
Language as a home “The Russian language is my homeland”, wrote the great poet Anna Akhmatova. She was born in Odessa but lived mostly in Saint Petersburg. She descended from Ukrainian cossacks on her father’s side and from Russian nobility on her mother’s side. She could have escaped during the 1917 Revolution, as friends of…
The Criterion channel has been doing a Hal Hartley retrospective, so I decided to watch or re-watch some of his films. As you may know, Hartley was one of the indie cinema darlings of the early 1990s, together with the likes of Jim Jarmusch and others. Jarmusch is still around, but Hal Hartley, which had…
One of the strangest aspects of contemporary pop culture is how dark a lot of it is, and how drenched it has become in all kinds of occult symbolism. I am way too old to personally follow pop music, and I don’t really watch most Hollywood movies anymore either, but sites such as Vigilant Citizen,…
Source: Ansa, Corriere The province of Milan was confirmed at the top in a recent 2022 Crime Index among 107 Italian provinces. It is the territory with the most thefts for every 100 thousand inhabitants, especially in shops and parked cars; the metropolitan city is also the seventh in reports of sexual violence, second for…