"Numbness mattered, it was what the Nazis did, made people feel like things were moving too fast to stop and though unpleasant and eventually terrifying and appalling, were probably impossible to do anything about. She'd been reading a book by Philip Guston. On 23 October 1968, Guston had been in conversation with Morton Feldman at the New York Studio School. He'd been thinking a lot about the Holocaust, he said, especially the concentration camp Treblinka. It worked, the mass killing, he told Feldman, because the Nazis deliberately induced numbness on both sides, in the victims and also the tormentors. And yet a small group of prisoners had managed to escape. Imagine what a process it was to unnumb yourself, he said, to see it as it actually was. That's the only reason to be an artist; to escape, to bear witness to this."
~~ from Crudo by Olivia Laing
Alex Kudera’s award-winning novel, Fight for Your Long Day (Atticus Books), was drafted in a walk-in closet during a summer in Seoul, South Korea. Auggie’s Revenge (Beating Windward Press) is his second novel. His numerous short stories include “Frade Killed Ellen” (Dutch Kills Press), “Bombing from Above” (Heavy Feather Review), and “A Thanksgiving” (Eclectica Magazine).
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In theory, a book isn't alive unless it's snuggled comfortably in the reading bin in the bathroom at Oprah's or any sitting Pres...
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Reading Little White Duck: A Childhood in China led me to Wuhan, China, a large sprawling city dissected by a huge river that Chairman Mao ...
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And Duffleman has the nerve to think he has problems! Is he a homeless man breaking into and reopening a bar? No. Is he earning over $10K a...
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I've been reading Zone by Mathias Enard, tired sometimes and spacing out, but always some vivid description or series of incisive fused...
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I stumbled upon a couple articles on Atlantic City's current casino "contraction," here and here , and it sounds like the bea...
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It's always a bit disappointing to see these somewhat simplistic articles get a shiny new website when my more developed and nuanced n...
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" Frade Killed Ellen " is featured at GoodKindles today and received a full review at Goodreads earlier in the week. Look ... -
Two articles on retail work in America recently caught my eye: here and here .
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Marcus Hayes, along with the comments that follow, pretty much sums up the brutality, angst, glory, forgiveness, sin, exploitation, joy, pai...
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Lavinia Ludlow's Single Stroke Seven drops on March 1, and I had a chance to ask her questions about the writing life, unaffordable ho...
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