#eccentric-characters

#eccentric-characters

A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, silent, empty, pure white, and, at the end of it, the huge and majestic form of Saint Paul's Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes a real-life snow globe.

"One must put himself in the period... crime had a certain familiarity from its repetition through time.... That's what they were like, unscrupulous. So was I. And since we are speaking about it, so was the Renaissance."

My mother bought me Stanley Bagshaw and the Short-sighted Football Trainer by Bob Wilson. I grew up thinking he was the same Bob Wilson who played in goal for Arsenal and presented sport on ITV.

Naked mermaids and prancing horses, silk carrots and unshelled peanuts, gilded elephant trunks, drums and masks are just a few of the buttons. The V&A's lavish spring show is a weird and wonderful tumble down the rabbit hole that is Schiaparelli, fashion's house of surrealism.

I think it probably started when I first made contact with Tom Clark. He was in England at graduate school and he asked me to be in a magazine he was starting. We somehow began talking about rock music and he subsequently sent me 45s by The Cream and Jimi Hendrix Experience, both groups being unknown to me.

Howard Jacobson writes characters at their wits' end; those characters are usually men, and those men are usually Jewish. Additionally, and problematically for both them and everyone around them, their collective wits are capacious: easily enlarged to allow idiosyncrasy to bloom into neurosis, preoccupation into obsession.

In 1836, Apaches raided a remote ranch near Janos, a tiny town on the northern fringes of the state of Chihuahua, in the newly independent republic of Mexico. The Natives absconded with some cattle, as well as with a young widow named Camila. Setting off in pursuit was José María Zuloaga, a taciturn lieutenant colonel in the Mexican army supported by a band of irregulars. Among them: a self-possessed teenager who served as an aide-de-camp, a pair of Yaqui brothers whose permanent address was the town jail, and a sharp-shooting nun named Elvira, who was actually a singer of zarzuelas dressed up in a habit.

All of us live in an age where we're bombarded by social media and artificial intelligence - when striving to be your authentic self becomes an increasingly difficult task. Yet, even if it has somehow become a common goal, it is unclear how many of us can truly define the "authenticity" that we say we are pursuing.

The best argument I can make for why I like reading fiction in translation is because it facilitates the psychedelic experience of encountering someone else's subjectivity twice over. The translator must act as a prismatic filter, faithfully attempting the impossible task of replicating someone else's experiences and ideas. To read in translation is to read two stories in harmony with each other: The one the author wants to tell and the one the translator has brought into your linguistic world.

So long as I manage to avoid lightbulbs or stay out of wine glasses, the buzzing will inevitably give way to silence. My wings will abruptly stop flapping and I'll careen towards the ground like an asteroid. I'll become a speck on a rug, a bit of debris absent-mindedly vacuumed up by someone who has no idea what adventures I've been on in the past minute.

Lying in my bed, I listened to what sounded like a woman screaming outside in the dark. I picked up my pen. A month of living in this Icelandic village and I was still unaccustomed to the impenetrable January gloom and the ferocity of the wind; its propensity to sound sentient. I had started to feel like the island was trying to tell me something, had a story it wanted me to write.

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At the end of the day [it's] similar to the Rorschach inkblot test. You see what you want to see. You might think it's speaking to you, but it's just your imagination.

They escaped persecution in the form of violent antisemitism and came to Canada with next to nothing. They built their lives from the ground up and understood, through lived experience, what the normalization of cruelty did to the human spirit, how quickly people can be swayed by the opinions of the day, and how easily one could forfeit the human capacity to stop and truly think about what one is doing.

Jodorowsky's most recent project is Alejandro Jodorowsky. Art Sin Fin (Taschen), two volumes in which he reviews his career, almost as boundless as it is surreal. Curated by editor and academic Donatien Grau, director of contemporary programs at the Louvre, this monograph is a work of art in itself and a manifesto that captures Jodorowsky's kaleidoscopic, mysterious, and dreamlike creative spirit across all his universes, from film and theater to poetry and comics, by way of philosophy and tarot.

Born in San Francisco as John Griffith Chaney on January 12, 1876, Jack London lived a life even more dramatic than those portrayed in many of his novels. His biological father never acknowledged paternity, shunning his mother while she was still pregnant. She would later marry Civil War veteran John London, who took him in as his stepson and gave him his surname. London grew up in severe financial hardship.

From figures with multiple legs and noodles for arms to frolicking trees, Paco Pomet summons the absurd. Known for his uncanny oil paintings rendered mostly in monochrome and enlivened by colorful details of overly stretchy limbs or celestial objects, a sense of nostalgia greets surreal scenarios. The artist often derives his imagery from vintage black-and-white photographs, adding an absurd dimension to history.

If Heaven, according to Talking Heads, is the place where nothing ever happens, the Bardo, according to George Saunders, is as jam-packed and frantic as Costco on Black Friday. We Saunders fans have been to the Bardo before that suspended state between life and death where, according to Tibetan Buddhism, a person's self-awareness helps determine what kind of existence they'll enter next.

Szilveszter Makó 's enigmatic photographs carry layers of mystery and introspection. Standing inside curious block-like backdrops and lain against two-dimensional fields of color and texture, his subjects seamlessly meld into stories in which every detail carries intention. Taking inspiration from art history, the Milan-based artist references Surrealism and grotesque art through his use of chiaroscuro effects via light exploration and contrasting earth tones.