a place / in which the living shows itself visibly over the ordering / where the impossibility of a destruction turns again and again blossoms from its opposite / from the conceivable consequences of the non-sterile into the bold future. – from Lois Weinberger ‘In the Geography of Deer and Mole’, in DEBRIS FIELD: ERKUNDUNGEN […]

My poor fragile white male librarian! I always feel for him on those days, like Wednesday this week, when he comes home, all twitchy with nervous energy, standing before the shelves I haunt with some kind of earnest expectancy in the hope of finding there some answer to a question he had just been confronted […]

As a library-ghost, I spend a considerable amount of time in my afterlife reflecting on life and death, not only my own, but also as part of the relationship between the books on these shelves I haunt. For example, and I can understand if you don’t believe me, but I feel a distinct shift from […]

The land is civilized, free, prosperous, law-abiding, moderate and cautious. Its many virtues may be summarized as the “banality of the good.” Asked by the tabloid BILD-Zeitung what feelings Germany awakens inher, Angela Merkel once famously replied, “I think of well-sealed windows! No other country can make such well-sealed and nice windows.” Timothy Garton-Ash, “The […]