Abwesenheit: Gedichte by Wolfgang Hilbig My rating: 5 of 5 stars The poems in abwesenheit (translated: absence) range from what appear to be straight forward denunciations of the socialist police state Wolfgang Hilbig was living in when he wrote them (1965 to 1977), to very lyrical metaphors with image densities approaching that of the poetry […]
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Wolfgang Hilbig’s first collected volume of poetry, published by S. Fischer, was titled abwesenheit — in English absence. Hilbig grew up in East Germany, where writing and individual expression of any kind was subject to review and control by state functionaries. Michael Opitz, of one of Wolfgang Hilbig’s biographers, went digging through East German Stasi […]
Thanks to Tim Stegall for writing some pretty awesome music articles, many of which show up on Alternative Press. It takes me hours to read articles like this. Hours. I read. I listen to a song. I listen to the song again. I think about how the song affected my life. Often they are new […]
Recently browsing the New Direction’s author list, I saw a title by Nathanial Tarn, The Hölderliniae. This attracted me immediately, since my early encounter with Friedrich Hölderlin when I was still in the earlier stages of learning German had been quite challenging. There is a special density to his poetry, his unregulated meter, and no […]
How the mistakes and missteps of two men, one nearly 60 years old and the other 30, contributed to — or even caused — the English language debut of one of the most renowned and powerful German writers in recent history to be delayed by a quarter of a century: In the fall of 1989 […]
I wrote One Punk Summer in Berlin. I was spending a year on an exchange program between the University of Texas and the Freie Universität Berlin. I arrived just days before reunification. Pieces of the communist police state’s skeleton were still to be seen: A ransacked Checkpoint Charlie that had been taken over by the […]
I once watched a comedy film that had a scene where two people climb into a convertible sports car. An utterly cavalier man with a ridiculous thin-line mustache and a comical French accent turns to the passenger and says: “The first rule of driving is that what is behind you does not matter!” He then […]
Building even a simple airplane is a tremendously daunting challenge. Just contemplating such an endeavor the builder can imagine a host of his friends and family raising their eyebrows in a suspicious frown as they rhetorically ask: “Who DOES that?” To those unfamiliar this may seem a stretch: Building a plane is a kind of […]
Worked on my slats. The parts supplied are different than the drawings. In particular the slat support piece which is shaped differently, and the skin has two slots instead of one. I’d looked at the plans carefully and looked at the parts, and figured and scratched my head about how to make the L-angle properly. […]
I spent a fair bit of time reviewing the SPA Corvair Engine Assembly Manual before setting to work on assembling the pistons / rods / rings / cylinders. I reread the main section multiple times. It wasn’t like work, but it was not as fun and putting the instructions and theory into practice a few […]