Author: F. Springer File Type: epub p itemprop=description Een nostalgische reis brengt een oud-diplomaat en zijn vrouw Juultje terug naar Bangkok, waar hij eind jaren zestig werkte op de ambassade. Alles is er bijna onherkenbaar veranderd. Toch vindt Juultje bij toeval het toenmalige huis van de Nederlandse zakenman Van Dreumen. Haar echtgenoot had vroeger diens huwelijk gesloten met een Australische vrouw, die Van Dreumen alleen uit correspondentie kende. Meer uit nieuwsgierigheid dan uit vriendschap bellen ze aan. Dertig jaar later blijkt de zakenman nog steeds in Bangkok te wonen. De confrontatie met deze schim uit het verleden levert een ongemakkelijke, ja zelfs pijnlijke ontmoeting op. Pas later beseffen Juultje en haar man dat zij op dat moment oog in oog hadden gestaan met wat zonder overdrijving eeuwige liefde genoemd kan worden.Bangkok, een elegie is een ontroerend liefdesverhaal over weemoed en verlangen naar wat verloren is en nooit meer terugkomt. De novelle was opgenomen in Allemaal gelogen, de verhalenbundel ter gelegenheid van Springers zeventigste verjaardag. Dit meesterwerkje verdient echter zonder meer een eigen gezicht. Recencie(s) De ondertitel - een elegie- zet de toon van dit korte verhaal als een lyrisch dichtstuk waarin de aangename herinnering aan hetgeen men vroeger bezat, afwisselt met treurigheid om het verlies ervan (Van Dale). Na de beeindiging van zijn diplomatieke loopbaan keert de auteur (1932) terug naar vindplaatsen van herinneringen. Dat zagen we al in Kandy (1998), met als ondertitel een terugtocht en in Bangkok luidt de eerste zin “In het najaar van 1990 reisden Juultje en ik terug naar vroegere pleisterplaatsen in ons leven.” Bij F. Springer (pseudoniem van Carel Jan Schneider) gaat het niet zozeer om het plot, de ontknoping, maar om het verhaal zelf. Dat zet hij neer met heldere pennenstreken, in de setting van de altijd weemoedig stemmende tropische, postkoloniale sferen. Over oude mensen en de dingen die voorbij gingen. Met humor die zijn scherpte krijgt door de naastliggende ontgoocheling. Boeiend van A tot Z. De novelle maakte al eerder deel uit van de bundel Allemaal gelogen (2002). Normale druk.Drs. P. van der Haar (source Bol.com)

Author: Treva B. Lindsey File Type: pdf This project examines New Negro womanhood in Washington, DC through various examples of African American women challenging white supremacy, intra-racial sexism, and heteropatriarchy. Treva Lindsey defines New Negro womanhood as a mosaic, authorial, and constitutive individual and collective identity inhabited by African American women seeking to transform themselves and their communities through demanding autonomy and equality for African American women. The New Negro woman invested in upending racial, gender, and class inequality and included race women, blues women, playwrights, domestics, teachers, mothers, sex workers, policy workers, beauticians, fortune tellers, suffragists, same-gender couples, artists, activists, and innovators. From these differing but interconnected African American womens spaces comes an urban, cultural history of the early twentieth century struggles for freedom and equality that marked the New Negro era in the nations capital. Washington provided a unique space in which such a vision of equality could emerge and sustain. In the face of the continued pernicious effects of Jim Crow racism and perpetual and institutional racism and sexism, Lindsey demonstrates how African American women in Washington made significant strides towards a more equal and dynamic urban center. Witnessing the possibility of social and political change empowered New Negro women of Washington to struggle for the kind of city, nation, and world they envisioned in political, social, and cultural ways.--Provided by publisher.

Author: John Haskell File Type: epub A bewitching collection of short fiction-haunting and hypnotic meditations on art, movies, literature, and lifeA circus elephant named Topsy was executed at Coney Island in the year 1900 for killing a man. Thats true. So is the life of Saartjie (Sar-key) Baartman, the Hottentot Venus, who was herself a circus act in the first half of the nineteenth century. What is myth is the Indian god Ganesha, whose head was lopped off by his father, Shiva, and replaced-with an elephants head-by his disconsolate mother, Parvati. In John Haskells expert hands, these three curious strands are ingeniously woven together in one story called Elephant Feelings.And so it goes with the rest of these dreamy meditations on the lives of artists, actors, writers, and musicians who are at once painfully human and larger than life. In Dream of a Clean Slate, Jackson Pollock the man struggles with the separation he feels from Jackson Pollock the artist in The Judgment of Psycho, Haskell probes the sexual dynamic of Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins in Psycho, and then delves into a different relationship, the one between Hector and Paris in the Iliad Orson Welles presides over the long story Crimes at Midnight, a tense evocation of desire and its consequences. Haskell has written a series of myths for modern times, stories about the ways in which we are distant from ourselves and about the way art can sometimes help us imagine other worlds and other possibilities. It is an astonishing debut.**From Publishers WeeklyHaskell evades definition in his audacious debut collection, creating an innovative blend of fact and fiction and deliberately eliding the difference between them. Most of the nine stories are imaginative extrapolations of the lives of real people (or, in some cases, real animals), such as the eponymous painter and his wife, Lee Krasner Psycho stars Janet Leigh and Anthony Perkins Laika, the first dog in space and Saartjie, the early 19th-century South African woman brought to London as the famous sideshow attraction the Hottentot Venus. Haskell mixes anecdotes from the lives of these artists and celebrities with fictitious events to compose deceptively simple vignettes in which he distills and clarifies moments of intense psychological struggle. Jackson Pollock sees a beautiful woman as he enters a bar in Dream of a Clean Slate, but he was feeling a thing he called nervousness, a feeling in his body that he didnt like, so he stopped at the bar for a drink, a whiskey... part of him--his desire-goes to the girl, and the rest of him stays at the bar, drinking and trembling. In The Faces of Joan of Arc, Mercedes McCambridge, the voice of the devil in The Exorcist, tries vainly to stop drinking actress Renee Falconetti tries to understand her role as the title character in The Passion of Joan of Arc and an aging Hedy Lamarr shoplifts a tawdry department store dress. Elephant Feelings weaves together the stories of the Hottentot Venus Topsy, the elephant whose electrocution was famously captured on film in the 1900s and the Indian god Ganesh, half man, half elephant. Betrayal and humiliation, coupled with an inability to communicate, drives all three to acts of violent rage. Haskell subtly explores questions of exploitation and agency through the eyes of his celebrity characters, winking all the while at his own attempts to get into their heads. His hypnotic writing creates its own genre, unsettling and quietly bizarre. 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Booklist Jackson Pollack created images of passion and mystery and sparked a new fervor for abstraction in the art world. Similarly, Haskells collection of stories--not quite fiction, not always true--equally tells of passions, mystery, and abstraction. He takes real-life situations Pollack himself trying to separate the man from the artist in Dream of a Clean Slate the infamous Coney Island man-killing elephant, Topsy, in the year 1900 and the fabled Hottentot Venus, an African woman whose body was a Parisian circus spectacle, both seek the true love of a man in Elephant Feelings Janet Leighs character in Psycho and her relationship with Anthony Perkins character is analyzed and romanticized in The Judgment of Psycho Glenn Goulds hypochondria is examined in Glenn Gould in Six Parts and the tribulations of Laika, the Russian dog that was the first animal in space, are addressed in Good World. These are just a few of the wonderful, quirky, even extraordinary tales that intersperse Hollywood gossip with plumbing the depths of the human spirit. Michael Spinella American Library Association. lt

Author: Maple Razsa File Type: pdf Bastards of Utopia, the companion to a feature documentary film of the same name, explores the experiences and political imagination of young radical activists in the former Yugoslavia, participants in what they call alterglobalization or globalization from below. Ethnographer Maple Razsa follows individual activists from the transnational protests against globalization of the early 2000s through the Occupy encampments. His portrayal of activism is both empathetic and unflinchingan engaged, elegant meditation on the struggle to re-imagine leftist politics and the power of a countrys youth. More information on the film can be found at www.der.orgfilmsbastards-of-utopia.html