From Chekhov's "Sakhalin"

 To decorate the walls they use sweet-papers, labels from vodka bottles and cigarette packets, and this deficiency does not tally at all with the substantial bed and painted floors. But what can be done about it? There is a high demand for artistry here, but God has not supplied the artists.

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Tarkovsky's Death and the Film "Stalker"

Several people involved in the film production — including Tarkovsky — had met deaths, which some crew members attribute to the film's long, arduous shooting schedule in toxic locations. Sound designer Vladimir Sharun recalls: We were shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Jägala with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when Larisa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris. [ 6 ]   [From Wikipedia:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(film )]
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TÜBINGEN, JANUARY by Paul Celan

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Hitchcock's Soda City

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Coetzee's "Costello": Koba the Bear and Paul West

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Lesson 6: The Problem of Evil . Ok, but not my fave chapter: traverses an age-old subject and doesn't turn up much that is new (I mean Hannah Arendt new). One bit I dog-eared (also threw a Howgarthian line in with an exclamation mark) because I liked it so much (especially if I could widen its scope). The underlining is mine:    The routine censorship paper is liberal in its ideas, with perhaps a touch of the Kulturpessimismus  that has marked her thinking of late:  the civilization of the West is based on belief in unlimited and illimitable endeavour; it is too late for us to do anything about that, we must simply hold on tight and go wherever the ride takes us. It is on the subject of the illimitable that her opinions seem to be undergoing a quiet change. Reading West's book has contributed to that change, she suspects, though it is possible the change would have happened anyway, for reasons that are more obscure to her. Specifically, she is no longer sure that people are
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