Zero point zero zero zero zero zero zero two percent
There should be a word for all the things that you wish you had known in the past. I had to think of that after reading an article about a man I saw on TV when I was a kid. It was possibly the most boring and old-fashioned quiz show you could imagine. I will spare you the details. But the article informed me that the moderator, a man named Willi Lembke, was Jewish (the article is in German, use your browser’s translate function to read it).
Aged 19, he had gone into hiding at a farm in Bavaria, to emerge 12 years later again. And when US troops approached the village in 1945, he told villagers “don’t worry about it, I can speak English, I’ll talk to them”. He basically covered for the many Nazis there, and he later refused to talk about this part of his past.
“I believe in the good in people,“ he is supposed to have quipped, “it’s got to be in there somewhere. So little of it emerges.” And so he went on to become a journalist, and later he entertained the Germans — the same Germans that only decades earlier would have had him killed.
I’m a pretty forgiving person, but I’m pretty certain that’s not something I could have done.
So it was not only the Nazis who refused to talk about their past when I was little, it was also Jewish survivors like Lembke (not even part of his family knew), worried about being stigmatized, the article says, or ashamed that they had survived.
I wish I would have known about this much earlier.
How do you translate a book that was written by a Zainichi Korean (a person born and raised in Japan who still only has South Korean citizenship because of Japan’s nationalist laws), a book that includes not only pretty complicated Japanese but also some Korean (and that was first serialized in parallel in a Japanese and a Korean newspaper)? Having started reading Yu Miri’s The End of August, I looked around what material I could find about it, and I came across this interview with the translator. The translation took three years.
And what do you do if you’re a photographer, and your old prints are fading? In other words, how do you keep your collectors happy?
“The US photographer Cindy Sherman has launched a new initiative to preserve the physical and conceptual integrity of her work. The Cindy Sherman Legacy Project (CSLP) […] introduces a formal process for condition assessments and the controlled replacement of damaged prints, and will also host an online catalogue raisonné documenting her career.” (source)
I bet you didn’t know this: “Julia Margaret Pattle was born in what was then Calcutta to a British expatriate family; her father worked for the all-powerful East India Company. Her much older husband, the British jurist Charles Hay Cameron, had helped write the penal code for the Indian Raj before buying a coffee plantation in Ceylon (present-day Sri Lanka).”
“[T]he canceled literary grants amount to $1,227,500—just 0.0000002 percent of the US government’s 2025 budget,” writes Adam Morgan. Zero point zero zero zero zero zero zero two percent doesn’t sound like much. But for many small publishing houses it’s the difference between being able to do what they’re doing and, well, not being able to do what they’re doing.
Zero point zero zero zero zero zero zero two percent — cultural vandalism, Trump/GOP style.
This will make you laugh: The Chicago Sun-Times newspaper published a summer guide with books to read. Only problem: some of the books don’t exist. Some dude had used “AI” to produce the list.
On the one hand, that’s pretty bad. On the other hand, it reminded me of Stanisław Lem's fictitious criticism of nonexistent books, actual book reviews written by the Polish writer.
I briefly considered writing fictitious criticism of nonexistent photobooks. But I don’t know whether I could pull that off, given that a) I’m probably not inventive enough and b) a lot of people wouldn’t be able to tell (after all, who can keep track of all those photobooks that are being published?).
This image, processed by Nathan Williams:
… reminded me of this photograph, taken by Edward Steichen:
Different moon, though.
“The Napalm Girl photograph,” writes Som-Mai Nguyen,”has left an indelible mark on how speech is governed, despite never establishing court precedent at all.”
Leif Weatherby wrote a length but incredibly important article about “AI” that for sure you want to read. No, it’s not running along the lines of what you’ve read before:
Rather than the dream of machine intelligence, we are witnessing the disastrous political consequences of a different dream, one of a total bureaucracy that operates in the all-but-invisible interstices of the software we have come to rely on. The way that such a system breaks basic elements of our social contract is a feature, not a bug.
More “AI”, and it’s simultaneously funny, frightening, and infuriating: Amanda Guinzburg spoke with ChatGPT, “asking whether it could help me choose several of my own essays to link in a query letter I intended to send to an agent.”
I already used the following essay in an article I wrote, but maybe you haven’t seen it. “While institutions—MFA programs, lit mags, publishing houses—have done much to include and elevate underrepresented groups on the basis of
race, gender, or sexual orientation,” writes Lee Cole, “they’ve done far less to include and elevate those from underrepresented class backgrounds.”
And that is the end of another email from my Mailing List. Sometimes, a lot of them arrive quickly. Sometimes, it takes a little while.
In any case and as always: thank you for reading!
— Jörg