illiteratus.com
Unauthorised Translations. Fractured Philology.
Category: Reflections
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You were very sick during that year. Bedridden in the hospital, unable to walk, you lay staring at the black TV screen in the room. The TV was off. The flat screen, slightly tilted, on the wall like a painting not properly hung. The book you had with you contained an essay titled Discovery of…
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Spinach as Pharmakon At first glance, Popeye the Sailor seems harmless: a comic celebration of spinach, a cartoon moral about the virtues of healthy eating. Yet beneath its slapstick repetitions lies a darker structure. Popeye is not simply nourished by spinach; he is dependent on it. He cannot triumph without the can. Read allegorically, Popeye…
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At times, reading Walter Benjamin, or reading about him, brings me back to that afternoon when she was cooking in the kitchen. The copy I had was from the school library. I remember a renowned local art historian, during some gathering, dismissively calling the library collection “wretched,” unaware, perhaps, that John had asked the library…
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Not all mirrors are made of glass. But under certain lighting conditions, glass becomes a mirror. I am not thinking of convex or concave surfaces, of a distorted reflection on a spoon, a glass half-filled with water, or the sun glinting off the hood of a car, but only of flat panes that at night,…
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I first encountered the accordion gate not as an object of nostalgia in films or photographs, but as a concrete entity, a noise-emitting presence. On humid mornings, the clatter of steel folding open was part of the street’s language. These gates were neither antique nor modern; they simply were. In shopfronts, in back alleys, they folded,…
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