Stalin Prize in Architecture

It’s always intriguing to look at the plans for the Stalin Prize that were not realised. Many were and you can travel across Eastern Europe and the former USSR to see many of them still in use, such as glorious constructions of Stalin Baroque. But when you look at the projects that were dreamed, planned, and even approved, but never built for whatever reason, you realise how massive the imagination really was between the 1930s and 1950s. A couple of my favourites, but you will find more here.

This one was for the Palace of Technology:

This one for the Aeroflot headquarters:

And here is a stunning residential building in Uprising Square:

(ht sk)

 

Pølser vs Würste: How the Danes Outdo the Germans

The Germans may have their Würste, in all manner of intriguing formations, as I have noted earlier. But on one thing at least the Danes comprehensively beat the Germans – in the grossness of their sausages. To wit:

They call this a Fransk Hotdog, but it looks more like a dog’s dick. Note the ring of mayonnaise at the base.

Even more inventive is:

Correct me if I am wrong, but that bun looks remarkably like a pair of bum cheeks.

P.S. Given the popularity of these items and given the obvious fact that they are decidedly bad for you, I am struggling to see how the infamous homo economicus fits into this picture. Isn’t he supposed to determine, rationally, what is to his own benefit?

 

Uruk, a megacity?

Walking around Berlin, you can’t help notice the advertisements for a new show at the Pergamon Museum, called ‘Uruk Megacity‘. While you might forgive the curators for trying to lure visitors, the question is whether Uruk was really a city, let alone a mega-city. The walls themselves at the greatest expanse in the fourth millennium encompassed 6 square kilometres. Huge? More like a country town. Estimating population is a bit like divination, so estimates range from 20,000 to 50,000 (the top end is little fanciful). A decent town, perhaps, or even a small city. Except that this is the total population of the whole city-state of Uruk, which was really a rather modest affair. At a stretch, you may want to argue that by comparison with other places, it counts as a city, where most of the few centres were around 3000 each. But ‘mega-city’ is really pushing it. Then again, ‘Uruk, Megatown’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it.

 

Bereft of a new idea? Produce a neologism for an old one. On Sara Ahmed’s ‘stickyness’

Sara Ahmed, the icon of liberal progressive thought, has proposed the theoretical neologism of ‘stickyness’. It’s not when honey drips on your fingers, or when you wear your undies for a week. It concerns words and ideas that are associated with a term. She proposes this in relation to race, in which a certain term has all sorts of other things that ‘stick’ to it.

Original? Hardly. I do believe that is known as connotation in semiotic circles, but it also has a much more robust presence in the work of someone like G.E.M. de Ste. Croix. Here class is the key. When Plato asks, ‘what is good?’, it is hardly an innocent term, for it evokes all manner of ruling class assumptions, in opposition to the despised slaves and rural labourers.

 

Berlin moments

I arrived in Berlin, just in time for Fest der Linken, but this was prefaced by a sign in a railway station toilet:

 

Ah yes, the spirit of the DDR lives on. In Rosa Luxemburg Platz, Die Linke and many communist groups from other parts of Europe were present:

There was an old friend:

He eventually went home, to bed in a local left-wing terror nest:

But then, Germans will be Germans … I happened upon this in the next toilet I visited:

 

Great quotes from Q

I am close to completing my article on the novel Q. Not only does it breathe the spirit of Engels, Kaustky and Bloch on the revolutionary decades of the Reformation (as well as expressing Gramsci’s longing that the Reformation had happened in Italy too), but the authors obviously enjoyed writing the thing. So a few select morsels:

On memory:

The road through memories is hazardous and bumpy: they’re always ready to betray you (105).

April just makes me scratch my scars: the geographical map of lost battles (114).

A bag full of trinkets rolling out by chance and finally amazing you, as though you weren’t the one who picked them up and turned them into precious objects (251).

On prophets:

But during these past ten years I’ve known so many of them, on every street corner, in every brothel, in the remotest churches. My peregrinations have been so studded with those encounters that I could write a treatise about them. Some of them were merely charlatans and actors, others believed in their own sincere terror, but only a very few had the stuff of prophets, the brilliance, the ardour, the courage to repaint John’s great fresco in the souls of men. They were capable of choosing the right words, seizing situations, taking the gravity of the moment and filling it with the imminent event, bringing it into the present moment (138).

A beggar among beggars, with a load of unbearable letters, memories and suspicions (119).

I haven’t done too badly as an exterminating angel (149).

On theology:

A silent fart in the divine plan (172).

They arrived in a black rage, they went home pissed as farts (208).

On travel:

You just feel that things can’t go on like this, that the walls, inside and out, are getting too close for you, and that your mind needs some fresh air, your body needs to feel the miles passing beneath you (235).

 

Every day quarrelling in the ancient Near East

We have already had the garden variety domestic squabble, in which women regularly crushed their men’s testicles. Some other common features of arguments have also turned. To begin with, there’s biting from the laws of Eshnunna:

If a man bites the nose of another man and thus cuts it off, he shall weigh out and deliver 60 shekels of silver; an eye – 60 shekels; a tooth – 30 shekels; an ear – 30 shekels; a slap to the cheek – he shall weigh out and deliver 10 shekels.

No wonder they wore out their teeth so early. This one is perhaps my favourite, from the Hittite laws:

If anyone steals a door in a quarrel, he shall replace everything that may get lost in the house, and he shall pay 40 shekels of silver.

That is the first thing that comes mind if I’m in a quarrel: I’ll steal his door!