“How strange it is to be young when one is old,” confesses Edgar Morin, and it is very relevant now that he is somewhere in Eternity. A couple of book fairs ago, in Frankfurt, we discovered Seeds of Sagacity, a title we published in March of this year in…
France and Europe have lost one of their most distinguished intellectuals, a witness and keen observer of the 20th and 21st centuries, who helped to decipher them. The sociologist and philosopher Edgar Morin, theorist of “complex thought,” a figure of the anti-Nazi resistance during World War II, died yesterday at the age of 104, his wife reported this Saturday. Morin remained active, publishing books, almost until the end.
An Extraordinary Plenary Session of the Algete City Council approved yesterday, Thursday, to remove the name of Joan Manuel Serrat from a municipal building, to rename it after a resident, who will be declared Favorite Son of the Town of Algete.
When her husband died two years ago, Siri Hustvedt (Minnesota, 1955) began writing Ghost Stories (Seix Barral/Edicions 62), a book that helped her face the abyss of “vanished time,” start the grieving process, and adjust to life alone after 43 years of marriage. If the one who left, a victim of cancer that the author describes with harshness but without losing her sense of humor, had not been Paul Auster, it would be the same, she admits, because this work is not a biography of the novelist, but a lost love song. “The most painful reality in this world is not loving someone and losing them to death, but the inability to love,” she argues.
In 1973, the advertiser Lluís Bassat was walking down Consell de Cent street when, at the height of the Sala Adrià, which was run by Francesc Mestre, an exhibition by Serra de Rivera caught his attention. Inside awaited Bañista, an enigmatic painting (the naked figure of a woman in a flooded room who sinks an arm into the water that reaches halfway up her leg) that not only stole his heart but changed his life. That afternoon he not only left with the canvas under his arm but also with 35% ownership of the gallery (he later convinced seven friends to acquire another 35%), and until 1980, when it closed its doors, they organized more than eighty exhibitions. “There I began to get to know the artists; and with my wife, Carmen, we bought one or two works from each of them. And so, almost unintentionally, we built a collection that today has more than 3,000 works.”
Felix Gonzalez-Torres -so, without accents and with a hyphen to join his two last names into one- was a child when, in 1971, he was in Madrid for the first time, where he arrived from Cuba, sent by his family to keep him away from the Castro regime. Twenty years later, in 1991, he returned and consummated a “sweet revenge,” it is not known against what or whom, which now, more than three decades later, is echoed by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
The workers of the Consorci de Biblioteques de Barcelona have started an indefinite strike this Tuesday to protest the lack of progress in the negotiation process with the City Council regarding their working conditions, and 37 of the 40 centers in the city have not opened; only the libraries of Collserola-Josep Miracle, Canyelles-M. Àngels Rivas, and Joan Miró have remained operational.
The Madrid Municipal Police have arrested playwright and theater director Ramón Fernández Paso as the alleged perpetrator of a sexual assault on a minor at the intersection of Alcalá Street and Paseo del Prado in Madrid, according to police sources.
Timothy Garton Ash (London, 1955) has documented live the European history of the last four decades from his dual role as historian and journalist. Professor of European Studies at the University of Oxford, he has outlined in his books a history of the European present that he has compiled in books such as Freedom of Speech, Facts Are Subversive, or his own History of the Present, all published by Tusquets. A representative of the old enlightened liberalism, he studied Modern History at Oxford, where he became interested in the German resistance to Hitler, which led him to live in Berlin and to gain an in-depth knowledge of the countries of the former Eastern Europe. Precisely in his book The Magic Lantern (Taurus) he narrates the moment when Eastern Europe on the other side of the Berlin Wall begins to falter, a moment he experiences firsthand, including the first free elections in Poland.
Faceless women… or rather with their faces hidden by hair, veiled by dresses, or even covered by a still life. The Polish painter Ewa Juszkiewicz presents about twenty unsettling portraits at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum, from this May 26th until next September 6th, that will not leave visitors indifferent.