Erik Stattin - mymarkup.se

Den vilda trädgården

2026-04-19T00:00:00Z

Jag kommer tillbaka till min gamla dröm om Walter Benjamin och en notering jag hade från Hisham Matars roman My Friends. Den här trädgården som nämns – Jardin sauvage Saint-Vincent – låter som den perfekta miljön att förankra berättelsen:

It was a sunny day. He suggested we walk to the Jardin sauvage Saint-Vincent, a small park behind the Sacré-Cœur in Montmartre. “A wild garden,” he said. “Almost always closed, but shall we try?”

He proceeded to tell me about the garden, how it was part of an old piece of fallow land, that the trees, plants, and flowers were all self-sown. “A little wild meadow locked inside the city.”

Apropå Benjamin så kom en bok förra året ut i Tyskland – Das Pariser Adressbuch. Eine Biographie des Exils im Spiegel – av Georg Wiesing-Brandes. Den verkar utgå ifrån Benjamins adressbok under perioden han bodde i Paris och inventerar det nätverk av personer som han interagerade med. Översatt från en recension:

Historien om hans exil har berättats många gånger – men aldrig som här. Ty vad som nykert presenterar sig som "Den parisiska adressboken" är den grundligaste, mångsidigaste och färgrikaste biografi över Benjamins parisår som någonsin funnits. Källan är ett litet grönt adressbok i läder, nu förvarad i Benjamin-arkivet i Berlin, i det för Benjamin typiska miniatyrformatet sju gånger 4,4 centimeter, inköpt i början av exilen i ett parisiskt pappershandel. Bara 25 sidor innehåller anteckningar, resten är tomt. Men vad litteraturvetaren Georg Wiesing-Brandes gör av dessa sidor är fenomenalt: varje adress av de drygt trehundra en ledtråd, varje namn en historia.

Från en annan recension:

So entstehen in gänzlich unterschiedlicher Länge Dutzende biografische Einträge – neben den ‚üblichen Verdächtigen‘ wie Adorno, Arendt, Brecht und Horkheimer auch zu Johannes R. Becher und persönlichen Freunden wie Alfred Cohn oder zum Arzt Camille Dausse. Das Pariser Exil, weit über Benjamin hinaus, gewinnt so an enormer detailreicher Tiefe – mitnichten war Benjamin hier einsam oder isoliert, im Gegenteil. Man kann ihn als gut vernetzt sehen. Es war jedoch seine Eigenart, die verschiedenen Kreise seiner Freunde, Bekannten und Kontakte voneinander isoliert zu halten, auch wenn es viele Überlappungen gab. Er nahm sowohl persönlich als auch brieflich Anteil an politischen, literarischen, persönlichen Zusammentreffen, Initiativen, Auseinandersetzungen und Diskussionen. Nicht alle der aufgeführten Personen hat er persönlich getroffen – bei einigen lässt sich gar nicht ausmachen, warum sie im Adressbuch standen, bei wenigen ist außer den Namen nichts Weiteres bekannt. Man erfährt viel Persönliches über die Beteiligten – von aufblühenden und zerbrechenden Bekannt- und Liebschaften über Befindlichkeiten, Drogenerfahrungen, tiefe Krisen bis hin zu politischen Entwicklungen, dramatischen Schicksalen, dem spurlosen Verschwinden und Reisen in den noch freien Teilen Europas (oder ins stalinistische Russland, wo so einige dann erschossen werden). Benjamin rang um jede bezahlte Veröffentlichung und versuchte, ins Französische übersetzt zu werden, – denn die wirtschaftliche Existenz, nicht nur seine, war mühselig, immer am Rande vollkommener Mittellosigkeit. Der Autor berichtet vom Entstehen und Zergehen von Zeitungsprojekten, von denen einige auch nur im Namen Bestand hatten, auch verschiedene politische wie literarische Organisationsversuche werden geschildert.

Glasblommorna från Dresden

2026-04-12T00:00:00Z

I Ben Lerners Transcription besöker berättaren Harvard Museum of Natural History med dess samling av blommor och frukter i glas, skapade av Leopold och Rudolf Blaschka. Det är som en hel estetisk filosofi inbäddad i de här två korta styckena:

We entered a large room full of dark wooden display cases containing thousands of anatomically perfect flowers in perpetual bloom, but also models of fruit in intricate, perpetual decay: strawberries turning ghostly with mold, peaches collapsing inwards on a branch, leaves curing at their edges. (I loved the names of the diseases on the placards, and read them aloud to Anisa as we moved among the specimens: brown rot, soft rot, blue mold, stony pit, pear scab, fire blight, leaft spot.)

I was astonished by what I saw. I couldn't quite believe that this moth orcchid was glass, that this pear blossom was lampwork, that these objects had been blown and shaped and painted, that these impossibly delicate things were the result of a thousand rapid choices and adjustments, movements of the hand. (That I'd recently read about the firebombing of Dresden in one of my classes with Thomas, seen slide of the ruined city, added another layer of pathos to the brittle flowers.) I joked with Anisa that these must be actual plants that some conceptual artist was claiming were glass—they probably replaces them each night—but the joke masked the flowering of a new sense: I kept seeing the flowers as organic one instans and as artificial the next, a kind of duck-rabbit effect, not between things the object might represent, but between nature and culture, the given and the constructed. And I carried this new way of looking, or this new hinge in my looking, outside the museum: when my sister dragged me camping, for instance, I was typically unmoved by "unspoiled" mountain views; after the glass flowers, I would see cracks in the rock face as penciled, as a history of small decisions, and then experience the view as beautiful. I could will myself to see the rose and pink of a sunset as applied in touched or stains and then revert to seeing it as natural; and so on. It was with Anisa that I first became conscious of this quiet but crucial technique, somewhere between a child's game, a CBT exercise, and a religion. Eventually I'd call this "fiction."

Uppdatering: vid sidan att man fick lära sig lite om vilka personer som kan ligga bakom Thomas i Transcription – Keith och Rosmarie Waldrop, förutom Alexander Kluge – så förekommer också scenen från museet i Maggie Millners recension hos n+1:

Distinguishing the world from simulations of the world, the virtual from the real—it’s a tough job for anyone, let alone for those of us who spend our lives writing texts in the service of “expression” or “creativity.” When your livelihood is language, it becomes almost impossible to tell where experience ends and representation begins. And when you’re a writer famous enough that your own work intervenes on the culture in a significant way, and changes the material and interpersonal conditions of your existence—well, you can go ahead and forget about separating art from life. Seen in that light, the instability of Lerner’s prose is not just a stylistic choice but also a painstaking effort at mimesis; the more perplexity we feel when we read it, the more accurately it reproduces the endlessly recursive experience of being a writer (or at least the kind of writer Lerner is). Here’s a telling sentence from his introduction to the 2019 reissue of Rosmarie’s novel, The Hanky of Pippin’s Daughter: “For a poet, ‘realism’ is at least as much about the reality of the work itself, its status as a made thing (a ‘machine made out of words,’ as William Carlos Williams put it) as it is about the vividness of the world that the words denote.”

Markeringar

2026-03-24T00:00:00Z

Ian McEwan, What We Can Know: A Novel

It was enough to observe and make a journal entry.

There was a fine account of it in a highly regarded book by P. Hughes-Hallett published in 2000.

Still, we know more about the twenty-first century than it knew about its own past. Specialists in literature pre-1990, like our university colleagues along the department corridor, know only as much about their writers of interest as scholars in Blundy’s time did. The wells, always meagre, were drunk dry long ago. For them, no new facts, only new angles. And still, they talk of their 500-year-old subjects, playwrights and poets, as if they knew them as neighbours. Up at our end, ‘Literature in English 1990 to 2030’, we have more facts and possibilities of interpretation than any of us could articulate in a dozen lifetimes. For the post-2030 crowd, which is most of the department, there’s even more. If civilisation manages to scrape through the next century as it scraped through the last, then we’ll need to find another hundred metres of corridor.

She had read too much. Everything was like something else. That was what weakened her hold on the real.

Our major libraries and museums are relatively safe at their various elevations.

He was well known for disliking country walks. Away from his study, he regretted the wasted time. Why walk when he could write?

She was putting notes together for a monograph in which she would describe a crisis in realism in fiction between 2015 and 2030.

Whenever humans got out of the way, the rest of the living world edged back and flourished. As for our precious universities, the kids we taught were inert, the culture fed them pap, and we were the elderly scolds, repeating the orthodoxies, the sacred canons, every year, just as we might have in the fifteenth century.

I surveyed the room from the doorway, reluctant to step back into the tangled lines of other people’s lives that I had foolishly made my own. I had been doing this too long. The Corona, even its long-dead author, even his entire era had no business squatting across so many of my best years. I was almost forty-five, a time when maturity and accumulated knowledge intersect with the last of youth’s lingering strength and quickness of mind. I should be doing something of my own. Something useful, for others. The loudmouths over in the Science and Technology building may have been right, the humanities were a waste of mental breath, of paper and ink, of entire lives. I sometimes compared myself and my colleagues along our corridor to medieval monks. But they at least were preserving a body of precious ancient knowledge that would one day stand against the violent tyranny of Christian thought. Whereas we were a diminishing band whose field, from Chaucer to Fisk, no one read but us. A thousand-year enterprise was turning to dust. It was history. History was history. Our students were right, the past was what they had to leave behind.

The various subjects had no proper theoretical underpinning. Their confident assertions were not subjected to conventional methods of proof. Published essays were not peer-reviewed. The best portion of the Humanities funding would be better spent in the Science departments.

A journal, whatever its quality, fixes events like beads on a string.

This novel had its origins in, and would not exist without, the magnificent, tender and technically brilliant poem by John Fuller, ‘Marston Meadows: A Corona for Prue’, a celebration of long love and nature, and a meditation on mortality. It was first published in the TLS on 9 July 2021 and is included in his collection Marston Meadows (Chatto & Windus, 2025). I am deeply indebted to Timothy Garton Ash, who pointed me towards the poem and, as so often before, gave wise counsel on an early draft of this novel. I am grateful to Richard Holmes for the epigraph that provided my title and for generously allowing me to summarise passages from Footsteps, his reflections on the biographer’s art. Craig Raine gave some excellent notes. My thanks to Stewart Brand and the Long Now Foundation for much deep thinking about what we owe the future.

Benjamin Markovits, The Rest of Our Lives

I need to think of something else to do with the rest of my life.

Brandon Taylor, Minor Black Figures

There was something obscene about a heterosexual man north of fifty trying very hard to fight his natural barrel chest and belly.

It was the sort of thing you could say only if you were accustomed to living your life as though it were a play or a podcast, the whole of your human idiom condensed into a vernacular of rudimentary sounds in slightly rhythmic repetition. It seemed awful, actually, but also, was that not the very definition of style? That pressurizing of the expressive capacity into a narrow channel or set of channels that communicated something about who you were or thought yourself to be.

Augustinus, Confessions

Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart. You had pity on it when it was at the bottom of the abyss. Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.

There is beauty in lovely physical objects, as in gold and silver and all other such things. When the body touches such things, much significance attaches to the rapport of the object with the touch.

Elizabeth McCracken, A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction

A writing life, I’ve come to believe, is a yearslong process of casting away everything you once believed for sure.

the security blanket tradition.

A first line is only a demand for further attention, an invitation to the rest of the book.

Disorientation is one of the duties of fiction.

Write a manifesto aimed only at your own work without worrying whether it applies to or offends anybody else in the world.

Write a manifesto aimed only at your own work without worrying whether it applies to or offends anybody else in the world. Address, in your silent heart, punctuation, plot, character, all your picayune concerns and grandiose plans, all the things that made you want to be a writer. Make it living, an armor-clad list that might change. It will be dearer to you than any other guide.

I like thinking about fiction; I like talking to myself.

Be open to new fixations in life as well as writing.

Alan Moore, The Great When: A Long London Novel

He hadn’t worked for Coffin Ada long enough to be described as anything remotely like a bibliophile, but long enough to recognise the thrill such souls were seeking when a wholesale carton full of it erupted in his face. It wasn’t just the heady scent of vintage paper – which was anyway masked by a memory of soap flakes – but rather the radiant glamour of the books within that rose about him in an exhalation of desires hitherto unacknowledged. It was a charisma wrought of lovely and forgotten lettering styles inlaid on wan cloth boards, pervaded by implicit histories of publishing or personality and sodden with the ghost of a dead

Fraktalt

2026-03-20T00:00:00Z

Det var nånting i Stefan Jonssons tal på den Forskningspolitiska dagen (4 min. in) om fraktal reproduktion som fastnade:

Om vi vill sätta en formel på mönstret så skulle vi kunna säga att här finns det en idé om ett tänkt "vi" som bekmäpar inre och yttre hot. I en värld mättad med digital kommunikation återskapas formeln fraktalt. Samma mönster som syns i helheten fortplantas snabbt till alla dess nivåer och delar i olika skalor. "Vi":et som står mot motståndaren återfinns i geopolitiken som bekant och i internationella och nationella organisationer, i parlament och myndigheter, i kommuner, organisationer och föreningar, på våra arbetsplatser och i våra skolor, vid lärosätena och i våra seminarierum. Det ställer oss i en situation där "vi":ets kamp mot inre och yttre hot är på väg att bli ett överordnat syfte med snart sagt all samhällelig verksamhet. Och när nångonting står i vägen för "vi":ets beredskap och kamp, till exempel allas jämlika människovärde, eller den akademiska friheten, då får det sistnämnda ofta böja sig.

Vad var Silicon Valley?

2026-02-26T00:00:00Z

Jag fann det intressant om forskningsprojektet "Silicon Valley Sverige".

Forskningsprojektet Silicon Valley Sverige (SIVAS) kommer att utforska relationen mellan Sverige och Silicon Valley mellan 1970 och idag [...] Med hjälp av tvärvetenskapliga perspektiv är vår ambition att kartlägga och analysera en central, men än så länge outforskad, pusselbit i det samtida Sveriges historia.

Som en del av det här projektet (tror jag) samtalar David Larsson Heidenblad med Björn Jeffery om några böcker som har varit inflytelserika för Silicon Valley-kulturen. Böcker som Good to Great, The Innovator's Dilemma, The Lean Startup och böcker av Peter Thiel och Reid Hoffman.

Det här tillvägagångsättet – att medelst böcker studera hur en tidsepok eller kultur uppfattade sig och i efterhand förstå det utifrån vår horisont – känns så självklart när det gäller perioder/platser/kulturer som är avlägsna, men att göra det för en så pass närliggande period är lite tankeväckande. Det är ju inte heller som att de här idéerna direkt bara är i backspegeln och har övertagits av nya idéer. De är ju i hög grad levande, även om de till viss del utmanas av nya och med kritisk udd mot det "gamla" (oftast det bara några år gamla).

2026-02-26T00:00:00Z

Sock-hopping, booping, unravelling, evaporating, thundering, propagating, galloping, perusing, cogitating, burrowing, embellishing, fluttering, symbioting, envisioning.

Födoämnen, februari 2026

2026-02-22T00:00:00Z

Tortellini Soup av Lidey Hueck.

Lemon-Miso Tofu With Broccoli av Hetty Lui McKinnon.

D.C.

2026-02-21T00:00:00Z

I höstas var det den här låten som ackompanjerade promenaden genom Brunkebergstunneln många gånger, på väg till jobbet. Den fick en att förlytta sig till en park i Washington D.C. Det regnade i parken, men ett rejält ljudsystem fick folk att dansa. Det gick liksom inte att låta bli. Själva inspelningen känns nästan live och improvisatorisk och onekligen har den känslan av att vara en future drum circle.

THE PARK by FUTURE DRUM CIRCLE

Det var därför intressant att nu läsa om house- och technoscenen i Washington D.C. Staden har ju en egen distinkt musikhistoria, med go go, p-funk, Dischord och också då en levande technoscen:

A whole new generation of talent is emerging from the city, crafting and refining an irreverent take on club music. As DJ Koh, one of the co-founders of the city’s most exciting party, Hast du Feuer, explains: “I think we’re seeing the emergence of an entire new wave of talent that’s more exploratory and diversified in the sounds they’re gravitating towards within electronic music. Club tracks tinged with hard dance elements; unique variants of UKG and dubwise records; saccharine trance-inspired footwork and breaks; acidic, bratty bass records—all of this often in the same night depending on the party!

Majsan approves

2026-02-18T00:00:00Z

Tunnelkunskap

2026-02-16T00:00:00Z

Jag hade faktiskt ingen aning om att det fanns en gångtunnel som går under Thames-floden i London. Det är en detalj i Hari Kunzrus artikel om det psykogeomytologiska London (genom dess storytellers Alan Moore, Arthur Machen och Iain Sinclair, bl.a.) som upplyste mig om det. Tunnelns södra ände är vid Curry Sark i Greenwich och dess norra start eller slut är vid änden av Isle of Dogs.

I am on the stairs that lead down to the Edwardian foot tunnel that runs under the river from the southern tip of the Isle of Dogs...