James J. Conway

Sadly no – I would also love to know more!

Against a mulberry coloured wall, a carved silver-plated frame in portrait format topped by an owl on a stack of books within a pediment, with plants and flowers at the bottom left and right. The oil painting within the frame shows a sorcerer in a blue cloak reading from a book on the ground, tracing a sigil into the dirt within a gloomy half-ruined building, with columns holding up a vaulting ceiling, although one column is broken and topped by plant life. Around him are presumably the apparitions he has summoned. In the foreground is the skeleton of a dog, still standing, alongside broken jugs, and the skeleton of a man lying down. Above the broken column is a man hanged in a noose from a beam; a cat standing on the beam is defecating on the dead man’s head. Also hanging from the beam are monkey, and an owl watches from a perch attached to a column. Above the sorcerer a naked man is riding a flying goat through a hole in the wall toward the moonlight, behind the sorcerer we see demons, bats, a naked woman and flying snakes emerging from the pits of hell.

It was closing time at Staatsgalerie Stuttgart but this caught my eye on the way to the exit. “Magic Scene” 1740/1 by Andrea Locatelli – a macabre, occult scenario that really rewards close examination (death has not halted the hanged man’s indignities...). Fantastic custom frame, too.

Thank you!

The Beauty of the Metropolis: August Endell in praise of the unpretty city - The Berliner August Endell’s The Beauty of the Metropolis, newly translated by James J. Conway, finds unexpected wonder in Wilhelmine Berlin’s smoke, steel, and bustle.

@brynstole.bsky.social‬ in The Berliner on August Endell’s The Beauty of the Metropolis (trans. me, pub. ‪@uoftpress.bsky.social‬): “a meditation on aesthetics, shot through with musings and engaged in turn-of-the-century debates”
www.the-berliner.com/books/the-be...

Ooooh … my first fig leaf!

An open box showing a book with the title "Die Lebensreform/Entwürfe zur Neugestaltung von Leben und Kunst um 1900" in green against an oil painting showing a naked young man flanked by a bare-breasted young woman with long auburn hair and green cloth blown by the wind and a blue skirt, and a dark-haired woman with an orange top and red skirt with her head turned away. They look to be striding into a better future.

Me: I’ve got a package coming today.
Husband (hopefully): Is it negative books?

It's only open for a few hours every Saturday. When I was there the last entry in the visitors' book was from two months prior ... Steffi is an even more niche taste than ever it seems.

In a curved glass case, a book in a Jugendstill design with the title MAXIMIN in gold within a gold design with thin vertical lines, a triangle and flame-like motifs against an ivory-coloured background. To the right of the book, a label: "'Maximin'/Ein Gedenkbuch/Herausgegeben von/Stefan George/Berlin 1907"

@johncoulthart.com, I saw one of these in the wild* and thought of you.
* the Stefan George Museum in Bingen, which was actually pretty wild. Lots of Melchior Lechter designs.

A long view through the wooden frame of the Gradierwerk, in the foreground a view of the grey-black brushwood panels with water trickling down them.

The idea is that if you have respiratory problems (and you can’t make it to the sea, which is a long way from here), the salty air will help. So you’re sitting on a bench on a surreally long wooden frame, looking out at grapevines and smelling sea air. It’s very, very odd.

It is essentially a framework with a raised deck, and at deck height are huge panels of brushwood twigs compressed to make a mesh, down which runs salt water pumped up from a natural saline aquifer. The water evaporates as it trickles, and the resulting vapour has a very high salt content.

Under a blue sky, a view of one side of the Gradierwerk, a wooden frame with a raised platform and dark panels, her with a small wooden turret, in the foreground a stream with plants either side.

Angled view of most of one side of the Gradierwerk, showing an extremely long wooden structure with dark wooden panels, at the far end a hill with grapevines and a small white chapel, in the foreground a curving stream with reeds and a curving pathway.

… but it is very difficult to describe, so bear with me. We are looking at the “Gradierwerk”, a spa facility in the form of an immensely long wooden structure – 333 metres long, *one third of a kilometre*, dating from the mid-19th century.

Grape vines in rows under a blue sky with hills in the distance.

… you continue on to open fields and your shape-shifting conveyance is now effectively a cross-country train, vineyards come into view and you arrive in the town of Bad Dürkheim. And there it is …

A concrete bunker on a street corner approximately the size of a seven-storey building. It has a door with steps leading up to it on each of the two visible sides, but no windows. The upper part of the structure is distinguished by a pattern of stepped indentations in the wall which look like the imprint of step pyramid.

… which was voted Germany’s ugliest city (and while it would be unfair to judge from few minutes’ transit, the fact that this bunker came as aesthetic relief was not a good sign), then the tram becomes a subway and then a tram again and then you’re out the other side of Ludwigshafen and …

On a corner, two street signs in blue enamel with white text announcing this block in Mannheim as “N7”. Below it is a pedestrian traffic light on red, above it a sign saying “BÄCKER”.

I may have found the most bizarre structure in Germany! Even the journey there is weird. Starting out from Mannheim, the grid city that has blocks with Battleship coordinates rather than street names, you catch a tram which crosses the Rhine to Ludwigshafen …

Stringed puppet figure with a dark red spherical torso, bulbous pink thighs and orange upper arms, stick forearms and lower legs, black hair with eyes agog, against a pick background

Toy figures in a cabinet; a conical black-clad figure in the foreground, a spherical figure out of focus further away against a green and yellow background

Looking down on a glass-covered display case with a dusty pink base, showing three children’s spinning tops with patterned discs, one evenly divided between black and white, another with wedges of red, purple, blue, black, yellow and orange, and the third with uneven concentric circles of white, yellow, red, blue and black.

Toys at the Bauhaus Museum, Weimar, including spinning tops designed by Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mack, one of the original Bauhaus Weimar cohort who later emigrated to Australia and became an art teacher, where his pupils included my Dad.

Yellow rubber überduckie styled as Friedrich Nietzsche, with bushy eyebrows and moustache.

🎵 Über-duckie, you're the one

A public square with cobbles and tram tracks, with two historic buildings: on the left, a smaller half-timbered brown and cream five-storey building with a simple gabled roof, on the right a five-storey tavern in green and white with a bell gabled roof, behind them a cloudy sky.

A courtyard showing cobbles and trees and a half-timbered facade.

A view over a vineyard toward a church and a cathedral with verdigris spires against a largely blue sky.

Looking down from a fortification with a terrace and a watchtower, with historic houses in the distance, modern apartment buildings further away, and green hills in the distance, under a largely blue sky.

I wasn't sure what to expect, but Erfurt was great: buzzy, multicultural with an amazing (and largely car-less) old town, and – one or two black t-shirts with offensive slogans in white Fraktur aside – no conspicuous far-right presence.

Selection of busts and statuettes of Friedrich Nietzsche in a museum on stepped black pedestals. Close to the viewer, a standing statuette in grey plaster, behind out of focus largely white busts.

White plaster statuette of the infirm Friedrich Nietzsche in an armchair with a blanket over his legs

Close up of Friedrich Nietzsche's death mask in grey/white plaster

Yellow rubber überduckie styled as Friedrich Nietzsche, with bushy eyebrows and moustache.

*Jan Brady voice* Nietzsche, Nietzsche, Nietzsche!

Brooding early evening sky, at the bottom of the image white neon letters spelling out WILLY BRANDT ANS FENSTER (Willy Brandt to the window).

WILLY BRANDT ANS FENSTER

Narrow canal with railing from which hang potted flowers, beyond a restaurant overlooking the water; trees and greenery on the left side of the image with a brooding cloudy sky beyond.

Two half-timbered cream houses with sage window frames with trees either side overlooking a canal with a footbridge of stone steps and wooden boards.

Covered medieval bridge in the evening with four-storey buildings overlooking the water below

Cheese board with a heart-shaped bun and a butter pot with a pink daisy

Erfurt is for lovers

Thanks! There is a translator's note and some changes to the afterword, but it is substantially the same.

Very true. Some typos just really want to LIVE dammit. Who are we to deny them?

Valiantly fighting the urge to flick through and inevitably land on the typo that slipped through three rounds of proofing.

Cardboard box open to reveal two stacks of the same book. The cover of the book has a backdrop the colour of a green carnation, with two colourised photos showing the same individual in two different exposures, one in masculine-coded clothing from the early 20th century, and one in feminine-coded clothing. On the left the individual is wearing a suit coloured mid-blue with a white starched collar and purple tie and waistcoat and a black hat. On the right the individual is wearing a pink overcoat with wide sleeves over a light-blue blouse and a purple skirt, as well as a purple broad-brimmed hat with a blue ribbon. The text at the top reads MAGNUS HIRSCHFELD/Translated and with an afterword by James J. Conway/BERLIN’S THIRD SEX

Receiving fresh copies of a book you’ve worked on – it never gets tired. Berlin‘s Third Sex by Magnus Hirschfeld, published by @uoftpress.bsky.social

Quite the pick-me-up!

Kid's classmate when I picked the kid up from school: DEIN OPA IST DA

Berlin, Saturday. Outside: meh. Inside: unfiltered sunshine from the other end of the world as Australian & New Zealand writing folk freely share their work and their thoughts in an all-day symposium. Looking forward to it!

Edwardian eccentric, defrocked priest and fantasy league pope Baron Corvo was getting up to this kind of nonsense 120 years ago strangeflowers.wordpress.com/2012/02/13/p...

A yellow-green tree with a pleasingly rounded crown amid other trees, including conifers, against cloudy sky.

TIL there is an online map of *every single tree in Berlin*! I see this tree on my dog walks and I always loved it but I had no idea what it was. Turns out it is a Dreidorniger Lederhülsenbaum, or honey locust (how is that not a shoegaze band?). experience.arcgis.com/experience/7...