Geoff Manaugh doesn’t post new material often, but when he does, he brings the same imaginative power as always:
When I was first here, in 1998 into early 1999, Potsdamer Platz was still a titanic hole in the ground, an abyss flooded with groundwater, melted snow, and rain, a kind of maelström you could walk over on pedestrian bridges, where engineering firms were busy stabilizing the earth for what would become today’s corporate office parks.
As I told the former geophysicist last night, I remember hearing at the time that there were people down there, SCUBA-diving in the floodwaters, performing geotechnical studies or welding rebar or looking for WWII bombs, I had no idea, but, whatever it was, their very existence took on an outsize imaginative role in my experience of the city. Berlin, destroyed by war, divided by architecture, where people SCUBA dive through an artificial sea at its broken center.
I like a good book trailer – I’ve produced two – and this one, for Ottessa Moshfegh’s new book, is fun. Found via LitHub:
Over the course of his career, Yang Zhichao has had several technological and natural materials surgically implanted into his body. For Planting Grass, nurses sew creek grass into his shoulder without anaesthetic. While his body hadn’t rejected the technological objects inserted in his body during other performances, it developed an infection to the grass (a problem that Petr Štembera encountered back in 1975 when he grafted a plant on his arm.)