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True Things on a Half a Page
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Soap Bubbles © Los Angeles County Museum of Art
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In 1919, the Austrian journalist Joseph Roth described a scene on a Viennese street: “I saw children blowing soap bubbles. Not in 1913 but yesterday,” he wrote. “…A bottle full of soap suds, a straw, two children, and a quiet alleyway bathed in the sunshine of a summer morning. The soap bubbles were large, beautiful, rainbow-colored spheres that floated lightly and gently through the blue air.” Soap bubbles, or Seifenblasen, were one of Roth’s favorite images. He returned to it often over the years, often as a model for his own writing. For him, Seifenblasen were something authentic, a mode of engaging with the world apart from moralizing politics or abstracted intellectualism, the beauty within the particular. “A candidate on the campaign trail can speak incoherent nonsense in poor language for three hours with impunity,” Roth wrote several years later from Berlin. “But a feuilleton writer who writes more than ten lines of Seifenblasen is a hack.”
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In the spirit of Roth’s words, the Diasporist launched its new series of Seifenblasen earlier this spring. In these pieces, Diasporist editors and contributors offer short reviews of films, books, exhibitions, and performances. These are occasionally timely, often impressionistic, sometimes frivolous, always light. Nothing that exceeds, as Roth puts it, “true things on a half a page.”
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Here are the Diasporist’s most recent Seifenblasen. We’ll continue to release more in the coming weeks.
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Fabian Wolff
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"Carrère tells Dick’s story as that of a Man in Full, uneasy with but not in America. He marries and cheats and fathers children and writes a lot, good sentences and bad, demonstrating prodigious gifts for metaphor and insight, and then in the spring of 1974 he is struck with actual prophecy, wrestling with visions for the rest of his days – or with ministrokes exacerbated by amphetamines."
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Julia Bosson
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"When I stop writing this text and pick up my phone, which I have done several dozen times, intentionally and otherwise, I sacrifice my privacy: not just the information that my phone gathers about me, from the extra seconds my fingers hover over a cat video on Instagram or which news sites I prefer, but the privacy of solitude. A liked post, a read message, a 'last seen' status all require an awareness, a publicity that prevents a state of oblivion."
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Ron Mieczkowski
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"The novel opens with an unforgettable scene that plumbs the psychological depths of childhood, of desire, and of repressed cravings: young Noboru, who has grown up without a father, has taken to watching his mother through a peephole in the closet between their rooms. When she brings home a new lover, a sailor, the boy witnesses the scene that becomes as embedded in his mind as ours. In the evening light, the two adults undress and stand naked in front of each other when
'suddenly the full long wail of a ship’s horn surged through the open window,' the sailor turns to the window 'with a sharp twist' and looks out to sea."
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Julia Bosson
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"Lots of things happen in the time it takes to read a novel of this length. Governments are created and dissolved, plans are made, executed, and forgotten, frustrations emerge, resolve themselves, and then emerge again. Lives are lost and the days march on. I had hoped that reading this novel would change me, but I found that life changed inside of it. Not quite a comfort."
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