True Things on a Half Page
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.”
In the spirit of Roth’s words, the Diasporist presents its new series of Seifenblasen. 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.”
