FEAST OR FAMINE

  Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006) is a philosophical and ethical inquiry about the changes that occur to people’s own culture over time. I read this book after viewing the ‘Radical Hope’ art exhibition at the  National Gallery in Tbilisi, Georgia, in June 2022, which was inspired by the book.   The collection represented works from Polish artists over the last 30 years, as well as a few artists of central Europe.    The book ’Radical Hope’ attempts to answer three questions: 1) how to live in a world that has suddenly lost meaning, 2) whether there is still hope in such a world, and if so, 3) in what language can you try to express it.   The heroes of the book, the tribe of Ravens and Crows, experience a cultural apocalypse. ‘When the buffalo went away, the hearts of my people fell to the ground and they could not lift them up again. After this, nothing else happened,’ says Plenty Coups, the leader of the Crow Nation. He rai...

  At 62 Rue de Vaugirard in the 6 th  arrondissement of Paris is Le Pont Traversé: The Crossed Bridge. Once a bookstore, and now a café.   Le Pont Traversé has a history.    The writer and poet Marcel Béalu (1908-1993) founded the bookstore in 1949.    He was born on 30 October 1908 in Selles-sur-Cher and worked in a haberdashery making hats while teaching himself classical French literature. His wife Marguerite Kessel encouraged him to study German literature too.    He established a bookstore in 1949 and named it Le Pont Traversé after Jean Paulhan’s 1921 story. Marcel Béalu also wrote his own poems in two noted collections:  Poèms 1936-1960 (Le Pont Traversé)  and  Poèms 1960-1980 (Le Pont Traversé).  His store specialized in rare and second-hand books, illustrated book editions, modern literature, and surrealist literature.   But Le Pont Traversé did not begin on Rue de Vaugirard. It began on Rue de Beaune, and mo...