Hort: A Playground for Designers

Iris Braun profiles the German design group Hort and founder Eike König at the Goethe-Institut site. Based in Berlin, Hort brings together a dozen or so designers in a working environment that resembles a nursery where children come to play.

“ … Here we are trying to be a sort of playground for creative people,” says König.

Hort has worked with a diverse clientele from Nike to Walt Disney, and magazines to record labels.

König expects to be surprised by what his team creates and has a few rules for the group: “No clichés, no advertising with naked women or for alcohol and cigarettes.”

You can learn more about Hort at their website and download a portfolio of their work.

We’d like the Absinthe HQ to be a creative playground but for now, thanks to our new assistant editor, the home office just swarms with toys ... I suppose it's a step in the right direction.

Literary Magazines in Germany

If you think we like literary magazines (or magazines in general) then you would be right and so an article like Big Ideas for Little Money: The Boom in Literary Magazines at the Goethe Institute site definitely catches our eye. It takes a look at three new literary magazines:

[SIC] is a magazine project that places text in direct relation to illustration; um[laut] appears under the bold subtitle of “junge kunst. politische kunst. mindestens” (i.e. young art. political art. at least). radar, by contrast, sees itself as a cultural mediator between Germany, Poland and Ukraine and, logically enough, is published as a trilingual magazine.

The article quotes Michael Braun as referring to literary magazine editors as “literature-mad mavericks and stubborn types who do not let meagre returns deter their passion for literature and who have retained a dogged ambition to discover literary talents and forgotten texts”.

I've definitely met a few editors matching that description.

Interview with German Writer Judith Hermann

Over at the Goethe Institut web site there's an interview with writer Judith Hermann.

What do you expect from your next book?

Nothing. I don’t know it yet. Sometimes I ask myself whether it will be easier for me than the other books. And then I know – it won’t be easier. It will be difficult in a completely different way than Alice, than Nothing But Ghosts, than The Summerhouse, Later. It will simply have its own importance. Maybe I expect ... a certain pleasure. I look forward to my next book. I hope it will come off all right.

Read the entire interview here.

What Price a Language?

I was shocked recently when I walked into the British Council library in Sofia to discover that half the books had disappeared! Poetry, the great Millennium Library (published by Everyman, a collection of the world’s literary classics in English original or translation), Geography, History, Political Science, Law had all but vanished, leaving a large array of English-language coursebooks, contemporary fiction, children’s literature, music and films. While I could understand getting rid of some outdated books that no one looked at (no, I don’t mean poetry), I was unsettled by the cause of such upheaval: to make way for a “One-Stop Shop” on the ground floor of the British Council’s premises in the Bulgarian capital. A “One-Stop Shop” where prospective students can come and register for courses and exams without having to climb the stairs to the first floor.

“One-Stop Shop” is making your intentions only too clear! I was disappointed by my experience as a locally hired teacher at the British Council. Where I had expected high things and mused on poetry readings, nay, even performances of Shakespeare, I found that all the talk was about money. I was also not a little embarrassed about the cost of our courses – a 48-hour General English course currently costs $500 (€390) in a country where the average monthly salary is $350 (€270). Were we not an “educational charity”, as it said on the headed notepaper? This was for accounting purposes, I was informed.

So I decided to make a comparison. What are the relative costs of learning English, French, German and Spanish here in Sofia? Well, for an hour’s tuition at the British Council, you will pay a little over $10. Next up are the Spanish: an hour’s tuition at the Cervantes Institute will set you back $4.50. Then come the Germans: an hour’s tuition at the Goethe Institute costs $2.80. And finally, with a Republican flourish, come the French, an hour at the French Institute setting you back a mere $1.60. Thus, for the pleasure of its services, the British Council charges roughly twice as much as the Spanish, four times as much as the Germans and six times as much as the French.

Colonialism is the art of going into a country that is poorer than yours and extracting some of its wealth. Meanwhile, the first snow has come and already melted. It hid our excesses, muffled our activity, but not for long, signalling the transition to winter.