Babel

Michael Romano, Milton Läufer & all the contributors to BAR

Library of Babel as visualized by Erik Desmazieres.

(Each of the following sentences comes from the texts of the Review.
Hover over one to see its title or click to read the whole text.)

Years of work turned into equestrian granite. A stunning twist, a one-hundred-and-eighty degree turn, has occurred in writing. Like Buscemi he is a look of love. He goes out the front door, an impulse that will seem ridiculous to him the next morning, he didn’t want them to find him dead when they battered down the door after not seeing him for days, and he is sitting on the doorstep by the sidewalk when the doctor arrives, meaning that he finally managed to get a hold of the phone number that seemed impossible to find and he was able to speak to ask for help, and in that instant he remembers that on other occasions the electrocardiogram never detected any trace of a heart attack, not even a pre-heart attack, and it’s only months later, when he resigns himself to following his doctor’s order not to call the emergency service again, which only gives him a sleeping pill so strong that it leaves him stupid for part of the following day, only then will he hear about panic attack when he agrees to put himself in the hands of another doctor whose specialization always inspired mistrust, psychologist, psychoanalyst, psychiatrist, how to trust his soul to someone who hasn’t read Dostoevsky or Saint Augustine, but he accepts anyway, agrees to abide by his verdict and submit himself to a psychoactive drug that he will soon abandon to seek and find remedy in words, or rather, in writing them as soon as there’s a sign of crisis, in putting them in a certain order. Murillo, like most artists on display at MADC, suggests the continued adequacy of modernism to our present moment.