Abwesenheit: Gedichte by Wolfgang Hilbig My rating: 5 of 5 stars The poems in abwesenheit (translated: absence) range from what appear to be straight forward denunciations of the socialist police state Wolfgang Hilbig was living in when he wrote them (1965 to 1977), to very lyrical metaphors with image densities approaching that of the poetry […]
On August 20th ECP Books concluded a contract with S. Fischer Verlag to publish Wolfgang Hilbig’s first volume of poetry in English. The title of the volume: abwesenheit In German that means absence. Hilbig grew up in East Germany, where writing and individual expression of any kind was subject to review and control by state […]
Spent 2.5 hours drilling out A3 holes in ribs and bottom skin, deburred and attached inboard leading edge skin. Did something different for deburring the skin. Basically I deburred it in place by rolling it back first in one direction and then the other. I used a file instead of a hole deburring tool.
I have been neglecting to log my build on this site. Facebook is taking over the world! But here are some pics of my pilot side wing. The skeleton is finished. And I am now attaching the bottom skin and drilling out the rivet holes to final A4 size.
Thanks to Tim Stegall for writing some pretty awesome music articles, many of which show up on Alternative Press. It takes me hours to read articles like this. Hours. I read. I listen to a song. I listen to the song again. I think about how the song affected my life. Often they are new […]
Recently browsing the New Direction’s author list, I saw a title by Nathanial Tarn, The Hölderliniae. This attracted me immediately, since my early encounter with Friedrich Hölderlin when I was still in the earlier stages of learning German had been quite challenging. There is a special density to his poetry, his unregulated meter, and no […]
How the mistakes and missteps of two men, one nearly 60 years old and the other 30, contributed to — or even caused — the English language debut of one of the most renowned and powerful German writers in recent history to be delayed by a quarter of a century: In the fall of 1989 […]
The first thing I ever read by Buk (as he was called by his crazed fans) was his book Factotum. There are some scenes in Factotum that I alluded to in One Punk Summer. Also influential in OPS was the basic idea of the factotum: One who does any and all things to earn a […]
I wrote One Punk Summer in Berlin. I was spending a year on an exchange program between the University of Texas and the Freie Universität Berlin. I arrived just days before reunification. Pieces of the communist police state’s skeleton were still to be seen: A ransacked Checkpoint Charlie that had been taken over by the […]
Part One — Crankcase, Camshaft, 5th Bearing, Safety Shaft, Propeller Studs The following pictures show how a short block Corvair flight motor is built. It starts from freshly disassembled (after 40 years in a junkyard). I spend a lot of time cleaning it up. But here the cleaned parts are assembled and each major step […]