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Homemade Soup (Dissertation excerpt)
I like publishing on this blog the sections of my dissertation that I know will have to be cut. I especially like the voice I found for writing this more reflective part and I really like returning to a place I love as I read this. Enjoy. “Coming to Zagreb to study display cabinets (vitrina) is like going to Saudi Arabia to study sand.” That is how my friend Dalibor N. gave me his approval of my fieldwork while we were watching people at a café on Flowers Square, one Zagreb Saturday morning. Every aspect of the vitrina in your mother’s or grandmother’s home calls up scenes in the mind’s eye and evokes feelings. The vitrina is the backdrop for silence of the room, the apartment, the building, the neighborhood, the city, Sunday from 2pm to 5pm. You, your family, your neighbors, your friends: everyone is at home, it is time for lunch. In the living room, in the apartment building, in the neighborhood, in the city, in the suburb: silence. At least there are some sounds in the house. The wa...
Wolfgang Vogel, Spyswapper, 1925-2008 (RIP)
Here is Vogel's quote about his life as a Spyswapper, "I was neither a resistance fighter nor a good Samaritan. My paths were neither white nor black. They had to be grey, otherwise it would not have worked." Does it mean the Cold War? The brilliant thing about Vogel is that he kept the system going, but he did not become a martyr or a victim. Here is the obituary of Wolfgang Vogel from the Financial Times (Aug 30/31, 2008, p. 8). His nickname was "The Devil's Lawyer." Does every political era have its moral order? What is ours? Who (what) is in the middle of the "war on terror," keeping it going by doing its dirty work, work it denounces by day?


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