The czech magazine Respekt, known for its investigative reporting, has published a story claiming prize winning author and anti-communist dissident Milan Kundera denounced a young exile who was back in Prague to the communist secret police. [more inside]
posted by lucia__is__dada on Oct 14, 2008 - 22 comments

David Cerny: frilly pink tanks, babies climbing TV towers, and the president feeding slops to the director of the national gallery out of giant asses. Why, this could only be the NEA gone awry! Actually, it’s Magic Prague, the land of Franz Kafka and Milan Kundera, and the artist, like the dissidents of past generations, would rather not do political art , political art. His latest sculpture ridicules the perverse situation in which the country finds itself post Havel: a place where right-wingers like President Klaus and national gallery director Milan Knížák— a past collaborator with secret police, and worse, completely idiotic and banal performance artist — prosper and rub shoulders at the expense of those with a conscience and good taste. Like David Cerny. This isn’t the freshest post, but I’ve been waiting to join Mefi for a long time, and today is the first day I can post.
posted by gesamtkunstwerk on Apr 9, 2004 - 4 comments

Bisclavret is part of a book I'm reading, "Les Lais de Marie de France." [Modern and original French versions, side-by-side]. Also the tragedy Suréna [French link], by Pierre Corneille, and for a reading group, Genesis from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, as a literary, not religious, text. Last week the group read The Dead from James Joyce's "The Dubliners" and before that Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." What are you reading?
posted by Mo Nickels on Sep 8, 2001 - 49 comments