Category Archives: bleakdom: don’t blink

Blue Homepage

Posted on March 1, 2016 by Mark Rossiter

Yesterday was the final day of the F/28 month of photography in Chiang Mai, so I spent a few hours running around trying to catch what I hadn’t already before it all came down. Highlights: colour images by Shin Jeseop … Continue reading →

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A Woman In Berlin

Posted on September 21, 2012 by Mark Rossiter

This anonymously written diary was kept between April 20th and June 22nd 1945 by a single thirty-something journalist in Berlin, and describes first-hand the utter collapse of German power in the capital of the Reich and the coming of the … Continue reading →

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The Pianist

Posted on August 8, 2012 by Mark Rossiter

This autobiographical tale by Władysław Szpilman is another staggering account of the holocaust, this one by a Polish Jew. A nationally known concert pianist living in a Jewish area of Warsaw with his parents, brother and two sisters, after the Germans … Continue reading →

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This Way for The Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen

Posted on July 29, 2012 by Mark Rossiter

Tadeusz Borowski, who wrote these stories, lived through Auschwitz somehow, and left sharply told tales of hell behind. There is nothing to say about them by way of commentary; they just need to be read. But his guilt (one has … Continue reading →

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earth do not cover their blood

Posted on July 29, 2012 by Mark Rossiter

From the moment the bus stops, Auschwitz and Birkenau, 67 and a half years to the day after their liberation, are heaving with guided tour groups in a Babel of languages. The story goes on and on: three-and-a-half almost relentless … Continue reading →

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Prague: the Jewish quarter

Posted on July 22, 2012 by Mark Rossiter

It only takes so long looking at the pretty face of central Europe before you are bound to end up staring at the screaming, searing wound gouged across it: the treatment of the Jews. It was bad enough before the … Continue reading →

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Storms of My Grandchildren

Posted on April 13, 2012 by Mark Rossiter

This first book by James Hansen, the dean of American climate scientists and the man who introduced a mass audience to the concept of “global warming” in a Congressional hearing nearly a quarter of a century ago, was published right … Continue reading →

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timor mortis conturbat me

Posted on December 22, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

These are the days of dying: Christopher Hitchens, Vaclav Havel, Kim Jong Il. Famous people, of whom I know nothing. Closer to home, the Saab marque died; we have had Saabs since we first married, and we still have two … Continue reading →

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comes to all

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Mark Rossiter

The bloke next door is dying, in hospital, of cancer. Apparently he’s doing so rather grouchily.  This seems understandable; who would want to go, after all, especially when it seems inconceivable that you could have done everything you wanted to … Continue reading →

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