Welcome to issue seventeen of The Attention Span Newsletter by me, Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil. I’m a writer, a literary translator and an artist based in Amsterdam.

Every other week, I take the time to reflect and offer a glimpse of how I see and feel the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature.

You can support my work via Patreon.

This will be the last issue of 2023, I will take a break and will send the next issue on 17 January 2024.

I wish you all healing, love, health and beauty for the new year. I hope you can celebrate whichever festivities you believe in surrounded by your loved ones.

EPISODE 17 SHOW NOTES

Listen to writer Ahdaf Soueif in Desert Island Discs - it’s an old recording (from 2012) but one I like going back to. I see Marina Abramović has recently appeared on the show as well. You can check all episodes online.

Read In the Shadow of the Holocaust. How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today by Masha Gessen in The New Yorker. (Gessen explains in an interview on Democracy Now what happened regarding the withdrawal of the Hannah Arendt prize they were going to be awarded in Germany).

Watch Anselm by Wim Wenders, a beautiful and poetic documentary about artist Anselm Kiefer. There is currently also an exhibition of his work at the Museum Voorlinden in The Hague.