Andrea Scrima’s first book, the novel A Lesser Day, was rereleased in a second edition in 2018 (Spuyten Duyvil Press) to accompany the publication of a German translation (Wie viele Tage, Literaturverlag Droschl, Graz). A German edition of her second novel, Like Lips, Like Skins (Kreisläufe) was published by Literaturverlag Droschl in the fall of 2021. Scrima’s essays and criticism can be read in journals including The Brooklyn Rail, Literary Hub, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Times Literary Supplement, The American Scholar, The Millions, Music & Literature, The Scofield, Schreibheft, and Manuskripte. She was the recipient of a literature fellowship and several research grants from the Berlin Council on Science, Research, and the Arts in Berlin, Germany and took part in writing residencies at Schloß Salem, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation in Taos, and Ledig House, New York. She is editor-in-chief at the Berlin- and Brooklyn-based online literary magazine StatORec and co-edited the recently published anthology Writing the Virus (Outpost19 Books), a New York Times Sunday Book Review “New & Noteworthy” title of 2021. Email: a.scrima [at] t-online.de
by Andrea Scrima Sette Opere di Misericordia, the famous altarpiece by Caravaggio commissioned in 1607 by the charitable Confraternità del Pia Monte della Misericordia in Naples, where it still hangs today, depicts the seven Biblical acts of mercy on a single large canvas. The dense composition is made up of at least fourteen visible and…
by Andrea Scrima Here are Part I, Part II, Part III, and Part IV of this project. Images from the exhibition LOOPY LOONIES at Kunsthaus Graz, Austria, can be seen here. 15. QUO VADIS? (Where Are You Going?) As children, we rely on the help of our caregivers and our innate capacity to learn. And we…
by Andrea Scrima For the past ten years, Andrea Scrima has been working on a group of drawings entitled LOOPY LOONIES. The result is a visual vocabulary of splats, speech bubbles, animated letters, and other anthropomorphized figures that take contemporary comic and cartoon images and the violence imbedded in them as their point of departure. Against the backdrop…
by Andrea Scrima Cherokee, Cree, Meskwaki, Comanche, Assiniboine, Mohawk, Muscogee, Navajo, Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, Tlingit, Hopi, Crow, Chippewa-Oneida—well into the twentieth century, the majority of America’s indigenous languages were spoken by only a very few outsiders, largely the children of missionaries who grew up on reservations. During WWII, when the military realized that the languages…
MORE LOOPY LOONIES BY ANDREA SCRIMA For the past ten years, Andrea Scrima has been working on a group of drawings entitled LOOPY LOONIES. The result is a visual vocabulary of splats, speech bubbles, animated letters, and other anthropomorphized figures that take contemporary comic and cartoon images and the violence imbedded in them as their point…
by Andrea Scrima 1. Bloodthirsty I have a morbid personality; sometimes I stay up late at night, googling serial killers and rapists. In the light of the computer screen, scrolling through articles on websites published by amateur sleuths, I feel the dark pull of the unspeakable deed. But my fascination isn’t for the blood and…
by Andrea Scrima I recognized the corner immediately: it was right next to Cooper Union, on Lafayette Street in downtown Manhattan. There used to be a large parking lot on the other side of the street, where passers-by occasionally happened upon a colorful bricolage cobbled together from stuffed animals and clothes, discarded household items, deformed…
by Andrea Scrima Sometimes it’s a single detail that hits home: a little girl’s pink shoe, for instance, with remnants of the delicate fabric still intact, unearthed among the hundreds of worn-down shoe soles and other objects found in the course of an archaeological excavation on the grounds of the former Liebenau camp in Graz,…
by Andrea Scrima Part I of this is here. #4: OWWW Pain is a private experience that happens within an individual body; it is internal and essentially invisible. As much as we might commiserate, we cannot “share” another’s pain; we can merely witness the behavior it induces, inquire into the nature of the pain, and…
by Andrea Scrima #1: SAYING NO In the talk Judith Butler gave upon receiving the Adorno Prize in 2012, she asks: “Can one lead a good life in a bad life?” Her question springs from a conclusion Theodor W. Adorno formulated in Minima Moralia: “Wrong life cannot be lived rightly” (“Es gibt kein richtiges Leben…
by Andrea Scrima Americans are often smiled upon for their need to identify with their ancestors’ heritage; there’s something naïve and childlike about it, as though we were hoping to find a family somewhere, waiting with open arms for the long-lost child who has finally come home. We describe ourselves with the usual hyphenated ethnic…
by Andrea Scrima In November 2023, in an essay for the German national newspaper die taz, I wrote that Germany’s Jews were once again afraid for their lives. It was—and is—a shameful state of affairs, considering that the country has invested heavily in coming to terms with its fascist past and has made anti-antisemitism and…
by Andrea Scrima Twenty years ago, John Reed made an unexpected discovery: “If Orwell esoterica wasn’t my foremost interest, I eventually realized that, in part, it was my calling.” In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, ideas that had been germinating suddenly coalesced, and in three weeks’ time Reed penned a parody of George Orwell’s…
by Andrea Scrima 1. What is power? The answer is relative, contingent on context. We speak of the power of sexual allure, the power of persuasion, of charisma, but these only rarely translate into sustainable structures of actual dominance. In a capitalist democracy, power is generally economic and political; it’s less frequently defined as intellectual…
by Andrea Scrima Sequel to the essay “Musings on Exile, Immigrants, Pre-Unification Berlin, Trauma, Naturalization, and a Native Tongue.” It’s disorienting when cities lose their gray zones—the undefined plots of fallow land that used to line the banks on the Brooklyn side of the East River, for instance, the nineteenth-century warehouses, docks, and quietly deteriorating,…
by Andrea Scrima (excerpt from a work-in-progress) When they arrived in the U.S., Southern Italians brought with them the sense that they’d been branded as underdogs, that they belonged and would forever belong to a lower class, but the birth of the Italian-American gangster was rooted in attitudes toward the Mezzogiorno that dated back far…
by Andrea Scrima (excerpt from a work-in-progress) My father, the son of Italian immigrants, was a member of the working class. There were things within reach, and things that were not in reach, and he accepted this. He never pushed his children to broaden their horizons, and would have been satisfied to see them in…
by Andrea Scrima I moved to Berlin in 1984, but have rarely written about my experiences living in a foreign country; now that I think about it, it occurs to me that I lived here as though in exile those first few years, or rather as though I’d been banished, as though it hadn’t been…
By Andrea Scrima It’s said that European societies are always about assimilation, and that’s almost true, but not entirely. Minority cultures alter the dominant culture in subtle ways. My twenty-one-year-old son speaks with a Turkish-inflected accent he shares with most boys his age who have grown up in Berlin. It’s a mark of masculinity, of…
by Andrea Scrima This past spring, I found myself sitting, masked, at a wooden desk among a scattering of scientific researchers at the Museo Galileo in Florence. Next to me was a thick reference book on the history of astronomical instruments and a smaller work on the sundials and other measuring devices built into the…