Also among the festival's theater offerings are Tim Etchells's "Sight is the Sense that Dying People Tend to Lose First," a monologue performed by Jim Fletcher (Sept . 28, and "a (micro) history of world economics, danced," by Pascal Rambert (Oct . 11-13.
As you exit the theater after "A (micro) history of world economics, danced," this motionless shrine glares back at you, persisting in the wake of the more impermanent things — movement, poetry, dialogue, song — that have come and gone in the past hour.
Since 2010, Mr. Rambert has taken "A (micro) history" to 10 cities, incorporating members of each local community — their stories, gestures, belongings — into his examination of our collective economic experience.
And his micro-history of Christian theology is inaccurate in places.These objections aside, this is a masterly book.
Mykola was in the process of conceiving a dissertation proposal: a micro-history of Lviv between June 22nd and July 5th, 1941.
Some day someone may well write a kind of micro-history of the night that Obama roasted Trump, as a pivot in American life.
Some day someone may well write a kind of micro-history of that night, as historians now are wont to do, as a pivot in American life, both a triumph of Obama's own particular and enveloping form of cool and as harbinger of — well, of what exactly?
The micro-history of that night yet to be written might be devoted largely to the double life of Barack Obama as cool comedian and quiet commander — or it might be devoted to the moment when new life was fed into an old ideology, when Trump's ambitions suddenly turned over to the potent politics of shame and vengeance.
But he also embarks on some absorbing storytelling, in a form now familiar from ten years of the little-thing/big-thing books: take a micro-history of something or other (cod, salt, the color mauve) and turn it into a macro-history of something else that provides, in parable, a mega-history of some larger third thing.
Desan has many crudely reductive theories — the most insistent being that Montaigne wrote essays about the world right now because he was covering up the truth that in the past his family were merchants, not lords — but he is a master of the micro-history of sixteenth-century Bordeaux.
History does simplify, and even horrors have micro-histories of their own.
