IN: Joy Division were an English post-punk band formed in 1976 in Salford, Greater Manchester. Originally named Warsaw, the band consisted of singer-songwriter Ian Curtis, guitarist and keyboardist Bernard Sumner, bass player Peter Hook and drummer Stephen Morris. The band was formed by Sumner and Hook after attending a 4 June 1976 Sex Pistols concert at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in Manchester. While Joy Division's early recordings were heavily influenced by early punk, they evolved a unique sound, aided by producer Martin Hannett, which earned their reputation as pioneers of the post-punk movement.

Despite their short career, Joy Division have exerted a wide-reaching influence. John Bush of AllMusic argues that Joy Division "became the first band in the post-punk movement by [...] emphasizing not anger and energy but mood and expression, pointing ahead to the rise of melancholy alternative music in the '80s."  Joy Division have influenced bands as diverse as contemporaries U2 and the Cure to artists such as Radiohead, Nine Inch Nails, Neurosis, Interpol, Bloc Party, the Editors and rap artists. Rapper Danny Brown is known to have named one of his albums after the Joy Division song "Atrocity Exhibition", whose title was partially inspired by the 1970 J. G. Ballard collection of condensed novels of the same name. In 2005, both New Order and Joy Division were inducted into the UK Music Hall of Fame.  The band's dark sound, which Martin Hannett described in 1979 as "dancing music with Gothic overtones", presaged the gothic rock genre. While the term "gothic" originally described a "doomy atmosphere" in music of the late 1970s, the term was soon applied to specific bands like Bauhaus that followed in the wake of Joy Division and Siouxsie and the Banshees. Standard musical fixtures of early gothic rock bands included "high-pitched post-Joy Division basslines usurp[ing] the melodic role" and "vocals that were either near operatic and Teutonic or deep, droning alloys of Jim Morrison and Ian Curtis."  Joy Division have been dramatised in two biopics. 24 Hour Party People (2002) is a fictionalised account of the rise and fall of Factory Records in which members of the band served as supporting characters. Tony Wilson said of the film, "It's all true, it's all not true. It's not a fucking documentary", and that he favoured the "myth" over the truth. The 2007 film Control, directed by Anton Corbijn, is a biography of Ian Curtis (portrayed by Sam Riley) that uses Deborah Curtis's biography of her late husband, Touching from a Distance (1995), as its basis. Control had its international premiere on the opening night of Director's Fortnight at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, where it was critically well received. That year Grant Gee directed the band documentary Joy Division.

who did they influence

OUT: contemporaries U2 and the Cure


IN: Robert Walser (15 April 1878 - 25 December 1956) was a German-speaking Swiss writer. Walser is understood to be the missing link between Kleist and Kafka. "Indeed," writes Susan Sontag, "At the time [of Walser's writing], it was more likely to be Kafka [who was understood by posterity] through the prism of Walser. Robert Musil, another admirer among Walser's contemporaries, when he first read Kafka pronounced [Kafka's work] as, 'a peculiar case of the Walser type.'

In 1913, Walser returned to Switzerland. He lived for a short time with his sister Lisa in the mental home in Bellelay, where she worked as a teacher. There, he got to know Lisa Mermet, a washer-woman with whom he developed a close friendship. After a short stay with his father in Biel, he went to live in a mansard in the Biel hotel Blaues Kreuz. In 1914, his father died.  In Biel, Walser wrote a number of shorter stories that appeared in newspapers and magazines in Germany and Switzerland and selections of which were published in Der Spaziergang (1917), Prosastucke (1917), Poetenleben (1918), Seeland (1919) and Die Rose (1925). Walser, who had always been an enthusiastic wanderer, began to take extended walks, often by night. In his stories from that period, texts written from the point of view of a wanderer walking through unfamiliar neighborhoods alternate with playful essays on writers and artists.  During World War I, Walser repeatedly had to go into military service. At the end of 1916, his brother Ernst died after a time of mental illness in the Waldau mental home. In 1919, Walser's brother Hermann, geography professor in Bern, committed suicide. Walser himself became isolated in that time, when there was almost no communication with Germany because of the war. Even though he worked hard, he could barely support himself as a freelance writer. At the beginning of 1921, he moved to Bern in order to work at the public record office. He often changed lodgings and lived a very solitary life.  During his time in Bern, Walser's style became more radical. In a more and more condensed form, he wrote "micrograms" ("Mikrogramme"), called thus because of his minuscule pencil hand that is very difficult to decipher. He wrote poems, prose, dramolets and novels, including The Robber (Der Rauber). In these texts, his playful, subjective style moved toward a higher abstraction. Many texts of that time work on multiple levels - they can be read as naive-playful Feuilleton or as highly complex montages full of allusions. Walser absorbed influences from serious literature as well as from formula fiction and retold, for example, the plot of a pulp novel in a way that the original (the title of which he never revealed) was unrecognizable. Much of his work was written during these very productive years in Bern.

When was his first article published?

OUT:
selections of which were published in Der Spaziergang (1917),