* I Never Knew How Blue Blueness Could Be *
Search Results for: bluets
Les Bluets
Maggie Nelson’s Bluets (Wave Books, 2009) is a fragmented love-story. It covers the narrator’s intense relationship with the color blue, her personal experiences of love & loss, philosophical investigations, natural phenomenon, art, etc. etc., all mixed together in a series of small fragments, told in a beautiful and sometimes very poetic language. To get an idea of…
Dept. of Speculation
What Rilke said: I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone. Somehow, I was sure Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation would read very much like Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, a much-praised book, which I unfortunately have to admit, I really didn’t like at all. And so the Department ……
A degree of darkness
I spent my weekend in a graphic workshop learning the art of cyanotype. Or, to be more precise, studying the method of cyanotype – the art will hopefully enter into my work as I go along. Cyanotype is a nineteenth century photographic process using chemicals that produce beautiful blue prints when exposed to sunlight. The…
Falling into art
The French artist Yves Klein is perhaps most famous for his invention of the color International Klein Blue (IKB), IKB was developed by Yves Klein in collaboration with Edouard Adam, a Parisian art paint supplier whose shop is still in business on the Boulevard Edgar-Quinet in Paris. The uniqueness of IKB does not derive from the…
Besetzung
MOTHERs by Rachel Zucker -the body of my mother is everywhere- … Last spring I fell in love with Bluets, this spring MOTHERs have become the most disturbing & sacred book in my possession. There is a kinship between the two, an affinity in form: both being hybrids, part memoirs and part poetry, and both…
Visibilization – (apropos color)
I have been studying color lately, blue has been my main focus, but of course one can not study a color in isolation – This summer New York’s Guggenheim Museum is presenting an exhibition I would have loved to visit, a solo exhibition by James Turrell – all about color, and light. Turrell’s installation, Aten Reign,…
“How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!”
Proverb by Steve Reich (1995) Maggie Nelson’s Bluets is in part inspired by the writing of Ludwig Wittgenstein, both his Remarks on Colour and his style has been of great influence to Nelson. As Nelson the composer Steve Reich is also inspired by Wittgenstein. A single line: “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life!” is the…
How come blue is the color of melancholy?
Today my study of Bluets has led me home – Edvard Munch, Melankoli (Melancholy), oil on canvas, 1892 © National Gallery, Oslo As with many of Edvard Munch‘s works, “Melancholy” appears in several different versions and techniques. (His repeated use of the same concepts has made it difficult to identify some works due to the lack of…
There would seem to be a lesson here, but I am not prepared to describe it –
While writing a book, I’m influenced by things the same way I would imagine most writers are: I look for what I want to steal, then I steal it, and make my own weird stew of the goods – Maggie Nelson * writing Bluets * ludwig wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) *
sub rosa 