Today I will recommend GENEVIEVE HUDSON interview with Maggie Nelson at Bookslut, here is an excerpt: I need to talk back, or talk with, theorists and philosophers in ordinary language, to dramatize how much their ideas matter to me in my everyday life. I can’t really partake in straightforward academic writing because its language…
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Maggie Nelson’s Bluets
* I Never Knew How Blue Blueness Could Be *
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…
“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…
Becoming intimate with fear
—Philosophy ought really to be written only as a form of poetry. (Philosophie dürfte man eigentlich nur dichten.) Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value * Maggie Nelson: I’ve often written about things that terrify me—likely out of compulsion more than hope for comfort, or catharsis; as Peter Handke says near the end of his horrified memoir of his mother’s suicide, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams,…
an attempt to meditate the passage of time
My area of interest – when talking about art – is first and foremost the contemporary art scene, but I must admit I have this weakness for Floral still life, as made by the Dutch in the 1600s. What really thrills me is when these two, the contemporary and the golden age, collide, as seen in the…
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 