I feel the sadness of the city, a sadness all the more powerful because everything around suggests that there is nothing to be sad about. «BLACK PAPER – Writing in a Dark Time» by TEJU COLE A new, beautifully disturbing essay collection by Teju Cole. If I am to highlight some of them … 1)…
Category: ESSAY
The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words
So much of philosophy is fiction. The William H Gass Reader (2019) William H. Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He is the author of seven works of fiction, nine books of essays, and a book of conversations. Gass was a professor of philosophy at Washington University. For most of his life he lived…
From Evan Lavender-Smith’s Old Notebooks
(could also be read as writing prompts) ~ Memoir beginning with detailed narrative description of subject’s rich and fertile childhood slowly disintegrates into list of difficult books he read as an adult. ~ Academic essay, after Moretti, quantifying the extent to which Jackson Pollock’s paintings influenced late-20th-century hairstyles. ~ Story about a mother who develops…
Ars Poetica XII: Art is a question
In my last post I offered a few points from Siri Hustvedt’s truly interesting essay on Louise Bourgeois. One of the things I have been thinking about since, is Hustvedt’s assertion that: A work of art is always part person, that is: a work of art is part-thing-part-person, it is this aliveness – according to…
Ars Poetica XI: A work of art is always part person
from: MY LOUISE BOURGEOIS SIRI HUSTVEDT ON THE COMPLEX, BRILLIANT, CONTRADICTORY ARTIST … we do not treat artworks the way we treat forks or chairs.[…] because it carries the traces of a living consciousness and unconsciousness, and it is invested with that being’s vitality. A work of art is always part person. Therefore the experience…
Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life
Being sceptical to psychoanalysis as a therapeutic method in cases of severe mental illness, I still believe that psychoanalytical theory has a lot to offer the fields of arts and humanities. One of the most interesting contemporary writers in this field is the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips. Here is from his book “Missing Out: In…
Sea-change
How to write about nature in a way that makes the reader feel the landscape as if she was there; wandering through it … absorbed, possessed – ? Here is Jean Sprackland: Countless times I’ve seen the shore hewn and hammered, scattered with whole tree trunks, steel pipes, oil drums, concrete fence posts, dead sheep….
Boring Friends
We know only four boring people. The rest of our friends we find very interesting. However, most of the friends we find interesting find us boring: the most interesting find us the most boring. The few who are somewhere in the middle, with whom there is reciprocal interest, we distrust: at any moment, we feel,…
Notes on the craft of poetry
Further notes on The best american poetics Mark Strand says: I believe that all poetry is formal in that it exists within limits, limits that are either inherited by tradition or limits that language itself imposes. Form it should be remembered is a word that has several meanings, some which are near opposites. form has to…
On becoming a poet
from: The weather of words, poetic invention, by Mark Strand
sub rosa 