(i) “To be in favor of solitude is not to be against community or friendship or love. It’s not that being alone is better, just that without the experience of it we block ourselves from discovering something enormously beneficial, perhaps even vital, to selfhood. Who are you when you are not a friend, a partner,…
Tag: essay
Home away from home
Well, to tell the truth, these rooms have no resemblance whatsoever to the place I usually call home. My home is a typical Scandinavian «no fuss» house. This is something completely different. Hazlitt’s hotel, London is everything my home is not. And I guess this is why I love this place so much. It offers…
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…
Short Talk On Housing
I have entered a new year of bookish life together with an old friend of mine, Anne Carson, or her texts, to be more precise. Close reading, slowly finding my way through her Short Talks. Here is how today started: Short Talk On Housing Here is one thing you can do if you have no…
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….
A talent for concealment and revelation
A breeze was blowing, and I could smell salt, seaweed, and sun-bleached shore. I knew, once again, that I’d found home. –Sue Hubbell, Waiting for Aphrodite I never tire of the coast because it’s never the same twice. The tides and the weather change its physical shape, and they bring different things to look at….
The best american poetics
In his introduction to The Best American Poetry 1991, Mark Strand, my favorite guide in the sphere of aesthetics these days, uses his own personal background (which I guess will be recognizable for many of us) to illuminate the difference between poetry and prose. Here is my attempt to summarize some his arguments: My parents…
Reading Mark Strand
– contemplating the difference between prose & poetry Mark Strand: The Weather of Words
Ugly???
What is ugly? Who is ugly? Is ugliness at all a word, a description, a kind of characterization one can use? Copyright© Iiu Susiraja I am working on a short text about the Finnish artist Iiu Susiraja. Susiraja is a photographer using her own body as subject and motif. What is most striking about Susiraja’s appearance, is…
Notes on Art and Politics
My review of Ai Weiwei’s exhibition at The Royal Academy of Arts focuses on Ai as a political artist. It is an obvious thing to do – Ai Weiwei is an activist artist. Not an activist or an artist, but both. For me it is important to underline this point because many theorists, and also…
sub rosa 