(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: literature
INDELICACY
This is how Amina Cain’s novel Indelicacy begins: I THOUGHT THAT BEING in the country would help me write, with its fields and its horses, but I don’t think I was meant for that. For the country, or for help.—Amina Cain Sometimes a short paragraph is enough. Something unique is unfolding, words – this common…
Mac’s Problem
I used to be a writer, these days I prefer paint. But the thing is — the two have more in common than I imagine. For the maker it’s all about the process … “I began my diary exercises without a plan, aware that in literature you don’t start because you have something to write…
“On Vision and Contemplation”
An Excerpt from “MEMORIES OF STAROBIELSK ESSAYS BETWEEN ART AND HISTORY” by Józef Czapski, translated from the Polish by Alissa Valles, introduction by Irena Grudzińska Gross “We paint only one percent of contemplation.” —CYPRIAN NORWID What is vision? A certain synthetic, singular way of looking at the surrounding world. A moment of such vision always…
Some days are all about colour
“I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To…
profound distraction
“All profound distraction opens certain doors. You have to allow yourself to be distracted when you are unable to concentrate.” — Julio Cortazar BODEN, WAND, ECKE, RAUM (1970) – Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI (diffusion RMN) © Klaus Rinke
Can you still just tend your own garden once you know about the fire outside its walls?
notes on Jenny Offill’s new novel; Weather (2020) A month ago I read Offill’s Dept. of Speculation – and fell in love with her digressive-fragmentary style. To me this is a way of writing which resembles my own thoughts – Offill’s text mirrors my own thought process; a constant rambling – . Offill’s narrator in…
A week in St Ives
I’m in St. Ives as a student. Working with my own art and studying masters. St. Ives has historically been a very important place for many artists — my favorites amongst them being Virginia Woolf & Barbara Hepworth. There is a Tate Museum here. An there is the wonderful Barbara Hepworth Museum and Sculpture Garden…
the fact that –
As if struggling my way through more than 900 pages of William H Gass’ isn’t already too much … Yesterday I had a quick glance at Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (a 1,000 page novel, more or less one-sentence stream of consciousness, told from inside the mind of an Ohio mother as she worries about everything…
Darkness at Noon
Noon Hour BY PEGGY TROJAN Unless hot lunch at schoolwas serving something speciallike corn chowderand baking powder biscuitsor creamed chipped beefpotatoes and browniesI went hometo what mymother madelike most town kids Jack walked the furthestalmost to the riverto his unpainted houseby the railroad tracksWe all knew nobody was therehis mom at the tavern alreadyHe always…
sub rosa 