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 ……
Tag: Maggie Nelson
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…
Maggie Nelson on “vernacular scholarship”
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…
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…
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,…
15 stones too many!
In my ongoing quest for blue I’ve today reached William Gass’ On Being Blue. A Philosophical Inquiry (1975). To my surprise, Gass starts off by quoting a text passage which I believe to be among the best pieces of literature ever written – The sucking-stones sequence, here is Molloy: I took advantage of being at the…
any color you like …
I’ve been reading a lot about the symbolic meaning of color lately, but what do seeing color really looks like? Green Parsley, Gelatin Silver Print, 2010 [from “Any Color You Like”] © Matthew Gamber North American Birds Exhibit, Gelatin Silver Print, 2010 [FROM “ANY COLOR YOU LIKE”] © MATTHEW GAMBER These beautiful images by Matthew Gamber made me…
sub rosa 