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: Mary Ruefle
Colder days, darker nights
Things to look forward to – — bad weather, great literature = a perfect match!
Allow the self to be distracted — (Ars Poetica XVI)
— wasting time is the most personal, most private, most intimate form of conversation with oneself, as well as with another. Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures by Mary Ruefle * Susan Hiller: Dream Mapping (1973/74) Dream Mapping, 1973 was an art event provocatively poised between an experiment (social or scientific) and a performance without an…
Indeed I Was Pleased with the World
There is so little to say, and so much time in which to say it. – Charles Wright Jacques-Henri Lartigue
28 Short Lectures: Mary Ruefle
… an image a day
Consecrating ones life to an imbecility
I suppose, as a poet, amongst my fears can be counted the deep-seated uneasiness that one day it will be revealed that I consecrated my life to an imbecility (to something intrinsically unnecessary and superfluous – and thereby unintentionally cruel). In an intriguing essay called “On Fear”, Mary Ruefle touch upon a problem I have been…
The pleasures of reading Mary Ruefle
You know I have this crush on Mary Ruefle, remember? (I actually believe her remarkable book of lectures; Madness, Rack and Honey, to be amongst the most extraordinarily thought-provoking books ever published). As luck would have it, my generous friend Ann knows my obsession, and today she very kindly supplied me with a link to Michel…
(creative?!???) MESS, or: a state of confusion and disorderliness
I’ve started working on a short essay on Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. the book keeps popping up in my imagination, so I’ve decided to try to write myself through my fascination. As for now I haven’t got any written stuff to show you, but this is what my desk looks like at the moment: in comparison…
“To live is so startling, it leaves but little room for other occupations”
In LECTURES I WILL NEVER GIVE (Madness, Rack, and Honey: Collected Lectures) Mary Ruefle writes: Once I wanted to write a lecture on two self-portraits by the German artist Käthe Kollowitz, (…) single self-portraits are not half as interesting as two self-portraits by the same artist painted thirty or forty years apart. When Käthe painted herself…
sub rosa 