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)…
Tag: photography
On the shape of things
“I am interested in the shape of ideas, even if I do not believe in them” —Samuel Beckett
Things to Think
Things to Think Think in ways you’ve never thought beforeIf the phone rings, think of it as carrying a messageLarger than anything you’ve ever heard,Vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats. Think that someone may bring a bear to your door,Maybe wounded and deranged: or think that a mooseHas risen out of the lake, and…
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…
notes on Jeff Wall
“My work is to not write – not writing is a literary activity. “
Can or can’t see the word for the trees …
“Trees” (1913) I think that I shall never seeA poem lovely as a tree. A tree whose hungry mouth is prestAgainst the earth’s sweet flowing breast; A tree that looks at God all day,And lifts her leafy arms to pray; A tree that may in Summer wearA nest of robins in her hair; Upon whose…
A custodian of larger issues (cont.)
“To require perfection is to invite paralysis. The pattern is predictable: as you see error in what you have done, you steer your work toward what you imagine you can do perfectly. Your cling ever more tightly to what you already know you can do, away from risk and exploration, and possibly further from the…
A custodian of larger issues
“It is a widely accepted notion that making art is about self-expression. And it is – but that is not necessarily all it is. It may only be a passing feature of our times that validating the sense of who-you-are is held up as the major source of the need to make art. What gets…
A note on compulsive performativity – and how to care (for) more
Thoughts excerpted from Jan Verwoert’s text: I CAN, I CAN’T, WHO CARES (2008) Some have said that we have come to inhabit the post-industrial condition. But what could that mean? After the disappearance of factory work from the lives of most people in the Western world, we have entered into a culture where we do no…
sub rosa 