~ The Vrbov Cemetery in Barnes by Gabriel Josipovici
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Always Be Squinching and Other Tricks From a Portrait Photographer for Taking Flattering Pictures
You've never seen (or smelled, or tasted) a van Gogh like this
A former high school teacher is spending $15 million to create a gallery where music, scent and food match the art.
'I don't think there's a place for me here': The playwright who left Australia in order to conquer it
A child may be satisfied with employing a bit of irony, with pretending, with crawling into the shelter of a lie, with using language in a manner different from what other people think. In this case one says something other than what one means, or one means something other than what one has said. This is irony. And it is good to have it at the ready when other people abandon us, which of course they do. Sooner or later.(Translated by Bruce H. Kirmmse)Later in his life, Garff says that through his study of the German Romantics, Kierkegaard "inhaled irony's urbane ether" and "during the calamitous course of his engagement [to Regine Olsen] he developed [it] into a sort of desperate perfection", as demonstrated in a journal entry of 1848 alluding to the engagement:
A wishing, hoping, searching individual can never be ironical. Irony (as constitutive of an entire existence) consists of the exact opposite, of situating one's pain at the precise point where others situate their desire. The inability to possess one's beloved is never irony. But the ability to possess her all too easily, so that she begs and pleads to become one's own - and then to be able to unable to possess her. That is irony.
~Irony, or the shelter of a lie
Breaking Bread Cabinet Magazine
The question lurking behind these attractions and choices is not one of enchantment but: how does one overcome the wall? But perhaps this question is misleading. When discussing his early frustrations with writing, the author who described Saul Bellow's tone of voice talks about what he learned from certain authors:
Proust had given me the confidence to fail, had driven home to me the lesson that if you come up against a brick wall perhaps the way forward is to incorporate the wall and your effort to scale it into the work. I had read Robbe-Grillet and Marguerite Duras, and been excited by the way they reinvented the form of the novel to suit their purposes – everything is possible, they seemed to say. But when you start to write all that falls away. You are alone with the page and your violent urges, urges, which no amount of reading will teach you how to channel. ‘Zey srew me in ze vater and I had to svim,’ as Schoenberg is reported to have said. That is why I so hate creative writing courses – they teach you how to avoid brick walls, but I think hitting them allows you to discover what you and only you want to/can/must say.
it behooves me, as a Jewish woman intellectual who has survived the holocaust, to pay homage to Blanchot for the fragments on Auschwitz scattered throughout his texts: writing of the ashes, writing of the disaster which avoids the trap of complicity with speculative knowledge, with that in it which is tied to power, and thereby complicit with the torturers of Auschwitz.(A passage that ought to be noted by those who accuse Blanchot of anti-semitism.) Given her record of publications, one would expect a more formal, scholarly approach, keeping any personal stake out of the study, but Kofman recognises such speech is compromised and it is Blanchot's example that enabled her to speak of "this event, my absolute", and so mitigate any mastery:
To speak: it is necessary without (the) power [sans pouvoir]: without allowing language, too powerful, sovereign, to master the most aporetic situation, absolute powerlessness and very distress, to enclose it in the clarity and happiness of daylight.
NO ONE IS BORN IN A PERFECT WORLD. AND THE QUESTION SHOULD ALWAYS BE: PERFECT, ACCORDING TO WHOM? Selling Out Paradise.
Thanks, Whistle-Blower, Your Work Is Done Editorial Board, NYT
They've announced the three finalists for this year's Jan Michalski Prize for Literature, the CHF50,000 prize for a work of world literature "irrespective of the language in which it is written" (though they tend strongly towards the major/European languages, and books available in French, German, or English ...).
Among the finalists is a Patrik Ourednik -- written in French --, La fin du monde n'aurait pas eu lieu; see the Alliapublicity page. This is apparently due from Dalkey Archive Press soon -- pre-order at Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk ? -- but I haven't seen this one yet.
I urge you to scoot over to Adam Scovell’s website & blog Celluloid Wicker Manand soak in his excellent recent post “Echoes & Imprints: Towards A Sebaldian Cinema,” which is an edited transcript of a talk he gave at Norwich Castle on August 27, 2019 in conjunction with the exhibition “Lines of Sight: W.G. Sebald’s East Anglia.” Here’s how Scovell summarizes his own talk:
I’m going to talk about Sebald from three angles, all related to cinema. The first is to look at cinema as an influence on Sebald’s writing, his relationship to cinema and even his own shadow-career as a would-be screenwriter. Moving on from this, the second section will look at Sebald’s influence on cinema as a subject after his death, looking in particular at documentaries about the writer and how making cinema with his work as a subject affected the way in which filmmakers approached the medium. And, finally, with this somewhat symbiotic relationship defined, we’ll conclude by looking at the potential of a Sebaldian cinema in itself; a cinema influenced by his atmospheres and methodologies but which uses them to create new work.
The Polish Literacką Nagrodę Europy Środkowej Angelus is an award for the best Central European work published in Polish, and they've announced that Georgi Gospodinov's The Physics of Sorrow has won this year's award.
Fourteen titles, selected from 105 qualified submissions, were longlisted -- with no Polish book making the final cut.
The 150,000 złoty prize money is pretty good: just over US$39,000.
