august 2023
Sep. 6th, 2023 02:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
boneglueThe classic imaginary of a CIA conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy. Imagined or no, it studies with powerful verisimilitude the awkward wavefields of intention and influence that half-accidentally produce events in the world even on the global scale. Brutally satirical about the ideologies of men, “solitaries…who plan eternally toward some total moment.” DeLillo’s famous clipped style, constantly turning left midway through sentences, demands more focus than it seems it ought to. The total moment itself is hypnotic, eternal.
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The Third Reich [El Tercer Reich], Roberto Bolaño. 1989, published posthumously in 2010. Transl. Natasha Wimmer, 2011. 360pp. CAVITY Curiosity Shop, Victoria, BC.
Captivating, mysterious. Having read no other Bolaño I can't speculate on how its unique path to publication should affect interpretation. This cautionary parable of fascist gamer vacation is breakneck and hooky in the manner of a popular mystery, but the incomprehensible drifting so-called plotline belies any accusation of pandering. Very funny sometimes. Nightmarish sometimes. Once I opened it at 3AM and chickened out.
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Lenore Tawney: A Retrospective, ed. Kathleen Nugent Mangan. 1990. 160pp (exhibition catalogue). University library.
Agnes Martin: Writings, Drawings, Remembrances, Arne Glimcher. 2012. 364pp (art book). University library.
Lenore Tawney: Mirror of the Universe, ed. Karen Patterson. 2019. 304pp (exhibition catalogue). Local library.
Apparently Agnes Martin once said, “Anyone who can sit on a stone in a field awhile can see my paintings." In Retrospective, Tawney quotes Max Beckmann--himself quoting "a famous cabalist?"--“If you wish to grasp the invisible, penetrate as deeply as possible into the visible.” I love both these artists and love to imagine them as volatile young women in Coenties Slip. Somehow Tawney’s tall woven figures have become my mental template for a whole variety of reclusive women’s art which centres meditation, the altered state, the communion with the unknown which is the divine. Priestess work. I tried to explain to my brother why Martin affects me so deeply. These paintings, I told him, are six feet tall. When you see them in person you experience something inside, and that, not the painting, is the painting. I don’t know if I was making sense.
Movies:
- Joy Ride (2023) dir. Adele Lim
- Happy Together [春光乍洩, Ceon1 gwong1 zaa3 sit3] (1997) dir. Wong-Kar Wai
- Oppenheimer (2023) dir. Christopher Nolan
- "Theory of the Dérive" [Théorie de la dérive] by Guy Debord, 1958, transl. Ken Knapp
- "Meet Me in Iram" by Sofia Samatar, 2018 (in Lightspeed Magazine). Reread.
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