january 2024
Feb. 23rd, 2024 08:27 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bonegluehappy new year!
Confessions of St. Augustine, Augustine of Hippo. 1963. 350pp. Transl. by Rex Warner. Found Bookshop, Cochrane, AB.
Apparently the proper MLA citation is "Augustine, of Hippo, Saint". Entrancing in many places, even for a laywoman like myself without much theological grit. There are reasons I couldn’t be Catholic, at least not the way they did it in the old days. How is it that the same ardour that begs, “Let me know you, my known; let me know thee even as I am known….” (210) can also deride the “poison of curiosity” and its sensual embodiment, “the pleasure of lust” (335)? I drew a New Year passage from Sor Juana for a friend: the segment which calls physical love “the knowing that no philosophy knows." Of course, centuries of argument on the works of Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, might well clarify my considerations someday.
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Harlot's Ghost, Norman Mailer. 1991. 1168pp. Interlibrary loan. Nearly finished.
Less interested in institutions and structures than DeLillo's Libra, for example; but the CIA memoir as libidinal gothic, complete with haunted house, also opens up some new corridors of feeling. The petty masculine desire to open envelopes and locks and dig big fuck-off tunnels under East Germany. I was enthralled for about 950 pages, which is much more than I would have given a lesser yarn-spinner. Then I realized I essentially had two full books left to read, the deadline of the interlibrary loan was fast approaching, and I had yet to sense any momentum of purpose. I asked a man at my book club who had read it if I should struggle through the rest and he said, don’t bother.
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Partir, Tahar ben Jelloun. 2007. 333pp. In French. University library.
Some movements midway through struck me as sentimental or abrupt, but the main plot line in particular is wrenching—precise architectures of longing and despair. I want to read more in French, and until I do, there are dimensions I can’t perceive. Rhythms, intertextual gestures, word-choices, et cetera. I look forward to sharpening those new senses and I am glad this was my first experiment in the effort.
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Stealing Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic, Neville Drury. 2011. 376pp.
A very useful summary of Anglo-Western occult thought through to the year 2000. Probably indispensable in terms of scope and spread. As an anthropologist, Drury remains dutifully uncritical—of course, sound method—but this leaves me still looking for a writer who doesn’t seem to literally believe in the collective unconsciousness to help me think through, with sympathy and rigour, all the mechanisms and movement behind the attraction of these modern magic(k)al fantasies invented nearly from nothing. We need to feel important to the universe, I guess. We can hold ourselves in indeterminate quantum superpositions of belief and unbelief.
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Movies & TV:
Confessions of St. Augustine, Augustine of Hippo. 1963. 350pp. Transl. by Rex Warner. Found Bookshop, Cochrane, AB.
Apparently the proper MLA citation is "Augustine, of Hippo, Saint". Entrancing in many places, even for a laywoman like myself without much theological grit. There are reasons I couldn’t be Catholic, at least not the way they did it in the old days. How is it that the same ardour that begs, “Let me know you, my known; let me know thee even as I am known….” (210) can also deride the “poison of curiosity” and its sensual embodiment, “the pleasure of lust” (335)? I drew a New Year passage from Sor Juana for a friend: the segment which calls physical love “the knowing that no philosophy knows." Of course, centuries of argument on the works of Augustine, of Hippo, Saint, might well clarify my considerations someday.
+++
Harlot's Ghost, Norman Mailer. 1991. 1168pp. Interlibrary loan. Nearly finished.
Less interested in institutions and structures than DeLillo's Libra, for example; but the CIA memoir as libidinal gothic, complete with haunted house, also opens up some new corridors of feeling. The petty masculine desire to open envelopes and locks and dig big fuck-off tunnels under East Germany. I was enthralled for about 950 pages, which is much more than I would have given a lesser yarn-spinner. Then I realized I essentially had two full books left to read, the deadline of the interlibrary loan was fast approaching, and I had yet to sense any momentum of purpose. I asked a man at my book club who had read it if I should struggle through the rest and he said, don’t bother.
+++
Partir, Tahar ben Jelloun. 2007. 333pp. In French. University library.
Some movements midway through struck me as sentimental or abrupt, but the main plot line in particular is wrenching—precise architectures of longing and despair. I want to read more in French, and until I do, there are dimensions I can’t perceive. Rhythms, intertextual gestures, word-choices, et cetera. I look forward to sharpening those new senses and I am glad this was my first experiment in the effort.
+++
Stealing Fire From Heaven: The Rise of Modern Western Magic, Neville Drury. 2011. 376pp.
A very useful summary of Anglo-Western occult thought through to the year 2000. Probably indispensable in terms of scope and spread. As an anthropologist, Drury remains dutifully uncritical—of course, sound method—but this leaves me still looking for a writer who doesn’t seem to literally believe in the collective unconsciousness to help me think through, with sympathy and rigour, all the mechanisms and movement behind the attraction of these modern magic(k)al fantasies invented nearly from nothing. We need to feel important to the universe, I guess. We can hold ourselves in indeterminate quantum superpositions of belief and unbelief.
+++
Movies & TV:
- House of Games (1987) dir. David Mamet
- The Holdovers (2023) dir. Alexander Payne
- Love and Anarchy [Film d'amore e d'anarchia, ovvero: stamattina alle 10, in via dei Fiori, nella nota casa di tolleranza...,] (1973) dir. Lina Wertmüller
- The Third Man (1949) dir. Carol Reed
- Johnny Guitar (1954) dir. Nicholas Ray
- Silence of the Sea [Le silence de la mer] (1949) dir. Jean-Pierre Melville
- The Zone of Interest (2023) dir. Jonathan Glazer
- "Catching Copper," "Snake-Light" by Natalie Diaz (Postcolonial Love Poem). I also read the rest of this sumptuous and sharp collection, but I'm not well read in poetry or poetry criticism, so I haven't written a whole shebang, and will probably continue not to as I read more poetry. The book is very beautiful.
(2024 song of the year.... call me basic all you like.)