Archive for reading
April 19, 2008 at 12:46 pm · tag/s : art, blog, death, doubt, loss, people, reading, writing
a much more engaging and humble piece by alex james in the independent about the suicide of his friend angus fairhurst (4.10.1966 - 29.3.2008) than the annoying self-serving piece by tracy emin which i linked some time ago to in ephemeral.
unlike his close friends damien hirst and sarah lucas, fairhurst was full of doubt. a few weeks ago he went alone to scotland and “with a ladder and a rope that he’d handwoven in silk, climbed the ladder and hanged himself in a meticulously planned grisly piece of theatre.”
April 9, 2008 at 8:21 am · tag/s : australia, blog, blogs, melbourne, reading
letter to the editor
I love clocks, in fact I have 17 of them. But what a bore, having to get up at 2am to put them all back an hour. I mean, couldn’t they let us put them back at 10pm as we go to bed.
- Doug Jacques,
Nambucca Heads.
ha ha ha … doug : you are a genius. marieke hardy thought you were serious.
but then she is not very smart.
and she is annoying.
and she has a stupid haircut.
and her blog sucks.
March 27, 2008 at 8:08 pm · tag/s : blog, holocaust, reading, text, writing
Published in 1975, Charles Reznikoff’s book-length poem Holocaust is a collage of witness testimonies from the Nuremberg Military Tribunal and the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
“By using the language of others he attends to the “object” of genocide without imaginative or philosophical flourish, and by reciting it again in his own rhythm he becomes a second witness to its truth. Ultimately, the reader responds not to the poet but to the testimony itself.” writes Kathryn Crim in the Boston Review.
read more »
December 27, 2007 at 9:35 am · tag/s : reading, universities
is it possible that the university where i work is run by ex-members of the secret service of the former east germany? i came across the following instructions for crippling ‘oppositional’ people in the directive ‘perceptions’ (richtlinien stichpunkt wahrnehmung) quoted in anna funder’s excellent stasiland :
to develop apathy in the subject … to achieve a situation in which his conflicts, whether of a social personal career health or political kind, are irresolvable … to give rise to fears in him … to develop/create disappointments … to restrict his talents or capabilities … to reduce his capacity to act … to harness dissentions and contradictions around him for that purpose …
(p.286)
September 7, 2007 at 12:57 pm · tag/s : doubt, life, people, reading, strange, thinking
as a kind of ex-cyberpunk i should be a science fiction fan, but i am just not … something about being unwilling to suspend my disbelief. however william gibson explains why science fiction is about the present, and his observations on the strange kind of reality we live in this recent interview in the washington post make for a great read.
A taste :
“…EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It’s like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement…”
via boingboing
August 30, 2007 at 6:32 am · tag/s : reading, writing
i found this advice for writers on a blog called Making Light which is kind of huge and interesting and has the rather nice byline Language, fraud, folly, truth, knitting, and growing luminous by eating light.
“The author makes a tacit deal with the reader. You hand them a backpack. You ask them to place certain things in it—to remember, to keep in mind as they make their way up the hill. If you hand them a yellow Volkswagen and they have to haul this to the top of the mountain—to the end of the story—and they find that this Volkswagen has nothing whatsoever to do with your story, you’re going to have a very irritated reader on your hands.” —Frank Conroy
March 11, 2007 at 6:23 am · tag/s : doubt, reading, thinking
the quest for global interpretations and grand narratives is always a mistaken one, assuming a shapeliness in human affairs and a simplicity in human motivation never encountered in muddy actuality. nowadays no one much hankers for the panoramic view of where we all were and where we are all going, once offered by marxism or whiggism, or the more obscure and even less testable stories and metaphors psychoanalysts offer to explain our darker private obsessions. large theories may generate good questions but they produce poor answers. the historian’s task is to discover what happened in some actual past situations-what conflicting or confused intention produced what outcomes-not to produce large truths. the most enlightening historical generalisations tend to be those that hover sufficiently close to the ground to illuminate the contours and dynamics of intention and action in circumscribed circumstances. (21-22)
for what it’s worth, the budding psychoanalyst in me thinks that a psycho-therapist/analyst’s task would be not unlike that of the historian, which clendinnen so eloquently outlines above.
March 4, 2007 at 6:06 am · tag/s : doubt, pain, people, reading
A country is considered the more civilised the more the wisdom and efficiency of its laws hinder a weak man from becoming too weak and a powerful one too powerful - If This Is A Man (1947)
reading primo levi’s survival in auschwitz (originally pulished in 1947 as if this is a man) - the amazing thing about reading levi is that, despite the fact that he is describing the most unimaginable horrors, he is not depressing - this is because of the humiltity of the man : he expects nothing, he does not waste time complaining about his situation, and he is not surprised or dismayed by people’s selfishness and cruelty.
and eventually, he always finds himself in a situation where another human being is kind to him, or to someone else. he describes these superhuman acts of selflessness with wonderful acuity yet simplicity. thus you always put the book down with a feeling of hope and wonder for what human beings are capable of, even in the midst of terrible suffering.
nevertheless, survivial in auschwitz is not the sort of book that you can pick up and read at anytime of the night or day. you need to be in a certain frame of mind for it. moments of reprieve, on the other hand, is a book by levi where he collects the stories of some of the men that helped him in his darkest hours. recommended for those times of doubt when you have lost all hope for the human race.
January 13, 2007 at 8:54 pm · tag/s : death, image, people, reading, thinking
i found a book of photographs of utrecht in 1942, my home town two years into the nazi occupation - the city has changed a lot more in the last thirty years or so than it did in the thirty year period immediately after the war (i left in 1972) and so it looks eerily familiar - but the most moving and disturbing thing is to see images of people wearing a yellow star, and signs saying “forbidden for jews” in the otherwise so familiar landscape - i feel a sense of outrage : these are utrechtenaren, “our” people, my fellow citizens … the mayor refused to co-operate with the transports and there was a stand off for several months - then the mayor was replaced and the transports began from maliebaan station - in her diary ina boudier bakker says hundreds of people protested there, to no avail … i wish my grandmother was still alive so i could ask her about it … but she wouldn’t have been there to protest … and i think about why - one : she was a poor woman who lived in the slums, she would have been fully engaged in the struggle to survive - two : it would have been, if not actually dangerous, then very frightening, for a half jewish woman who, even though she looked like any other jew, did not have to wear the star, thanks to her dutch mother, who had died giving birth to her sister when she was three years old - three : she wasn’t the sort of person who would think that it would have made any difference to protest
there is a photograph of three young girls wearing the star - we know the names of two of the girls : hadassa and sophia wijzenbeek, and the date on which they were murdered at auschwitz : 28.1.1944 (the day my father turned 12) - the name of the third girl is unknown
my mother, who could have been one of the little girls (she was seven when these photographs were taken), looks at the book for a long time and i watch her face looking at it - the tiredness is gone … she is turning the pages, looking keenly at the faces of the people in the photographs, to see if she recognizes anyone … she is there .. she looks up at me and says : i can taste the atmosphere…
there is a picture of the house where, 16 years later, i would be born
January 2, 2007 at 7:27 pm · tag/s : reading
de volkskrant‘s iranian born columnist kader abdolah, in his piece condemning the execution of saddam hussein today, (2.1.07) quotes from a poem by the iranian poet forough farrokzhad (from her collection my lover) :
i am just going out onto the verandah
to stroke the tight
night
air with my fingers
the connections are broken
the connections are broken
no one will
introduce me to the sun
no one will
take me to the celebration of the sparrows
birds are mortal
think about flying
translated from persian into dutch by amir afrassiabi
translated from dutch into english by i.j.oog (with apologies)
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