It is a restless moment
It is a restless moment. She has kept her head lowered, to give him a chance to come closer. But he could not, for lack of courage, she turns and walks away.
In The Mood For Love, 2000
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Imaginary journal
Amer Picon Punch
Another cocktail recipe. Plenty of time to determine the drink for this summer.
- 1 tsp grenadine syrup
- 1/2 oz Amer Picon orange bitters
- fill with soda water
- 1 oz brandy
First noted in this article: ‘Unpacking a punch’ by Wayne Curtis, from The Atlantic.
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Stupid
…there’s nothing out there. It’s stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I’ve never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn’t want to hide in factories. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have. Let’s drink more wine!
Charles Bukowski – via light leaks
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Frankenstein
“Remember that I am thy creature—I ought to be thy Adam—but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed; everywhere I see bliss from which I alone am irrevocably excluded.” Percy grasped what lay beneath Mary’s language and pulled it to the surface. “I ought to be thy Adam,” the creature says—but his creator rejected him before his mate was made. He is not inhuman because he was brought to life on a surgical table. He is inhuman because he is alone.
Louisa Thomas, ‘Their Love Is Alive’, Newsweek
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Give some back
Pain and damage don’t end the world, or despair, or fuckin’ beatin’s. The world ends when you’re dead. Until then, you’ve got more punishment in store. Stand it like a man… and give some back.
Al Swearengen, ‘E.B. Was Left Out’, Deadwood
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Monsieur Flaubert, c’est moi!
To keep one’s distance from life, to avoid organizations, the state, and routine family life, to regard success and literary renown as objects of disdain… these are the indisputable moral principles of secular modern literary seclusion; that is, of literary modernism. First of all, if being experimental and giving voice to never-before expressed human experience in a new idiom does not do away entirely with with literary acceptance and legibility, it delays commercial success. A young writer who is preparing himself for a difficult and trying literary life must have a sincere conviction in these principles such that should success prove evasive (sometimes success never arrives), he will avoid immediate disappointment and be able to make do with nearly nothing, to progress on the hard road of his convictions, and to continue to write. I still believe that the modernist literary morality is something that all writers as a group from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, especially today’s young writers, must believe in and respect to stay on their feet and resist the commercialisation of literature. Another victory of Flaubert’s, in addition to the great success of his books and oeuvre, rests in having lived his entire life in accordance with his description of this morality made while he was only twenty-nine.
Orhan Pamuk, “Monsieur Flaubert, c’est moi!”
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She pushes like the tide
She pushes like the tide. Urgent, quick, reaching out for something beyond you and then in a moment rushing back clattering over shells and tumbling kelp, draining in retreat, leaving wrack and foam. Curling back in a small defense. And if at first you step away on toe-tips there is an eventual moment when she touches and from that inevitability, with each new visit, you begin to contemplate the immensity of what is offered, the frightening expanse. Each leaving, after water runs and sand mirrors sky, a moment of relief, the detail from absence and the outline of what is left behind. Should you embrace her (you should) remember the unexpected cold, the way your feet look and how she changes you because by late-afternoon there will be only the faint grey of grubby shadow high on the beach, no footsteps left. Below at the darker edges, where tide runs sharp against the sudden depth, water prepares for night. What you are left with: memories of things that you didn’t think important. On a couch in someone else’s house. Watching her tend a plant. Tired eyes. That dress she wore, those shoes, that soft perfume long gone. That painting she thought looked like you (how gently she considered you). Idle moments. Tired gladness. And still you want to remember certain things, shape the whole like a half-waking dream, content with its forced conclusion. There may be pictures but what of them? There is that tin of praslins now filled with artifacts (the dried head of a rose, a shell, a butterfly wing, pebbles, polished glass, a silver ring, a broken piece of jade, a folded tram ticket). But these drift-things will mutely nod to what you forgot to remember. Instead you understand how your own blood is tide-like. The fluttering of it when you press against a pillow echoes every longing and ache, everything that you wanted to do differently. Whatever reservations you have put them aside. Fold them, and fold them once more, slip them into a book and abandon what holds you from her. Even the bittersweet water is better than nothing. But know now that you can never be everything to anyone.
~
Altermodern and the nomads
There is an interesting video of Nicolas Bourriaud, curator of the 4th Tate Triennial, explaining his conception of Altermodern. Bourriaud is also writing a book, The Radicant. From the publisher’s site:
To be radicant: it means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them any value as origins, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing. The author extends radicant thought to modes of cultural production, consumption and use. Looking at the world through the prism of art, he sketches a “world art criticism” in which works are in dialogue with the context in which they are produced.
“And if twenty-first-century culture was invented with those works that set themselves the task of effacing their origin in favor of a multitude of simultaneous or successive enrootings? This process of obliteration is part of the condition of the wanderer, a central figure of our precarious era, who insistently is emerging at the heart of contemporary artistic creation. This figure is accompanied by a domain of forms and by an ethical mode: translation, whose modalities and cardinal role in contemporary culture this book seeks to enumerate.”
It sounds almost like nomadology or psychical nomadism: the practice of taking as one needs from any moral, religious, political, ethical, or whatever system, and leaving behind the parts of that system found to be unappealing.
I suppose the key difference is the Radicant sounds more inclusive while the Nomad is more deliberately making decisions about what should be discarded. Both concepts appeal since they seem to work against any kind of cultural studies approach, the great ouroboros, the cul-de-sac of academic thought.
Another book to add to the reading pile.
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Robert Drewe & Charles Meere
I was a little fuzzy on the details but after seeing a painting last week I was reminded of a story.
Robert Drewe was scouring through the Art Gallery of NSW looking for an artwork that might suit a book cover. He happened upon ‘Australian Beach Pattern’ by Charles Meere. The AGNSW describes the work as “perennially popular” but until Drewe pulled it from storage it had been “lost”.
That’s the story. Whether it is true, I’m not sure.
Looking at the AGNSW details for the painting they list exhibitions that include the work. After an initial exhibit in 1952 it wasn’t seen again until 1982. The Bodysurfers, Drewe’s collection of stories was published in 1983 using the painting for the cover. The timeline seems to match, taking into account the time involved to create the cover, print the book, etc.
Like Dupain’s ‘Sunbaker’ the painting has become an iconic representation of beach culture but more than that it seems a very nationalistic piece. The child raising a shovel from his father’s shoulders looks almost like a parody of Soviet-era posters, and the father, as well as the man holding the towel in the center, have a military posture.
Most striking, to me, is the light. It isn’t so much that there is a problem with the direction of the sun but that each person is made up of light and darkness. The painting has depth and perspective, a layering of groups. But there is also a tension on each person with the way shadow seems to curve the figures.
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Justine
Tonight I finished reading Justine, the first book of the Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell. The final section:
The cicadas are throbbing in the great planes, and the summer Mediterranean lies before me in all its magnetic blueness. Somewhere out there, beyond the mauve throbbing line of the horizon lies Africa, lies Alexandria, maintaining its tenuous grasp on one’s affections through memories which are already refunding themselves slowly into forgetfulness; memory of friends, of incidents long past. The slow unreality of time begins to grip them, blurring the outlines—so that sometimes I wonder whether these pages record the actions of real human beings; or whether this is not simply the story of a few inanimate objects which precipitated drama around them—I mean a black patch, a green fingerstall, a watch-key and a couple of dispossessed wedding-rings…
Soon it will be evening and the clear night sky will be dusted thickly with summer stars. I shall be here, as always, smoking by the water. I have decided to leave Clea’s last letter unanswered. I no longer wish to coerce anyone, to make promises, to think of life in terms of compacts, resolutions, covenants. It will be up to Clea to interpret my silence according to her own needs and desires, to come to me if she has need or not, as the case may be. Does not everything depend on our interpretation of the silence around us?
~