I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as […]
Middenstead — Liminal Narratives
Middenstead. The ‘place where a dunghill is formed’. This is the dust-heap, the rubbish pile, the flecked land of litter and waste. Here we find the discarded; the despoiled; the contaminated and the forgotten. These are spaces we shun or, more passively, we fail to see. They flicker at the margins of sight. For Shoard, […]
The desert as postmodern metaphor — Andrea Gibbons
Think of how the desert gets turned into metaphor in postmodern rhetoric where it functions as the place of origins, endings and hard truths: the place at the end of the world where all meanings and values blow away; the place without landmarks that can never be mapped; the place where nothing grows and nobody…
Michel de Certeau — The Vale of Soul-Making
To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place – an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny […]
William S. Burroughs — The Vale of Soul-Making
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.
― William S. Burroughs, Queer. (Viking Press November 1985)
“Our real enemy is not the virus but our response to the virus.” — Art of Quotation
” Sometimes people ask me what it takes to be a writer. The only things you have to do, I tell them, are read constantly; write for thousands of hours; and have the masochistic ability to absorb a great deal of rejection and isolation. As it turns out, these qualities have prepared me well to deal […]
via “Our real enemy is not the virus but our response to the virus.” — Art of Quotation
James Baldwin — The Vale of Soul-Making
So what can we really do for each other except—just love each other and be each other’s witness? And haven’t we got the right to hope—for more? So that we can really stretch into whoever we really are? Don’t you think so?
—James Baldwin, Another Country (Dial Press, 1962)
The “Kinetic” Mind of Conceptual Artist Gordon Matta-Clark — Chicago Review of Books
A review of Frances Richard’s new book, “Gordon Matta-Clark: Physical Poetics.”
via The “Kinetic” Mind of Conceptual Artist Gordon Matta-Clark — Chicago Review of Books
Graffiti — cakeordeathsite
Brassaï’s close-ups of graffiti carved and painted on Parisian city walls were first seen in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure in 1933, however he would continue to photograph images of graffiti for the next three decades, culminating in the publication of the book, Graffiti, in 1961. With this project, ‘the eye of Paris’ as he was called […]
Clarice Lispector — The Vale of Soul-Making
I write because I passionately want to speak. Even though writing is only giving me the great measure of silence.
— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva. (New Directions, June 13, 2012) Originally published August 1973.
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