Category: landscape

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The relief of having something to focus our attention.

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The future refuses [or is slow] to happen, so where else should I turn?

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Prefer crossed out, scribbled over monuments

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Berlant’s work is underpinned by a pressing desire for new forms of relationality and alternative ways to flourish. There is an urgency to their writing: feelings are political, affective life sustains the possibilities for other life-worlds.

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What Berlant proposes then is ‘an affective register which recognises the relationship between the joy-giving parts and the parts that require a kind of patience with the way things do not fit. The out-of-synchness of being matters’ (Berlant & Hardt, 2012, n.p.

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queer theory presumes the affective incoherence of the subject with respect to the objects that anchor it or to which they’re attached. (Berlant & Hardt, 2012, n.p.)

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Berlant helps us think about affective life through the lens of ambivalence, contradiction, and incoherence, rather than certainty and singularity. It is this that makes Berlant’s social theory so generative: an invitation to always ask questions, to unravel our own objects of attachment and fantasies of political transformation.

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think capaciously about the affective dimensions it will take to rebuild the world from the fragments of the present.

Eleanor Wilkinson, 11 | AMBIVALENT LOVE, Encountering Berlant part 1: Concepts otherwise.

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“… always felt that the ground below him was charged with a sense of belonging.” Lapvona: A Novel, Ottessa Moshfegh

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the place where [it] remains a little distanced and discursive, but to which we are unfathomably attached. Joe Jukes, Encountering Berlant part 1: Concepts otherwise.

Beauty will come to them  
Where they stand.
[...]
Trees need not walk the earth 
For beauty or for bread;  
Beauty will come to them  
In the rainbow—  
The sunlight—  
And the lilac-haunted rain

David Rosenthal

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“It was necessary, she said, to do something to cure the multitude of its unreality. Her solution was fiction. She was making up their lives, their castes, their faiths, how many brothers and sisters they had, and what childhood games they had played, and sending the stories whispering through the streets into the ears that needed to hear them. She was writing the grand narrative of the city, creating its story now that she had created its life. Some of her stories came from her memories of lost Kampili, the slaughtered fathers and the burned mothers; she was trying to bring that place back to life in this place, to bring back the old dead in the newly living, but memory wasn’t enough, there were too many lives to enliven, and so imagination had to take over from the point at which memory failed.”  

A sackful of seeds, Salman Rushdie, New Yorker, December 12, 2022 issue.

When the dead return
they will come to you in dream
and in waking, will be the bird
knocking, knocking against glass, seeking
a way in, will masquerade
as the wind

No Ruined Stone, Shara McCallum

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We are only human, and the gods have fashioned us for love. That is our great glory, and our great tragedy

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How easy it seems then, to walk the path of honor. Yet soon or late in every man’s life comes a day when it is not easy, a day when he must choose.

Maester Aemon (GRRM)

for some bits

of the nucleus

of the other

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Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind

Virginia Woolf via Popova.

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I have sewn the bits that I have, and those I can recall, as new ones will not be formed, into a thing that can renew, give strength, and maybe offer wisdom and joy.

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Related : Gabriela Gamboa New Topographies: 25.7617° N, 80.1918 W° at Bakehouse curated by Laura Novoa.

“an unending search for a sense of belonging and place exacerbated by the challenges of exile.

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Gamboa reconstructs a “personal mythology,” an exercise in remembering a place that no longer exists as it once did. She does so by expanding upon the notion of geography, not only as it pertains to the physicality of a landscape (i.e. its topography), but also how it is affected by human intervention.”

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The New York Review, December 22, 2022. Articles aiming to adjust the biographical perception of writers–Merve Emre on Roald Dahl and Howard W. French on Naipaul. But, Tobi Haslett on John Edgar Wideman is an appreciation.

Elsewhere, The Annotated Mrs. Dalloway, edited by Merve Emre (Syllabus for Love and Other Useless Pursuits, upcoming book).