Category: landscape

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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

[…]

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.

[…]

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).

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art in and of itself is not liberating; it either is or isn’t depending on the type of capacity it sets in motion, on the extent to which its nature is shareable or universalizable.

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An art is emancipated and emancipating when it renounces the authority of the imposed message, the target audience, and the univocal mode of explicating the world, when, in other words, it stops wanting to emancipate us.

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there is a more positive attempt today to give form to a continuity between artistic creativity and the forms of creativity manifested in objects and behaviors that testify to everyone’s capacities and to our inherent powers of resistance.

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Dissensus is a modification of the coordinates of the sensible, a spectacle or a tonality that replaces another.

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These are a few examples … of what “dissensus” might signify: a way of reconstructing the relationship between places and identities, spectacles and gazes, proximities and distances.

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Emancipation is the possibility of a spectator’s gaze other than the one that was programmed.

Art of the Possible: An interview with Jacques Ranciere, Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey, ArtForum March 2007.

Positioned to “stand between the realm and the darkness that [would] sweep[s]“