Information delayed. Information withheld. Saturation with info, useless and helpful blended. Plot not “completed.” Size and significance of events unemphatic: far too much attention paid to tiny subjects. Option on funny noises. Order of info homogeneous. Litotes, a Greek god, Litotes of Lacedaemonia. Why isn’t this boring? Do I need this info? It changes all the time, doesn’t repeat itself, it only almost does. What is a “conditional honorific”? Randomness and inductive method, both at once. “So what?” is a valuable question to ask. Frame story, like Taming of the Shrew, but W.S. didn’t finish the frame! A is really a pretext for B. B is what counts.
El día de mi suerte – Héctor Lavoe, Orquesta de Willie Colón
Has any one supposed it lucky to be born? I hasten to inform him or her it is just as lucky to die, and I know it.
I pass death with the dying and birth with the new-wash'd babe, and am not contain'd between my hat and boots, And peruse manifold objects, no two alike and every one good, The earth good and the stars good, and their adjuncts all good.
I am not an earth nor an adjunct of an earth, I am the mate and companion of people, all just as immortal and fathomless as myself, (They do not know how immortal, but I know.)
Every kind for itself and its own, for me mine male and female, For me those that have been boys and that love women, For me the man that is proud and feels how it stings to be slighted, For me the sweet-heart and the old maid, for me mothers and the mothers of mothers, For me lips that have smiled, eyes that have shed tears, For me children and the begetters of children.
Undrape! you are not guilty to me, nor stale nor discarded, I see through the broadcloth and gingham whether or no, And am around, tenacious, acquisitive, tireless, and cannot be shaken away.
Ben Eastham on Reba Maybury and Lucy McKenzie’s Pervert or Detective?, edited by Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen with an afterword by Susan Finlay, was published by no place press in 2025. It accompanied an exhibition on view at Ca’Buccari, Venice. (e-flux)
When used to camouflage a deeper conservatism, which is so often the function of cliché, the phrasing reassures readers that their engagement with the work of art in question affirms their opposition to the injustice they might recently have observed in the world, might even be feeling guilty about. Aesthetic experience is reconciled with ethical principle, pleasure equated with virtue, the beautiful made consistent with the good.
In the conversation at the heart of this book, [the] artists … dismantle this comforting delusion.
That “perversion” … carries the implication of a desire that cannot be subordinated to any ethical framework.
Art might in turn alert us to the “violence in which we live,” as McKenzie puts it, and lead us to establish creative spaces—subcultures—outside of those strictures.
By decoupling art from received morality, they reclaim it as an arena in which hierarchies and social norms can be brought into question without repercussion.
Only by expressing our unconscious desires and then measuring them against abstract ideals of the good can we approach self-knowledge and establish a workable politics.
The right to make my dreams come true, I ask, nay, I demand of life, Nor shall fate’s deadly contraband Impede my steps, nor countermand; Too long my heart against the ground Has beat the dusty years around, And now at length I rise! I wake! And stride into the morning break!
I have had not one word from her Frankly I wish I were dead. When she left, she wept a great deal; she said to me, This parting must be endured, Sappho. I go unwillingly.” I said, “Go, and be happy but remember (you know well) whom you leave shackled by love If you forget me, think of our gifts to Aphrodite and all the loveliness that we shared all the violet tiaras, braided rosebuds, dill and crocus twined around your young neck
Sunshine and shadow play amid the trees In bosky groves, while from the vivid sky The sun’s gold arrows fleck the fields at noon, Where weary cattle to their slumber hie. How sweet the music of the purling rill, Trickling adown the grassy hill! While dreamy fancies come to give repose When the first star of evening glows.
“The “synchronic museum,” as he calls its new alternative, “would forego history in the name of a kind of intensity of experience, an aesthetic charge that is not so much temporal (historical) as it is now radically spatial.””
Ne fais jamais de peinture si tu veux vivre tranquille. Corot, to a friend
The most inviting landscape, where we say, “Here we may rest and make this landscape ours,” For him is apprehension. To convey A moment of its meaning calls on powers He sometimes doubts possessing. In his hand The palette with its colored spots and smears Seems to match nothing. On the easel’s bland And vacant canvas not a line appears To guide him. While we gaze and shift our eyes Accumulating all there is to see, His fuller sight begins to realize A world brought into being anxiously, Where structured shapes and contoured colors show A calmer scene than any we could know.
A creamy tear descended here when Cupid squeezed the teat of Venus. Dripping down the Milky Way it puddled beneath old oak, new pine. Love’s selfish thirst did pluck a cosmic note, set every entombed entangled bit of me in roots both new and old to singing. I was become in earth and by harmony a million bits of tongue and ear, sound funnels upwhorled in song conducting cones. Fresh music from old flesh corrected my (most melancholy) record of this last go round the planet. Now I was first things: elementals, vegetable and mineral in form, dust to kick it on the breeze, loam to feed old oak, new pine, Eros-greedy energy on hunt for nourishment, cream to suck, breast to squeeze.
The LRB Podcast, Poetry and the Turning World: Divorce (Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s ‘The Divorce’, Anne Carson’s The Beauty of a Husband , ‘The Mpemba Effect’, Isabelle Baafi)
The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos, Anne Carson.
