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Category: language

  • Aspire to change

    […] starting from the position that the status quo is unacceptable, and that some sort of change—whether transformation, disruption, rebellion, innovation, intervention, or insubordination—is therefore necessary, the works under discussion in the chapters that follow offer a version of Cage’s optimistic transferral; they expand that conviction about the intolerability of the status quo to literary modes, advocating implicitly for a more variegated canon, and then continue more radically to question the fundamental structures of language itself. Texts here are conceived not only as artifacts documenting moments in which writers have undertaken the radical reevaluation of modes of composition but also as sites encouraging readers to proceed in unconventional and innovative ways; they exhibit experimental writing and reward experimental reading. If the world requires new positions and relations, new modes of attention and perception, a refreshed awareness of material conditions, the redistribution of powers, and continually active participation, unscripted by conventions, here are the proving grounds. Those who aspire to change society shouldn’t shy from the far less ambitious task of reconsidering what—and how—they read.

    Radium of the Word : A POETICS OF MATERIALITY, Craig Dworkin
    Cristina Lei Rodriguez at Locust Projects.

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    […] uncertain and adulterated, strange and unauthorized

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    […] join in, for us, to change misery.

    Barely, related — The Calamity Form : On Poetry and Social Life, Anahid Nersessian.

    Like the commodity form, the calamity form enables an “active and in-depth knowing of nothing.” Its “peculiar achievement” is not to explain the conditions responsible for the epistemic and experiential dilemmas and contradictions of its moment but rather to put us “on close terms with incomprehension.” Through its “anti-denotative and anti-representational” strategies, the poetry “repossess[es] the occult character of the commodity and sets it not against but beside the inscrutability of its historical moment” (p. 4, emphases Levinson).

    In other words, the relationship of commodity form to calamity form is one of adjacency: a serial, similarity, reiterative relationship rather than a hierarchical, logical, and causal one. The calamity form is Nersessian’s category-term for Romanticism’s way of suspending, attenuating, downgrading, vaulting over, fracturing, blurring, deforming, and misdirecting the normative relationships between signifier and signified that characterize narrative, statement, argument, and reference. The calamity form, on her reading, neither critiques nor idealizes the commodity form; it “rehearses” it …

    Marjorie Levinson on The Calamity Form via Critical Inquiry

  • Somebodies

    Morrison wants us ashamed of how we treat the powerless, even if we, too, feel powerless.

    […]

    There is somebody in all of us. This fact is our shared experience, our shared category: the human.

    […]

    [A] form of self-regard, for Morrison, was the road back to the human—the insistence that you are somebody although the structures you have lived within have categorized you as “nobody.”

    Zadie Smith, newyorker.
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  • The Genius of Toni Morrison’s Only Short Story | The New Yorker

    In 1980 Toni Morrison sat down to write her one and only short story, “Recitatif.” The fact that there is only one Morrison short story seems of a piece with her œuvre. There are no dashed-off Morrison pieces, no filler novels, no treading water, no exit off the main road. There are eleven novels and one short story, all of which she wrote with specific aims and intentions.

    https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/toni-morrison-recitatif-short-story-zadie-smith

    This essay is drawn from the introduction to “Recitatif: A Story,” by Toni Morrison, out this February from Knopf.

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    Join in so we can change misery.

    Nussbaum went on to extend the work of John Rawls, who developed the most influential contemporary version of the social-contract theory: the idea that rational citizens agree to govern themselves, because they recognize that everyone’s needs are met more effectively through coöperation. Nussbaum argued that Rawls gave an unsatisfactory account of justice for people dependent on others—the disabled, the elderly, and women subservient in their homes. For a society to remain stable and committed to democratic principles, she argued, it needs more than detached moral principles: it has to cultivate certain emotions and teach people to enter empathetically into others’ lives. She believes that the humanities are not just important to a healthy democratic society but decisive, shaping its fate. She proposed an enhanced version of John Stuart Mill’s “aesthetic education”—emotional refinement for all citizens through poetry and music and art. “Respect on its own is cold and inert, insufficient to overcome the bad tendencies that lead human beings to tyrannize over one another,” she wrote. “Public culture cannot be tepid and passionless.”

    Rachel Aviv on Martha Nussbaum, newyorker, 2016.

    “A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image”

    Joan Didion, The White Album: Essays.

    “A finished picture defies all attempts to analyze what makes it work or not work: the responsibility for its every frame is clouded not only in the accidents and compromises of production but in the clauses of its financing.”

    Ibid.

    “For the fact is that the world cannot be left out of the garden.”

    Jamaica Kincaid, My Garden

  • Redeem things

    “… redeem things from their associations” Jamaica Kincaid was on Cultivating Place, a podcast (July 2020).

    “Memory is a gardener’s real palette; memory as it summons up the past, memory as it shapes the present, memory as it dictates the future.”

    “…carry it always

    on my person, concealed, so

    no one else would know but me.

    That way they can’t steal it…”

    Floridas, Anastasia Samoylova. 19 January – 19 March 2022. Madera, 23.

    “Sunshine state. Swampland paradise. Tourist aspiration. Political swing-state. Real estate racket. Refuge of excess. Sub-tropical fever dream. The place where image and reality become inseparable. With forms of nature and culture found nowhere else, Florida is unique. It is also among the most elusive and misunderstood of places.

    Samoylova’s series Floridas documents it all in a layered portrait of contemporary Florida, while establishing a dialogue with the oeuvre of Walker Evans, the American photographer who documented the state between the 1930s and the 1970s. Like Evans, Samoylova moves between color and black and white, looking closely at the telling details in landscapes, cityscapes, people, objects and interiors that speak volumes about culture and social values. With her vivid bright images and sharp juxtapositions, Anastasia Samoylova offers a test for endurance to the iconic American narratives of the American Dream.

    Floridas seems to exist on the thin border between observational documentary photography and a crafted photo-collage. It is the way the artist frames the shot of her subject of choice, in combination with her loaded depiction of color, that creates a slightly surreal atmosphere — none of which is staged. Posters, storefronts, signs, and utilitarian objects are meticulously observed as silent reminders of the character of American culture as a whole.

    Press release, Sabrina Amrani Gallery.
    Ana Samoylova
    Ana Samoylova
    Photo : Antonio Lobo Mena

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