dig

Category: language

  • AG2025_1211041a or feel it

    AG2025_1211041a

    Upon a second viewing, Tenet is interesting mostly in its narrative sequences and choreography of bodies, moving and running, for the camera.

    “Above all, there is Barbara’s instruction, as she ushers the Protagonist into the wonders of temporal inversion. “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it,” she says to him. The echo is clear: “Do not try to understand. Just believe.” That is what the hero of Cocteau’s “Orpheus” (1950) is told as he prepares to pass through a mirror into the underworld. Like Nolan, Cocteau sprinkles his film with reverse-motion images, but each one of them gives off a lyrical shimmer, and when a dead woman, lying on a bed, is ordered to rise, her body springs to the perpendicular as if reborn, and the hearts of viewers lurch and lift in response.” Antony Lane, New Yorker, 2020.

  • AG2025_1211036b

    AG2025_1211036b
    Brickell Avenue

    Episode 2 is great. Sandra Isidore was instrumental.

  • AG2025_1211065a admits that it fiddles while Rome burns

    AG2025_1211065a

    “For minoritarian subjects, the discourse of attention has little relevance because it is structurally difficult to occupy the position of attentiveness, historically, we have always been the objects of others’ attention”

    “Distraction is not opposed to attention but is a type of attention -it’s not individual and intrinsic but social and relational”

    “medication seeks to treat biologically a set of behavioural and environmental conditions”

    “greater collective happiness in all its wild plurality”

    “This book … admits that it fiddles while Rome burns”

    Disordered Attention, How We Look at Art and Performance Today, Claire Bishop (Verso)

  • AG2021_1960249a2 or here, take it

    AG2021_1960249a2

    Joe Brainard’s C Comics ran for only two issues, but it remains a testament to the absorbing pleasure of making art with your friends. 

    By Nicole Rudick

  • go ahead and do as you like


    Florida Prize in Contemporary Art 2016, The Orlando Museum of Art

    _____

    you
    who’ve read Dante in folio
    you let yourself drift
    through those little drawings
    so-called illuminated miniatures
    and you swallowed it all
    all
    from ay
    to bi

    but it’s a lie

    that hellish bin of complications is pure rubbish
    made on purpose to make you waste time
    calculating in which circle
    the bones of your soul
    will end up

    and you know something?
    this famous inferno
    has an admirable simplicity
    it’s not for nothing, the master’s cunning

    you get there and they tell you

    you’re free
    go ahead and do as you like

    The [preceding] poems come from Rebekah Smith’s […] translation (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2020) of Susana Thénon’s 1987 book Ova Completa.

  • helps us obliquely

    god help us or god don’t help us
    or god half help us
    or he makes us believe that he’ll help us
    and later sends word that he’s busy
    or he helps us obliquely
    with a pious “help yourself”
    or cradles us in his arms singing softly that we’ll pay for it
    if we don’t go to sleep immediately
    or …

    Kikirikyrie, Susana Thénon, translated from Spanish by Rebekah Smith (UDP)

    AG2025PXL_20251208_204354997a

  • a way of being effortlessly in the world

    Poetry is what you find
    in the dirt in the corner,

    overhear on the bus, God
    in the details, the only way

    to get from here to there.

    Ars Poetica #100: I Believe, Elizabeth Alexander

    Into the Sublime, Tank Magazine, Issue 95. Anahid Nersessian interviewed by Nell Whittaker.

    “Will we choose to believe in an art that launders pain and calls that an ethics? Or will we opt for something else, not knowing necessarily what it might be but certain it will involve the loss of something precious – an elegant idea, a charming concert, a way of being effortlessly in the world?”

    “[Poetry] … it does surround and enraptures us.”

    AG2025_1200880a

  • it’s just been one thing after another

    Zadie Smith on NPR’s Fresh Air.

    Instead, it’s just been one thing after another, and there are no neat conclusions except the certainty of death.

    […]

    Well, helpfully, my mother has written a novel, a quite autobiographical novel called “The Day I Fell Off My Island.” She was born in very tough circumstances. She grew up extremely poor. Her mother left to work with the Windrush generation as an orderly in a hospital. And she left my mother in Jamaica. So she was alone for a long time.”

    Anahid Nersessian’s When does a divorce begins? (The Yale Review)

    18

    Divorce is a writer’s business. You can paint a wedding but not a divorce.

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