A work from 2003 came up in conversation.
Category: language
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The rumbling aliveness of the novel comes, in part, from the friction of these facts: what does it mean, really, to know better? No matter how many years we spend reading, thinking, watching films, somehow, insanely, we still have to live. As the story’s scenes accrue, this collision creates a sense, if not of agency or of power (which is perhaps the stuff of heroes), at least of stamina, the recognition that more and more life, more and more looking at it, can generate its own sort of strength.
Lynn Steger-Strong in New Yorker.
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In her eye, livid sky where brews the storm,
The sweetness that fascinates and the pleasure that kills.
To a passerby, Baudelaire
AG2024_2030166a winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow
Powerhouse Arts | 322 3rd Ave, Brooklyn
April 29–May 3, 2026
By the bivouac’s fitful flame,
?A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow;—but first I note,
?The tents of the sleeping army, the fields’ and woods’ dim outline,
?The darkness lit by spots of kindled fire—the silence,
?Like a phantom far or near an occasional figure moving,
?The shrubs and trees, (as I lift my eyes they seem to be stealthily watching me,)
?While wind in procession thoughts, O tender and wond’rous thoughts,
?Of life and death—of home and the past and loved, and of those that are far away;
?A solemn and slow procession there as I sit on the ground,
?By the bivouac’s fitful flame.
By the bivouac’s fitful flame, Walt Whitman
AG2025_1222201a or concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
Not one of all the purple Host
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of victory
As he defeated – dying –
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!
Success is counted sweetest (112), Emily Dickinson
As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accidental stars with a talent for squad-drill. I was drawn in by short gasps, inhaled at each momentary recovery, lost finally in the dark caverns of her throat, bruised by the ripple of unseen muscles. An elderly waiter with trembling hands was hurriedly spreading a pink and white checked cloth over the rusty green iron table, saying: ‘If the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden, if the lady and gentleman wish to take their tea in the garden …’ I decided that if the shaking of her breasts could be stopped, some of the fragments of the afternoon might be collected, and I concentrated my attention with careful subtlety to this end.
Hysteria, T. S. Eliot
atmosphere-generating juxtaposition
Beatriz Monteavaro, Tonight, We Can Be As One Tonight.
Under the Bridge.
12425 NE 13th Ave, North Miami, 33161.
The kinds of proximity that matter here are made by practices of attention not defined by dissensus or agonism but technically, by atmosphere-generating juxtaposition. This proximity dilutes what we called structural by shifting the force of the normative infrastructures from the state and commodity capitalism into the ordinary that also includes local plural intimacies and the associations that make life sticky and interesting.
Berlant
AG2026_1222184a or seduced her wits and left her to wander
Some say thronging cavalry, some say foot soldiers,
others call a fleet the most beautiful of
sights the dark earth offers, but I say it’s what-
ever you love best.
And it’s easy to make this understood by
everyone, for she who surpassed all human
kind in beauty, Helen, abandoning her
husband—that best of
men—went sailing off to the shores of Troy and
never spent a thought on her child or loving
parents: when the goddess seduced her wits and
left her to wander,
she forgot them all, she could not remember
anything but longing, and lightly straying
aside, lost her way. But that reminds me
now: Anactória,
she’s not here, and I’d rather see her lovely
step, her sparkling glance and her face than gaze on
all the troops in Lydia in their chariots and
glittering armor.
The Anactoria Poem, Sappho. Translated By Jim Powell
011222165~2 or cuffed primly
She laughed and leaned back in her chair. Crossed her legs at the ankles. Her trim dark jeans were cuffed primly back over brown wool socks. She had on half boots, all scuffed worn leather. Her jean jacket had a shearling fringe, mottled white and green.
Colonial Conditions, Brandon Taylor (The Yale Review)
The Aesthetics of Resistance. Peter Weiss. “The three volumes of the novel were originally published in 1975, 1978 and 1981. English translations of the three volumes have been published by Duke University Press, in 2005, 2020 and 2025.”
The Aesthetics of Resistance, Volume I
Translator: Joachim Neugroschl
Foreward: A Monument to Radical Instants / Fredric Jameson