dig

Dig

  • 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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  • Tunga – A Bela e a Fera

    Tunga, A Bela e a Fera – La Belle et la Bête, 2001-2012 Copper plated cast bronze, cast iron and iron 106 1/4 x 98 3/8 x 90 1/2 inches (270 x 250 x 230 cm) Edition of 3 © Instituto Tunga, Rio de Janeiro – Photo: Farzad Owrang Courtesy Luhring Augustine, New York.

    Luhring Augustine Sculpture Mar 22 – Apr 14, 2018.

    Jillian McManemin links A Bela e a Fera to the devil card in tarot.

    An earlier version (2001, sans chain) at Inhotim.

    Tunga official–A Bela e a Fera (with chain, image is undated), Jewels, Mondrongo, Elective Affinities.

    Related :

    Janine Antoni, Caryatid (Crackled green glaze over red oxide on an ovoid bodied vase with a truncated neck), 2003 C-print and broken vessel photo: 29 3/4 x 91 1/4 inches; vessel: 11 x 12 x 18 inches; crate: 48 x 25 x 32 inches © Janine Antoni – Photo: Farzad Owrang Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York

  • some fragments

    “… never altered a disagreeable word to suit the pleasure or convenience of any mortal being, least of all of his own children”

    “… he seemed to her sometimes made differently from other people, born blind, deaf, and dumb, to the ordinary things, but to the extraordinary things, with an eye like an eagle’s” To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf.

    “.. ALL OF A SUDDEN they run at each other once more and if you have a better phrase than like thundering elephants insert it here [ ].”

    “… cotton canvas of heartbreaking, variegated stains.” The Autograph Man: A Novel (Vintage International), Zadie Smith

    “… In practice this requires prodigious coordination, precision, and the best efforts of several human minds and that of a Univac 418.” The White Album: Essays, Joan Didion

    “The sacred is of us, of this network, of our wandering, our errantry.” Poetics of Relation, Édouard Glissant

    “Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams and misunderstandings more thrilling than understanding could ever be.” The measure of our lives : a gathering of wisdom, Toni Morrison

    Just as there is a Keatsian sentence and a Shakespearean one, so Morrison made a sentence distinctly hers, abundant in compulsive, self-generating metaphor, as full of sub-clauses as a piece of 19th century presidential oratory, and always faithful to the central belief that narrative language—inconclusive, non-definitive, ambivalent, twisting, metaphorical narrative language, with its roots in oral culture—can offer a form of wisdom distinct from and in opposition to, as she put it, the “calcified language of the academy or the commodity-driven language of science.” Daughters of Toni: A Remembrance, Zadie Smith, reprinted as the foreword of The measure of our lives : a gathering of wisdom.

  • Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Cuervo and Low-Polygon poem