You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
As I think of it now, it must have started
As a game to please a boy: but games without humor
Become the occupation of a lifetime.
– Marcia Carlson
“peace dwelt, sanity reigned and the sun for ever shone” Woolf, To The Lighthouse
Let’s aim for peace and sanity. 25000 Palestinians killed by IDF, so far (The Guardian).
As the baby-boomer generation of major donors pulls back or dies off, museums are struggling to attract their heirs’ interest
… next-gen donors want to tackle big global issues, from climate change to racial justice. And those who do recognise the arts’ ability to strengthen social cohesion, improve health outcomes and encourage critical thinking are likely to eschew legacy institutions in favour of smaller organisations where their money can make a bigger impact.
Source: Julia Halperin, The Art Newspaper 011924
Celestial Universe (1988), which has been part of a number of installations over the decades. Hand-painted on silk taffeta, this large, dark blue banner displays a star map from 1840 complete with zodiac signs and figures of the constellations originating from Greco-Roman mythology. Suspended from the ceiling to hover like a canopy above a candle-lined canoe, the work premiered in ‘Voyages: Dreams and Destinations’at the National Taiwan Museum of Art in Taichung in 1988, evoking the use of constellations for nautical navigation.
[…]…the night sky of Celestial Universe may symbolize a space of liberatory potential that reaches beyond the limited map of the past and present
Stephanie Seidel in Frieze
When we ask about the ends of criticism, we’re also asking how criticism ends. I don’t think it does, any more than love. Both things—criticism, love—are better off, and better done, if we let them admit their perversions, their failures and travesties and pratfalls. They are, both things, an unending negotiation of the limits of what is bearable. They are, at their best, avenues of grace within fucked-up time, languages of perpetual inquiry and curiosity, poses of submission and dominance and everything in between, a practice of turn-taking in a world that runs on theft and greed. They believe, rightly or wrongly, that there is always room to try again. And maybe there is.
Anahid Nersessian, Originally published in Mousse 86
Maybe it’s chance. Maybe it’s fate. But the two aren’t necessarily contradictory. Chance is merely a fate unknown to us, a fate written in invisible ink.
[…]And that’s exactly what you should always follow: life and its unpredictable paths. They all lead to the same place, the same destination for all of us, but to get there, they take routes that can be beautiful or terrible, paved with flowers or bones, night roads we often travel alone, but where we have the chance to put our souls to the test.
The Most Secret Memory of Men: A Novel
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, translated from French by Lara Vergnaud
Untitled (A place to stand and stare, recalling tunes of ballads in a minor key)
It is “the running after the spinning top” or “To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.” Carson via Enns.
Ordinary Unhappiness, Anahid Nersessian on The Lights by Ben Lerner.
“If the aim of this art is to map in language “the motion,” as John Ashbery put it, “by which a life / May be known and recognized,” it must confront what happens when life begins to take a shape whose patterns are warped or aborted by an anomalous present and the anticipation of an even worse future.
In The Lights, the pervasive unreliability of the world is visible on the page, where it takes many forms”
[…]“The title The Lights seems to refer to what Lerner calls “sources / of lift,” those unexpected instants when someone … or something … leavens without eliminating the difficult immensity of being alive. It doesn’t always work.”
[…]“Kindness, it turns out, does not mean trying to argue someone into sanity by exposing her delusions nor does it mean ignoring them. Instead, it might mean finding a way to enter unobtrusively into madness as if in a collaborative spirit and to make it non-catastrophic together.”
[…]“The madness of the world might not be malleable and yet there is no ethical choice but to try and reshape it. If Lerner’s language aspires to be a medium in which experience is, however briefly, suspended before it is shorn down into clarity or cliché, that language has no illusions about its power. It knows that poetry—like sex or parenting or friendship—is a discipline of barely getting by. We fuck up, we act like clowns, we cause pain without thinking or because we cannot control ourselves. But we also show up and repair what we must and save who we can.”
“I selected
sleep, but could not
I decided to change everything
Composed entirely of stills
or fade into the trees
In a perfect world, this would be
April, or an associated concept
Green to the touch
several feet away
[By any measure], Ben Lerner
1.
I was the starlight
I was the moonlight
I was the sunset,
Before the dawning
Of my life;
I was the river
Forever winding
To purple dreaming,
I was the glowing
Of youthful Springtime,
I was the singing
Of golden songbirds,—
I was love.
2.
I was the sunlight,
I was the twilight,
I was the humming
Of winged creatures
Ere my birth;
I was the blushing
Of lily maiden,
I was the vision
Of youthful striving,
I was the summer,
I was the autumn,
I was the All-time—
I was love.
Revery, Fenton Johnson
Reading List: Publishers for Palestine. (Afterall)