"I'm the closest thing to myself that I know."

TLS May 1 2009

from Paul Binding's review of Arnold Weinstein's Northern Arts: The breakthrough of Scandinavian literature and art, from Ibsen to Bergman:

When, in his sixties, Ibsen returned to Christiana (Oslo) after years of voluntary exile from Norway, he worked with a portrait of the Swede [August Strindberg] in his study, to remind himself of the threatening power of a writer twenty-one years his junior.

*

[In Fear and Trembling (1843)] Kierkegaard insists on the sheer terribilita of the Abraham and Isaac story, so central to the biblical idea of our relationship to God. We fail, he says, if we do not recognize the enormity of this episode, its repudiation of conventional bonds in its dramatization of what God expects of his human creations. . . . Looked at with his independent eyes, not only Abraham's behavior but that of God himself casts moral doubt on the whole concept of patriarchy, on which traditional society was founded. This doubt [Weinstein] sees as at the very core of Scandinavian modernism, which has defiance and overthrow of accepted authority--and consequent freedom to receive the numinous--informing its most representative works. 

*

"Munch," [Weinstein] says, knew that "our love-life is time-drenched"; he is "Strindbergian in his volatility and exposure"; "erasing," in such iconic works as "The Scream", "all boundaries between 'inside' and 'outside'; he thus gives us "multiple citizenships, . . . in and of the world."

*

Of Strindberg's paintings, Weinstein wrote: [they] are a supreme illustration of what it can mean to live in a place that is not our own. . . . The alterity of both world and self is, amazingly, a generative formula for poetry and art. . . . Darkness seeds light. Freedom does not disappear: it is refigured.

***

from David Horspool's review of Barney Hoskyns' Lowside of the Road: A Life of Tom Waits:

[Waits:] "I'm the closest thing to myself that I know".

***

from David H. Walker's review of Francois Augieras's A Journey to Mount Athos:

In fact, the book as a whole reflects Augieras's lifelong pursuit of a father, a master, an initiator and young partners he can in turn initiate. 

*

In the course of the journey, time is disrupted by sudden undercurrents from the narrator's various pasts, and he feels his identity shift according to the diverse forms of clothing he finds himself wearing in the present--from the uniform of a young Nazi airman posted on the island twenty years before (the uniform had been left with a young monk by a "corporal in the Hermann Goering Airborne Division stationed at Heraklion"), to the borrowed habit of a young monk: "I loved the game, in it I saw the secret of life; to mislead, to change clothes, to be someone else for a while in order to live forever!". 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Goh Chok Tong's Visit to FCBC

Image
I am surprised by how much this incident is affecting me. I thought I have moved past my former religious life, left it behind in Singapore, but like tin cans tied to a dog it has followed me and is rattling me. I am posting the incident, and my response to it, here on this blog, because I want to remember that the past is not yet past. When Emeritus Senior Minister of Singapore Goh Chok Tong visited Faith Community Baptist Church on 13 January during a Sunday service, Senior Pastor Lawrence Khong took the opportunity to deliver a hateful anti-gay message . Among other things, he said: We affirm that the family unit comprises a man as Father, a woman as Mother, and Children. This is the basic building block of society, a value foundational for a secure future, a premise fundamental to nation-building. and warned ominously that We see a looming threat to this basic building block by homosexual activists seeking to repeal Section 377A of the Penal Code.   Example...
Read more

Wallace Stevens' "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words"

Just read three essays from the "Poetics" section at the back of Volume One of The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry : "The Poetry and the Present" by D.H. Lawrence (1919); "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain" by Langston Hughes (1926); and "The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words" by Wallace Stevens (1942). The first is an artful polemic for free verse in contact with the "insurgent naked throb of the instant moment." The second is a spirited rejoinder to a young Negro poet who wanted to "write like a poet--not a Negro poet." The third, my favorite, is a wide-ranging meditation on the nature of poetry and the role of the poet. So many grand things said but I will only quote a few passages: I am interested in the nature of poetry and I have stated its nature, from one of many points of view from which it is possible to state it. It is an interdependence of the imagination and reality as equals. This is...
Read more

Steven Cantor's "What Remains: the Life and Work of Sally Mann"

Image
Sally Mann, The Perfect Tomato , 199 0 Since it is moving pictures, a film necessarily captures--produces--a process. It turns photographs into the making of photographs. It joins moments ("spots of time") into a Life. This I expected watching Cantor's documentary on Sally Mann's creation of the exhibit "What Remains." So photographs of a long-dead beloved greyhound "lead" to photographs of the Civil War battlefield of Antietam, to photographs of Mann's Virginian farm bloodied by the police killing of a runaway convict, to photographs of decomposing bodies in a forensic study site, as if each group of pictures forms an independent yet preparatory stage in the creative process. What I did not expect to see is the influence of the film-making on the photography itself. Mann begins to think of her exhibit as a "narrative," and wants the narrative of death to end on a more uplifting note. With such an idea in mind, she takes close-up pic...
Read more