You speak of writing ‘first on books and then on photography, increasingly of contemporary art in general’. Did this transition take place because of a perceived lack of conceptual strength in most contemporary literature? Do you think this lack of conceptual strength is perhaps the reason why a career as a literary reviewer can be quite limiting?
My patience for fiction that isn’t very sophisticated is kind of limited. This sounds stupid, but I like really, really, really good fiction. I get bored very easily with what you might call ‘middling’ fiction. Even writing about non-fiction can be kind of limiting, simply because there aren’t the same kind of venues for doing that outside of newspaper reviews and the big literary magazines. I started writing about contemporary art because I started writing for art magazines, which seemed a little different. It seemed like art magazines were interested in all kinds of things. So, for a magazine like frieze, I could write about, say, the history of zoos or the history of notebooks – all sorts of subjects – because the editors were interested in making a publication that reflected a culture not limited to that of contemporary art and the views of contemporary artists, curators and so on. It turned out that the art world and artists were far more interested in the culture around them than it seemed the literary world was. The art world was a place where you could write – where you could be a writer. It seemed more welcoming and much more intellectually curious than the literary world – certainly the mainstream literary world anyway. Other people have said this, of course. Tom McCarthy’s [Remainder] was famously published by a tiny art press in Paris. Over the last decade, which is the span that this book covers, the art world has felt like a very welcoming place to be a writer.
~ Brian Dillon interviewed by Kevin Breathnach @ Totally Dublin
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In a way, these discoveries are as consequential as the germ theory of disease. Just as we once knew that infectious diseases killed, but didn’t know that germs spread them, we’ve known intuitively that loneliness hastens death, but haven’t been able to explain how. Psychobiologists can now show that loneliness sends misleading hormonal signals, rejiggers the molecules on genes that govern behavior, and wrenches a slew of other systems out of whack. They have proved that long-lasting loneliness not only makes you sick; it can kill you. Emotional isolation is ranked as high a risk factor for mortality as smoking. A partial list of the physical diseases thought to be caused or exacerbated by loneliness would include Alzheimer’s, obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, heart disease, neurodegenerative diseases, and even cancer—tumors can metastasize faster in lonely people.
~ Judith Shulevitz
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From An Island
Fogged in all day, the long, low horns announcing
the passing of another ghostship.
But we see nothing. It’s as if a curtain had been dropped.
Go back into yourself, it says. None of this matters
to you anymore. All that drama, color, movement —
you can live without it. It was an illusion,
a tease, a lie. There is nothing out here but smoke
from the rubble that was everything,
everything you wanted, everything you thought
you needed. Ships passing, forget it.
Children bathing, there’s no such thing.
Let go, your island is a mote of dust.
But the horns of the ghostship say, remember us,
we remember you.
~ James Tate
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Conducted and controlled from afar, ships at sea will sound their horns to a musical score, that will take into account atmospheric conditions, landscape and the physical distance of sound. The composition, performed live to audiences on the coastal cliffs, will be played across a space of several miles around Souter lighthouse.
Heard at great distances, the sounds of foghorns are generated by their interaction, reverberation and echoing with the landscape, literally capturing the landscape into the sound. Foghorn Requiem is an attempt to incorporate space and reverberation of the landscape directly into the musical composition. Sound-influencing factors, such as atmospheric conditions, tide, distance and the sonic impact of the landscape, are calculated to position vessels off the coast and programme their horns to perform along with conventional brass instruments on-shore and the Souter Foghorn.
(via Some Landscapes)
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If it gets to be too much, I turn it all off, but the silence makes me feel even more lonely than long stretches at the desk usually make me feel. Right now I’m in Iowa City, where I have a few friends who will occasionally stay up all night with me, working in the same room, and I like that better than the running music. One friend plays Hyderabad musicals all night, and that’s fine with me. Other friends demand absolute silence, and that’s okay with me, too.
~ Kyle Minor @ Identity Theory
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Looking at music one could ask why it is that a composer like Haydn could write a hundred symphonies and only a few years later a composer no less gifted, no less industrious, Beethoven, could write only nine. The answer, quite simply, is that Haydn didn’t feel he needed to start from scratch each time. Haydn is the last major composer to work as Dürer showed St Jerome working: at ease within a tradition. What he had to do, to put it schematically, was to fill in a form. That he filled it in supremely well, far better than any of his contemporaries except Mozart, is neither here nor there.
~ Gabriel Josipovici, What Ever Happened To Modernism?
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.@henriettepower on writer’s block: surgeon’s don’t get surgeon’s block. We have to be problem solvers. #muse2013
— GrubStreet (@GrubWriters) May 4, 2013
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But a lot of producers, studio executives and major film financiers disagree. Already they have quietly hired Mr. Bruzzese’s company to analyze about 100 scripts, including an early treatment for “Oz the Great and Powerful,” which has taken in $484.8 million worldwide.
Mr. Bruzzese (pronounced brew-ZEZ-ee), who is one of a very few if not the only entrepreneur to use this form of script analysis, is plotting to take it to Broadway and television now that he has traction in movies.
“It takes a lot of the risk out of what I do,” said Scott Steindorff, a producer who used Mr. Bruzzese to evaluate the script for “The Lincoln Lawyer,” a hit 2011 crime drama. “Everyone is going to be doing this soon.” Mr. Steindorff added, “The only people who are resistant are the writers: ‘I’m making art, I can’t possibly do this.’ ”
~ New York Times
That night I had a dream, a rather mournful one, of one of my children writing a story that began: Long after he died — for weeks, for months — we kept receiving postcards from Dad because he had traveled so far and to such small and insignificant places.
~ Paul Theroux
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Katelyn holds the instrument out at arm’s length. It’s interesting, in a purely scientific sense, to listen to this minuscule being gabbling mindlessly inside the little box she’s holding in her hand. Are there many of these creatures? Were they human once, like she is? Did they once have normal bodies, before they decided to live inside phones? Do they find these plastic exoskeletons more durable and convenient than ordinary flesh, blood, and bones? She conveys the handset slowly toward her ear, wincing as the pleading sounds get louder. For a disembodied ball of noise, this critter can kick up a fuss.
~ Stephen Guppy, Like I Care
On the outskirts of the city over which this drone is today validating its performance parameters, a crowd is gathering at a graveyard. Two vehicles stand out among those parked nearby. One is a van, emblazoned with the name and phone number of a commercial spray painter, possibly even belonging to the deceased, for it is being used as a hearse to transport his white-shrouded body. The other is a luxury automobile from which emerges a pale of male figures in suits, a man in his sixties and a slender, teenage boy, perhaps his grandson. These two are conspicuously well dressed, contrasting with most of the other mourners, yet they must be closely related to the fellow who has died, since they lend their shoulders to the task of bearing his corpse to the fresh-dug pit. The elder of them now commences to sob, his torso flexing spasmodically, as though wracked by a series of coughs. He looks up to the heavens.
The drone circles a few times, its high-powered eye unblinking, and flies observantly on.
~ Mohsin Hamid, How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia
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“As a society we’re used to logging onto the Internet and using computer technology. That’s spilled over into the funeral service.”
Savino-Weissman co-owner Mark Weissman said it’s not only out-of-town friends and family who use the service; he once hooked up an elderly person confined to a hospital bed up to watch their spouse’s service.
“It actually connects families at the worst possible time,” said Weissman, who is also a Parkland, Fla., city commissioner.
In most funeral homes, only the service is broadcast because the camera is affixed to the chapel; the burial is not available online.
@ StarTribune
~ Charles Freger @ National Geographic
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This is what the Last Ones left us.
After the Era of Flood and after the Era
of Fire, we creep into the Central Clusters
and rifle through the rubble. From the top
of a cliff, two pink eyes and one pale ear beckon.
The Wordsplitter names the creature
Kangamouse, Male. It is not one of their BeWiths,
which were almost universally furred,
nor a ListenTo, since he makes no sound,
nor is there a mention of Kangamouse
in the Aesop’s Fables found in a Ziplock
in Zone Twelve some twenty years ago.
We still cannot make a Ziplock, but we know
all about Morals—try before you trust and
might makes right. We try to tease one out…
~ Matthea Harvey @ Underwater New York
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Then he consoles himself by going to feed the pigeons of Reservoir Park, which no longer even bears that name: rebaptized Bryant Park, it’s near where the great public library will soon rise. Gregor goes to that park every day now. Reducing his social life more and more, he seems to have transferred it to these wretched birds, for which he has lost none of his affection.
He enters the park, and even before he takes from his pockets the bags of seeds he’s brought for their Christmas presents, the abject birds recognize and pounce upon him, cooing horribly by the dozens as they cover him entirely, pecking frenetically and convulsively into pockets that are coming undone. Enveloped head to toe in this blanket of small creatures, barely breathing so as not to disturb them, Gregor stands motionless near the park gate, through which passersby, who have stopped with their large beribboned packages in the lengthening shadows, stand staring at him and shaking their heads.
~ Jean Echenoz, Lightning
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Garbage is the formlessness from which form takes flight, the ghost that haunts presence. Garbage is the entrails, the bits or scraps, the mountain of indistinguishable stuff that is in its own way affirmed by resolute dismissal: it is refuse-d (not accepted, denied, banished). Garbage is the tat, the lowly that has sunk to the depth of a value system that is present (so far as as we are aware) simply as a clean surface — mask-like — much as the gleaming interiors of a thousand catalogue bathrooms […] garbage is the mucky handprint of a being that carries on regardless, a dirty trace, the wreck of beauty, and in the most recognizably banal sense, the excrement of a body. Garbage indicates the removal of qualities (characteristics, or distinguishing features) and signals the return of everything to some universal condition […]
~ John Scanlan, On Garbage
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Once part of a hazardous grey economy, the people who pick over rubbish in the Philippine capital are now an organised and recognised force @ Guardian
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There are those who believe that somewhere in the vast blackness of space, about nine billion miles from the Sun, the first human is about to cross the boundary of our Solar System into interstellar space. His body, perfectly preserved, is frozen at –270 degrees C (–454ºF); his tiny capsule has been silently sailing away from the Earth at 18,000 mph (29,000km/h) for the last 45 years. He is the original lost cosmonaut, whose rocket went up and, instead of coming back down, just kept on going.
~ Kris Hollington @ Fortean Times
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What happens when we do not come in from the cold? I propose a frosty thought experiment: to speak for, with, and through the icy world in order to (i) recognize our complex co-implication with icy stuff and (ii) realize the desires in these connections. ‘It is time to compose – in all meanings of the word, including to compose with, that is to compromise, to care, to move slowly, with caution and precaution’ (Latour, 2010, 487). How does ice remind us that we slowly compose with and are composed by the rimy world? And, what new futures, collectives and joys may come of it? To look forward we must paradoxically move backward.
~ Lowell Duckert @ Postmedieval
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