26 February 2008

Duino Elegies by Rainer Maria Rilke

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"The creature gazes into openness with all
its eyes. But our eyes are
as if they were reversed, and surround it,
everywhere, like barriers against its free passage.
We know what is outside us from the animal’s
face alone: since we already turn
the young child round and make it look
backwards at what is settled, not that openness
that is so deep in the animal’s vision. Free from death.
We alone see that: the free creature
has its progress always behind it,
and God before it, and when it moves, it moves
in eternity, as streams do."



I am in Antarctica.


Download.

08 February 2008

Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson

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I am wondering why most of Winterson's novels come with such horrid covers. Naked women, flowers and fruits galore, it makes for an almost embarrassing read. Who are they for? I mean, she writes about love and gender in the most wonderful way, but who is supposed to yearn reading these thingies by the awful Harlequinesque look of them? Do these tacky naked bodies make more women read her? Men? Americans? The only cover that's really acceptable, even beautiful, is Weight, published by Canongate.

"As I embalm you in my memory, the first thing I shall do is to hook out your brain through your accomodating orifices."

That line does not go with that cover. Moreover, that line made me remember the first time I read about Ancient Egypt in school and how terrified I was of the mummification process. A quite repressed thought, merci beaucoup.

05 February 2008

Disaster Supplies

1. The sighs of sleeping dogs

2. Maki (although that's not really a maki)

3. Ipoh bean sprouts

4. Anders Nilsen's Big Questions

5. Harold and Maude

6. Char Siu (Bao)

7. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf and The Bridge Poem

8. Vincent

9. Edward Gorey's The Doubtful Guest

10. Sattva's raisin bread

11. The Lady in the Radiator

12. Five Years

13. Longan

14. Kodama

15. Kaya toast and white coffee


Let's pray it gets longer.

04 February 2008

Monologues for the Coming Plague by Anders Nilsen

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Nilsen goes Shrigley, however sequential and very much in his own style.

By the way, that amazingly long Metabunker interview I linked to recently is really really a great introduction to Nilsen's work.

02 February 2008

The Connection.org

Boston's National Public Radio WBUR has a pretty great archive of interesting interviews and authors/artists specials over at The Connection, for example:

Edward Gorey
Sylvia Plath
Susan Sontag
Virginia Woolf
Jean-Michel Basquiat

01 February 2008

The End #1 by Anders Nilsen

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And it goes on.

The End #1 is about surviving the loss of one's beloved; "now every day this other person descends into hell or heaven"; talking to his former self the way he was before he knew, when everything was still well.

More.

Big Questions #7 by Anders Nilsen

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Biq Questions is certainly up there on that list of stuff essential for (after) survival that I keep in my head, together with for example Ipoh bean sprouts, char siu bao and dogs who sigh in their sleep (the latter which Anders Nilsen already told a story about in Dogs and Water).

Danish blog Metabunker has a long interview with Nilsen.

Old posts of mine here, here, here and here