Bakom garden by Åsa Sandell

Currently Reading: Oates

The writer contemplates his opposite in the boxer, who is all public display, all risk and, ideally improvisation: he will know his limit in a way that a writer, like all artists, never quite knows his limits - for we who write live in a kaleidoscopic world of ever-shifting assessments and judgments, unable to determine whether it is revelation or supreme self-delusion that fuels our most crucial efforts.

On Boxing (1987)

Disaster Supplies: April

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind

Cannot bear very much reality.

T.S. Eliot, Burnt Norton. 

Ellis Island by Georges Perec

Imagine Ellis Island. According to Perec, 3.000 people took their own lives on the tiny island between 1892 and 1924. 

Disaster Supplies: February

Var alla avsked i förväg, som vore de redan

bakom dig, liksom den vinter som gått. 

Ty bland vintrar finns en där den ändlösa ledan

givit ditt övervintrade hjärta sitt rikliga mått. /... /

Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonetterna till Orfeus II:XIII


English, German.

Du är rötterna som sover vid mina fötter och håller jorden på plats by Eli Levén

Need to think about this for a while.

Red Book by David Shrigley

I spent the whole afternoon in that coffee bar reading a few pages at a time, to even out the laughter. Having been a great fan for half a decade or so, I must say Red Book turned out to be one of Shrigley's most brilliant works. 

Read this red book. And visit the artist's website. 

2009

36 titles

53% in English, 3% in French, rest Swedish

61% by female authors

36% by Scandinavian authors (mostly female graphic novelists)

14% by authors of Asian descent

25% on feminist issues

10%+ by/on Susan Sontag

Best reading experience: Little Gidding on the way to Little Gidding during T.S. Eliot International Summer School, London University. 

Guidelines for 2010: more, harder.

Big Questions #13 by Anders Nilsen: A House That Floats

Back to the thin paper quality but more life-saving than ever before.

Read two pages here. 

Lady in Waiting: A New Nina Bouraoui

The novel is called Nos Baisers sont des adieux and will be out on Éditions Stock on March 24. I shall be holding my breath until then.

Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes

Red on blue hurts the eye, but obviously makes for great covers. In a similar way, this moment happens to be both weird and perfect for finishing a collection like Birthday Letters. In the 88 poems that broke Hughes' (almost) silence 35 years after Sylvia Plath's death, he finally speaks of their life together.

All the prison animals had to be patient 

While we married. 

It must be one of the most emotionally complex and extraordinary collections of love letters ever written. 

Terror

Was the cloud of you

Birthday Letters was published in 1998, Ted Hughes' last year in life. 

Disaster Supplies: December

/... / En del ögon är alltid släckta
Där sover dåsiga drömska djur
som för alltid gått ur vintern
Drömdjur, skrämseldjur
Kallblodiga med förhårdnade naglar
I evighet utstötta ur rasen /.../


Katarina Frostenson, Huset är kvinnligt / Rena Land (1980)