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)

Reborn (Early Diaries 1947-1964) by Susan Sontag, Ed. by David Rieff

I simply cannot talk about it at this point. 

Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag

It's been so long since I first fell in love with the first sentences of Illness as Metaphor that I almost can't believe that I actually managed to finish this masterpiece today. 

I suppose more strange things have happened. After all, my word for 2009 was base (makes a little more sense in SWE). And I did finish some other long lasting projects in the past year (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) so, if I can just hurry up and wrap my head around Duras' Moderato Cantabile, Barnes' Nightwood and Martinson's Aniara before December, 31... Yeah, well - then what?

I'll be better equipped for the next decade? Sort of like wearing David Shrigley's Battle Dress? I don't dare to even start hoping for something that great.

The Old Child by Jenny Erpenbeck

A girl who appears to be hewn from a single block of wood is found in the middle of the street one day, holding a bucket. Nobody knows who she is or where she's going - neither does she. The Police take her to the city's orphanage where she does all she can not to be noticed, to become the lowest ranked child of all.

Seldomly have I had the opportunity to read a novel that describes the hopelessness of being human so well, philosophically. The only stories I can think of at the moment that appeal to me personally, would be Woolf's Orlando and Kafka's Metamorphosis. The Old Child is, with the dry tone and that wonderful precocious style sort of Kafkaesque, however feminist. That is: not bad at all. 

Read the beginning here.