Katy
@katejames
Katy
“She knew what it was to experience absolute loss. But to contemplate that loss, in writing, was the highest pleasure” - she notes that those who abstract through words, are never bored. - p. 10 LRB, Devotion to the Cut, Adam Thirlwell.
Death/Decay and Writing
Parallel characterisation in Lonesome Dove: Masculinity - “They sat in the room a month and then he burnt it”. Both characters - the barkeep and Call - destroy their whole life in trying to run away from pain and feeling.
Vulnerability and
Call, in his pursuit to be a good man after his guilt over Maggie, burns down his whole life & sees his entire outfit die. They’re both the same thing - both hurt themselves, hurt others and needlessly destroy something they had built, in an attempt to not feel.
bog bodies & the archaeology of iron age ireland
youtube.comArcheology and Bog bodies
“If there were displeasing drips or blots or other errors, she’d destroy the canvas with a knife or box cutter, sometimes even hurling it off the mesa, before beginning again one or twice, or seven times, which is to say that every mark in an Agnes Martin painting is intentional, wholly meant.” -- her art is not to everyone’s taste “The grids in
... See moreArt is something that people believe must convey meaning. That the artist is trying to tell us something, an encoded message for them to unpick. Martin, renowned for being intentional with her marks, flaunts this idea by confronting people with art that conveys no message: it leaves them to give it meaning. This plays with the idea of art itself & interacts with notions of death of the author etc. in a really self-conscious and almost satirical way. These blank spaces are so intentionally devoid of the artist, they scream out her authorial presence.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick: “The paranoid imperative towards exposure” is “above all defensive, attempting to forestall the pain of being caught unawares: ‘There must be no bad surprises…paranoia requires that bad news be always already known” - p. 115. Crucially, Olivia Laing writes that while this is “necessarily cynical, it is also weirdly naive”. Th
... See more“Nothing beats paint for stopping time cold”…”The weather isn’t looking good, time’s running out, a shrapnel of light falls whitely on the birch” - p. 124/125 Olivia Laing, Funny Weather
Gertrude Stein on Matisse: “he used his distorted drawing as a dissonance is used in music or as vinegar or lemons are used in cooking or egg shells in coffee to clarify”. - LRB, Sep 25
Gertrude Stein as a writer was oft derided or despised by her contemporaries - “they hated that Stein had become a celebrity, but most of all they hated the way she brought their own seriousness into doubt” - p. 6, LRB, Devotion to the Cut, Adam Thirlwell.
“Nature is a strange factory, relentless in its productivity. We like to think life and death are opposite states, but it’s all tangled up together, the cherry blossom and the cancer: a never-ending production of more, a monstrous fecundity - Dylan Thomas’ green fuse that drives the budding flower but also blasts the roots of trees” - Olivia Laing,
... See moreDeath/Decay and Nature