recommendations
stealing this idea from emilye:
16 jan
read
listen
watch
9 hours in milan w hunter schafer
17 - 25 dec
read
roberto bolaño, nazi literature in the americas, with your friends
thomas mann, the magic mountain, alone
adalbert stifter, rock crystal, silently but in a group
listen
bedhead compilation
watch
eyes wide shut
10 - 16 dec
watch
fallen leaves
read
anna schechtman, life in the algorithm
experience
3 - 9 dec
read
kafka, letters to milena
i've meant to ask you several times why you never write in czech. not to imply that your command of german leaves anything to be desired. most of the time it is amazing and on those occasions when it does falter, the german language becomes pliant just for you, of its own accord, and then it is particularly beautiful, something a german doesn't even dare hope for; a german wouldn't dare write so personally. but i wanted to read you in czech because, after all, you do belong in that language, because only there can milena be found in her entirety
listen
skim
26 nov - 2 dec
read
roland barthes, all except you
How is that an image can impart ideas? And yet, Steinberg imparts them. Or rather--a more precious thing--he imparts the longing for ideas.
listen
black belt eagle scout, salmon stinta
peruse
19 - 25 nov
read
katherine mansfield - prelude & at the bay
listen
parannoul - to see the next part of the dream
low - double negative
watch
l’argent
12 - 18 nov
read
adania shibli, stories too awful to believe
listen
5 - 11 nov
read
alejo carpentier, the lost steps (translated by adrian nathan west)
"Culture obliges," my father used to say, looking at the photos of executions in the newspapers, and this motto represented a new chivalry of the mind and a faith that the spread of literacy would spell the end of infamy. A Manichean in his way, he saw the world as a battlefield between the light of the printing press and the darkness of a primordial animality that propagated endless cruelties among people oblivious to professorships, music, and laboratories. Evil for him was personified in the man who lined up his enemies against the wall, emulating after centuries that Assyrian prince who blinded his captives with a lance, or the bloodthirsty crusader who immured the Cathars in the cave of Montsegur. Beethoven's Europe had freed itself from Evil, which had its last redoubt in the Continent with Little History . . . But after standing in the House of Tremors, in a camp dreamed up, built, and organized by people so steeped in nobility, the dorado gunslingers, the doggedly besieged cities, the trains derailed among cactuses, and the shoot-outs on drunken nights were like spirited scenes from an adventure novel [....]
At last I was listening to the Ninth Symphony, cause of my prior departure, and certainly not where my father would have imagined. Joy! Lovely sparks divine, daughter of Elysium. Drunk on fire, heavenly one, we enter your sanctuary . . . all men shall be brothers when you gently take flight. The irony of Schiller's verses was cutting. They were the culmination of centuries of progress, a ceaseless march toward tolerance, kindness, and understanding of the other. The Ninth Symphony was the warm pastry of Montaigne, the azure of Utopia, the essence of Elzevir, the voice of Voltaire in the Calas trial. And now Alle Manschen werden Bruder, wo dein sanfter Flugel weilt swelled joyously as it had that night when I lost my faith in those who spoke mendaciously of principles, drawing on texts whose deeper meaning they'd forgotten. [...]
All at once, I grow bored of this Ninth Symphony with its unkept promises, its messianic yearnings, capped off by the shooting gallery of Turkish music running riot in a nod to the masses in the prestissimo finale. I don't wait for the maestoso Tochter aus Elysium! Freude schoner Gotterfunken of the exordium. I turn off the radio, wondering how I could listen to the piece almost in its entirety, lost to myself when not subdued by the memories it called forth. With one hand, I reach for the cool skin of a cucumber, with the other I grasp a green pepper, pressing my thumb into it to free the juice my mouth drinks in with delight. I open the apothecary's cabinet plants, take out a handful of dried leaves, and sit there inhaling their scene. The last ember is still throbbing as though alive in the fireplace. I look out the window: even the trees closest by are lost in the mist. The goose in the backyard untucks its head from its wing and opens its beak slightly without waking. A fruit falls somewhere in the night.
listen
29 oct - 4 nov - halloween week :-)
watch
don't look now (1973)
halloween 3: season of the witch (1982)
listen
bark psychosis - a street scene
read
julio cortázar - in the name of bobby
mariana enriquez - the dirty kid
22 - 28 oct
listen
oneohtrix point never - world outside
read
judith butler - giving an account of oneself
My words are taken away as I give them, interrupted by the time of a discourse that is not the same as the time of my life. This "interruption" contests the sense of the account's being grounded in myself alone.... No account takes place outside the structure of address . . . . The address establishes the account as an account, and so the account is completed only on the occasion when it is effectively exported and expropriated from the domain of what is my own. It is only in dispossession that I can and do give an account of myself.
15 - 21 oct
watch
this bonkers trailer for the movie adaptation of percival everett's erasure
read
listen
1 oct - 7 oct 23
read
Keynes's work set itself against the mystification of the market as a self-regulating machine, but it does this by acknowledging the mystificatory potential inherent in the market, what Woolf's writing conveys by its magicality and poetic infusion. Essentially, this is a counter-magic of the market. Recall that it was Ronald Reagan who, in a burst of anti-Keynesianism with long-lasting effects on most of the Western industrial economies, triumphally declared a return to "the magic of markets." ... Woolf and Keynes as modernists have to find a vocabulary for the momentary, the oscillating, the everyday, for a market transfused by a collective magic, one always at great risk of breaking down. Both comprehend that the market can be a battlefield, or a minefield, or a liquid terrain of experience, choice, agency, and desire exquisitely sensitive to all the ripples that play across its surface.
jennifer wicke, mrs. dalloway goes to market, novel, 28.1, 1994
listen
watch
a haunting in venice :-)
23 sept - 30 sept 23
read
socialist feminist little mag with a lot of good work to its name already. the most recent issue has good work on the many different people the criminalization of abortion has put at risk and investigative work on cop city, and previous issues have featured vivian gornick, among others.
listen
laurel halo - atlas
makaya mccraven - in these times
watch
make way for tomorrow (1937, leo mccarey)
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