RIP Agnès Varda, 1928-2019
The Visionary, 1904 by Serafino Macchiati (1861-1916)
Antoine Volodine is interviewed by Andrew Wilson at The Evergreen Review. The interview focuses on Volodine’s 1990 novel Lisbon, Last Frontier. (Wilson’s translation of the first chapter of Lisbon, Last Frontier was recently published in The Evergreen Review). The interview touches on a number of subjects, including Volodine’s invented genre, post-exoticism. From the interview:
AW: Is post-exoticism simply anti-exoticism?
AV: Yes, what’s important in post-exoticism is that it does away with exoticism. You suggested anti-exoticism, and it could just as well have been anti-exoticism, in as much as what characterizes exoticism is the absolute distinction between the metropolis and the margin, between the center and the periphery. With exoticism, there is an interest in the margins–the writer lives on the margins–but it’s all for the sake of the center. In exoticism, one describes the margins with ideas that come from the center, whereas in our books, the characters—who are dying, or perhaps already dead, who are birds, or animals, or insane—have no center, or rather it is their margin that is the center—the center no longer exists. For us, mental derangement doesn’t refer to a discourse of normality outside of it. In the books, it is present, and it is the center, it is what’s creating the world. In Lisbon, Last Frontier, it’s Ingrid Vogel who creates the world. The reader might think she’s completely mad, schizophrenic, paranoid, but, in fact, the book never refers to an outside normality, from which one could judge Ingrid’s experience. Yes, the book enters her imaginary; yes, it creates imaginary spaces for her to inhabit, but it never refers to a normality outside of her. And it’s through this precise mechanism that the books are on the margins, in the dustbin (to borrow an expression from Lisbon, Last Frontier); it’s in this way that they are dustbin literature, a literature from elsewhere, and that’s what comes into being with post-exoticism. That’s what’s important I think: a literature that doesn’t refer to normality, that doesn’t refer to the center. In that sense it’s more anti-exoticism… but of course I’m not going to change it now. It’s too late; it’s post-exoticism until the end!
Contingent by Lukifer Aurelius
Equilibre (Balanced), 1946 by Suzanne Van Damme (1901-1986)
Eleven Heads, 1935 by Pavel Filonov (1883-1941)
My review of Jon McNaught’s newest book Kingdom is live now at The Comics Journal.
First two paragraphs:
Not much happens in Jon McNaught’s latest graphic novel Kingdom. A mother takes her son and daughter to Kingdom Fields Holiday Park, a vacation lodge on the British coast. There, they watch television, go to a run-down museum, play on the beach, walk the hills, and visit an old aunt. Then they go home. There is no climactic event, no terrible trial to endure. There is no crisis, no trauma. And yet it’s clear that the holiday in Kingdom Fields will remain forever with the children, embedded into their consciousness as a series of strange aesthetic impressions. Not much happens in Kingdom, but what does happen feels vital and real.
“Life, friends, is boring,” the poet John Berryman wrote in his fourteenth Dream Song, before quickly appending, “We must not say so / After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns.” In Kingdom, McNaught creates a world of flashing sky and yearning sea, natural splendor populated by birds and bats, mice and moths. In Kingdom Fields, waves crash in gorgeous dark blues, the sun rises in golden pinks, rain teems down in violet swirls, and the wind breezes through meadows of grass. It’s all very gorgeous, and the trio of main characters spend quite a bit of the novel ignoring it. The narrator of John Berryman’s fourteenth Dream Song understood the transcendental promise of nature’s majesty, yet also understood that “the mountain or sea or sky” alone are not enough for humans—that we are of nature and yet apart from it.
Read the rest at the Comics Journal.
Boy in Profile, 1645 by Wenceslaus Hollar (1607–1677)
Two Telegrams (Antonioni), 2013 by Jen Mazza (b. 1972)
Under the orders of the Great Master, they’re embroidering the earth’s mantle, seas, mountains, and living things. Only the girl has woven a ruse in which she is seen beside her beloved.
Remedios Varo’s description of her painting The Embroidering of the Earth’s Mantle (1961). From the collection Letters, Dreams & Other Writings. Translated by Margaret Carson. From Wakefield Press.
Figure with Horn, 2017 by Derek Fordjour (b. 1974)
The Split, 1992 by Alexander Boghossian (1937-2003)
An Arm for an Eye, 2017 by Elizabeth Glaessner (b. 1984)
Via–
Glory of Spring (Radiant Spring), 1950 by Charles Burchfield (1893-1967)
The Spring Witch, c. 1880 by George Wilson (1848-1890)
Biblioklept 