June Night, 1949 by Henry Koerner (1915-1991)
Blondie Bubba and the Red Porch, 2016 by Jamie Adams (b. 1961)
Chase by Dragan Bibin (b. 1984)
An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent…
From George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch.
Untitled (Hiveman) by Gervasio Gallardo (b. 1934)
Soldier’s Granddaughter, 2004 by Gely Korzhev (1925-2012)
The Vagabond, 1845 by Gustave Courbet (1819-1877)
I’m excited about this one! I’ll admit I haven’t heard of Mario Benedetti before. The Truce: The Diary of Martín Santomé (first published in Uruguay 1960) is in English translation from Penguin by Harry Morales. More to come, but for now, Penguin’s blurb–
Forty-nine, with a kind face, no serious ailments (apart from varicose veins on his ankles), a good salary and three moody children, widowed accountant Martín Santomé is about to retire. He assumes he’ll take up gardening, or the guitar, or whatever retired people do. What he least expects is to fall passionately in love with his shy young employee Laura Avellaneda. As they embark upon an affair, happy and irresponsible, Martín begins to feel the weight of his quiet existence lift – until, out of nowhere, their joy is cut short.
The intimate, heartbreaking diary of an ordinary man who is reborn when he falls in love one final time, this beloved Latin American novel has been translated into twenty languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, and is now published in Penguin Classics for the first time.
Hercules and the Cattle of Geryon, c. 1537 by the Workshop of Lucas Cranach the Elder
Schloss Kammer on Lake Attersee I, 1908 by Gustav Klimt (1862-1918)
Several creatures wake up, semi-human and semi-animal, seated on a tribunal dais. Their memory doesn’t give them any self-knowledge, they knew nothing about the affair that they must judge, or even about the world where they’ve landed. The only landmark they have at their disposal is the individual lamp that illuminates a bit of the table before them. The darkness all around is without hope. Silence reigns, crushing, and prolongs itself. Aware that the situation must be untangled in one way or another, they all imagine being observed by their neighbors with discontent and even hatred. In reality, all share, without knowing it, a vertiginous feeling of guilt and solitude. The strangeness of the situation reinforces itself every moment; immobility grow stronger. The minutes flow, more and more painful. The only way to put an end to the unbearable seems to be to take the floor. Their voice must be heard, they must seem to take on their judiciary function competently. After having cleared its throat, the massive animal who is in the middle, and therefore assumes the need to play the role of president, opens the dossier placed in front of it and begins to read it with thundering voice. Startled by the excessive vibration of its vocal chords, painfully embarrassed by the words it pronounces, it nonetheless continues its speech. What it has before it is a prose poem, surrealist, a completely incongruous text. The creatures sitting to its left and its right have collapsed at the idea that they must now prove their existence and therefore respond. In order not to underscore its own foreignness to the world, each one to the world, each one in turn pretends to know the procedure and intervenes, masking it’s fears under an aggressive excess of confidence. The readings follow one after the other. The poems are not always of a trivial nature and, on the contrary, abound in imprecations and personal attacks; however, they are formulated in a sufficiently obscure manner that each magistrate feels deeply implicated. The tribunal session has no end. The nightmare has no escape.
From Antoine Volodine’s short story “The Theory of the Image According to Maria Three-Thirteen.” English translation by Katina Rodgers (Dalkey, 2014).
The microfiction, which points to the abject nature of writing/speaking (and witnessing), by the titular heroine, is also a macrofiction for both the story itself, and, perhaps, Volodine’s entire post-exotic project.
Scar Tissue of Lies, 2016 by Katherine Kuharic (b. 1962)
Coping, 2008 by Nicole Eisenman (b. 1965)
These are links to some of the longer pieces I’ve written so far this year. The painting of the great Indian fruit bat (c. 1777-1782) is attributed to Bhawani Das or one of his followers.
The Last Jedi and the anxiety of influence
A review of Paul Thomas Anderson’s film Phantom Thread
A review of The Paris Review’s overproduced podcast
A review of Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz’s collection Narcotics
A few paragraphs on beginning Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell
On a compelling Stephen Crane character
A review of Iris Murdoch’s novel The Bell
On a particular Gordon Lish sentence
On rereading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance
On Goya’s painting The Straw Man
On Don DeLillo’s novel The Names
On the radical postmodernism of Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story “Schrödinger’s Cat”
Polygamy as a metaphor in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance
On Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “silvery veil” — and David Foster Wallace’s Madame Psychosis
An analysis of William Carlos Williams’s ekphrastic poem “The Wedding Dance in the Open Air”
A close reading of Lydia Davis’s very short story “Happiest Moment”
On a passage from Gerald Murnane’s short story “Stream System”
Something on a scene from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance
On John Berryman’s Dream Song 265
On making a literary cocktail, the sherry cobbler
On Robert Coover’s short story “The Brother”
On Claire-Louise Bennett’s short story “Stir-Fry”
On Balthus’s portraits of young girls reading
On the postmodern comedy-horror axis of Martin Scorsese’s The King of Comedy
An interview with the editors of Egress, a new literary magazine devoted to innovative writing
A completely subjective and thoroughly unnecessary ranking of Thomas Pynchon’s novels
Antoine Volodine’s Writers blows me away
A review of Dave Cooper’s queasy abject comic Mudbite (at The Comics Journal)
On Michael Radford’s film adaptation of 1984
Is The Running Man a good film?
On William Friedkin’s paranoid, claustrophobic horror flick Bug
Mary and the Witch’s Flower, a love letter to Studio Ghibli from director Hiromasa Yonebayashi
On Hayao Miyazaki’s film Porco Rosso
A review of Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon
From D.H. Lawrence’s chapter on Whitman in Studies in Classic American Literature (more):
POST-MORTEM effects?
But what of Walt Whitman?
The ‘good grey poet’.
Was he a ghost, with all his physicality?
The good grey poet.
Post-mortem effects. Ghosts.
A certain ghoulish insistency. A certain horrible pottage of human parts. A certain stridency and portentousness. A luridness about his beatitudes.
DEMOCRACY! THESE STATES! EIDOLONS! LOVERS, ENDLESS LOVERS!
ONE IDENTITY!
ONE IDENTITY!
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
Do you believe me, when I say post-mortem effects ?
When the Pequod went down, she left many a rank and dirty steamboat still fussing in the seas. The Pequod sinks with all her souls, but their bodies rise again to man innumerable tramp steamers, and ocean-crossing liners. Corpses.
What we mean is that people may go on, keep on, and rush on, without souls. They have their ego and their will, that is enough to keep them going.
So that you see, the sinking of the Pequod was only a metaphysical tragedy after all. The world goes on just the same. The ship of the soul is sunk. But the machine-manipulating body works just the same: digests, chews gum, admires Botticelli and aches with amorous love.
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
What do you make of that? I AM HE THAT ACHES. First generalization. First uncomfortable universalization. WITH AMOROUS LOVE! Oh, God! Better a bellyache. A bellyache is at least specific. But the ACHE OF AMOROUS LOVE!
Think of having that under your skin. All that!
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
Walter, leave off. You are not HE. You are just a limited Walter. And your ache doesn’t include all Amorous Love, by any means. If you ache you only ache with a small bit of amorous love, and there’s so much more stays outside the cover of your ache, that you might be a bit milder about it.
I AM HE THAT ACHES WITH AMOROUS LOVE.
CHUFF! CHUFF! CHUFF!
CHU-CHU-CHU-CHU-CHUFF!
Reminds one of a steam-engine. A locomotive. They’re the only things that seem to me to ache with amorous love. All that steam inside them. Forty million foot-pounds pressure. The ache of AMOROUS LOVE. Steam-pressure. CHUFF!
An ordinary man aches with love for Belinda, or his Native Land, or the Ocean, or the Stars, or the Oversoul: if he feels that an ache is in the fashion.
It takes a steam-engine to ache with AMOROUS LOVE. All of it.
Walt was really too superhuman. The danger of the superman is that he is mechanical.
Biblioklept 