Ben Lerner Leaving the Atocha Station

... starts with Adam visiting the Prado to stand in front of Roger van der Weyden's Descent from the Cross, and finding someone there before him...

He was standing exactly where I normally stood and for a moment I was startled as if beholding myself beholding the painting, although he was thinner and darker than I. I waited for him to move on but he didn't. I wondered if he had observed me in front of the Descent and if he was now standing before it in the hope of seeing whatever it was I must have seen. I was irritated and tried to find another canvas for my morning ritual, but was too accustomed to the painting's dimensions and blues to accept a substitute. I was about to abandon room 58 when the man broke suddenly into tears, convulsively catching his breath. Was he, I wondered, just facing the wall to hide his face as he dealt with whatever grief he'd brought into the museum? Or was he having a profound experience of art?

I had long worried that I was incapable of having a profound experience of art and I had trouble believing that anyone had, at least anyone I knew. I was intensely suspicious of people who claimed a poem or painting or piece of music "changed their life,"especially since I had often known these people before and after their experience and could register no change. Although I claimed to be a poet, although my supposed talent as a writer had earned me my fellowship in Spain, I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility. Insofar as I was interested in the arts, I was interested in the disconnect between my experience of actual artworks and the claims made on their behalf; the closest I'd come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity. 

Rebecca Solnit - The Faraway Nearby

I loved this book. To the point where I had to stop reading it intermittently in order to make it last. (I can read a book very quickly, and then it is done).
I need to reread it, these notes are from a few months ago, and I want to offer it to various people I know; my Mother, my aunts, my friends, my bookclub. It also made me want to read everything she has ever written, as did 'Men Explain Things to Me' the essays I read before this (they made me want everyone to read them).

So, I will read everything I can get my hands on, beginning with 'The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness' which I have put down for other reasons – it's harder going, all that trouble – though Solnit manages to focus on community, humanity and hope in the direst of tragedies (Katrina, Fukushima and the BP Oil Spill). Her description of her experience of the Fushimi Inari Shrine in Kyoto is breathtaking. But here, now, from 'The Faraway Nearby'... I had trouble choosing bits to share here out of context.

The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another. The child I once was read constantly and hardly spoke, because she was ambivalent about the merits of communication, about the risks of being mocked or punished or exposed. The idea of being understood and encouraged, of recognising herself in another, of affirmation, had hardly occurred to her and neither had the idea that she had something to give others. 

p.63

At its best, visual art is philosophy by other means and poetry without words. Visual art asks the grandest questions, about the most essential ingredients of existence: about time, space, perception, value, creation, identity, beauty. It makes mute objects speak and it renews the elements of the world through the unexpected, or it situates the everyday in a way that asks us to wake up and notice. This kind of art raises fundamental questions about the act of making, about what it means, whom it is for, what happens in that engagement with materials and history and embodied imaginations. I arrived in the realm of visual art in my early twenties, and it was a spacious arena in which to come of age, one that opened up the terrain in which I would travel to create and converse. I was invited into the conversation, to speak and to listen and to learn. 

Who hears you? To have something to say is one thing; to have someone who hears it is another. To be heard literally is to have the vibrations of the air travel through the labyrinth of the listener's ear to the mind, but more must unfold in that darkness. You choose to hear what corresponds to your desires, needs and interests, and there are dangers in a world that corresponds too well, with curating your life into a mirror that reflects only the comfortable and familiar, and dangers in the opposite direction as well. Listen carefully. 

p.193

Kate Zambreno Heroines

I am so bad at this I know, but I have decided to just post notes from books I am reading, as there are so many, and I want to try to keep track a little. This seemed an appropriate one to start with. Also, read this.

I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order – pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature. The comments on Frances Farmer is My Sister and allied blogs that have built sometimes to this glorious other text, this communion, this conversation, this casual liquidness, the superlative nature, that is generative and affirming as opposed to dismissive, that uses our own language instead of theirs.

p 281 Kate Zambreno Heroines

Christmas

Adam asked me what I wanted for Christmas. Not much but nice food and a chance to catch up with some loved ones. But that is unhelpful, so here is a foolishly dreamy list of possibilities.

Anything from Mr Kitly. No, really. You could close your eyes and spin around and whatever you pointed at, I'd be happy to give a home. The plants are an obvious favourite, as are the wooden hexagonal platters and the copper tea canister of my dreams.




Books, books, books. I am my mother's daughter here. Each year we'd get a new book or more, for holiday reading, and I treasure them. Big and full of pictures, or small and absorbing. That wishlist, along with the new music one, is never ending, surprise me.

I also kind of dream of REALLY comfortable shoes like these, (thanks to Adam for making me look at future sneakers with him) or perhaps more predictably boots like these.

I can't help but dream of covetable pretty black, and pretty coloured things. Then, I'll get all practical on a more boring note, and remember we need salad servers, a couple of decent sized noodle bowls and maybe a food processor.

Obviously I am quite happy without any of it. But, it's nice to dream of nice things.