TBC

.

[rclesham]

Loneliness and poverty made me not walk but fly . For I was so poor, and I have already been accused of so many thefts, that when I leave a room too quietly on tiptoe, holding my breath, I am not sure, even now, that I'm not carrying off with me the holes in the curtains or hangings.

Attributed to Jean Genet in Blood and Guts in High School ~ Kathy Acker

[rclesham]

I hate walking, he says, it seems to pointless to me. I walk, and while I am walking I keep thinking how I hate walking.

Old Masters ~ Thomas Bernard

[rclesham]

The City: Version 2, Alasdair Gray

[rclesham]

10 Paragraphs About Lists You Need in Your Life Right Now

A meditation on the list, the signature form of our time—and the embodiment of a comic nightmare of futile enumeration.

Ha

[rclesham]

Here we arrive at the near miracle that is the true motive for this writing: what we might call the survival of the angel. The human imagination has pictured a horde of monsters (tritons, hippogriffs, chimeras, sea serpents, unicorns. devils, dragons, werewolves, cyclopes, fauns, basilisks, demigods, leviathans, and a legion of others) and all have disappeared, except angels. Today, what line of poetry would dare allude to the phoenix or make itself the promenade of a centaur? None; but no poetry, however modern, is unhappy to be a nest of angels and to shine brightly with them. I always imagine them at nightfall, in the dusk of a slum or a vacant lot, in that long, quiet moment when things are gradually left alone, with their backs to the sunset, and when colours are like memories or premonitions of other colours. We must not be too prodigal with our angels; they are the last divinities we harbour, and they might fly away.

A History of Angels - Jorge Luis Borges

[rclesham]

"When you get right down to it, I had travelled 420 miles to stand on a bridge and then turn around and go back home. I mean, it’s not like I expected anything else to happen at the bridge. I don’t believe in ghost children who grasp at my ankles, and science had already provided a reasonable explanation for the dogs’ behaviour. If you’re like me, then there wasn’t any more mystery to it, really. I went to Overtoun Bridge, I’m pretty sure, because I really just felt sorry for all those dogs. I really did. Which I think is just as crazy as any other part of this whole saga." There's a bridge in Scotland from which dogs keep jumping off, and killing themselves. 

[rclesham]

(The real origin of 'pelican' is from the Greek 'I hew with an axe', in a confusion of its large bill with that of the woodpecker's.) But more unusual than its appearance are its habits. With its bill and claws, the mother bird caresses her offspring with such devotion that she kills them. After three days the father arrives and, despairing over the deaths of this young, rips at his own breast with his bill. The blood that spills from his wounds revives the dead birds. This is the account given in medieval bestiaries, though St Jerome in a commentary on the 102nd Psalm ('I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert') attributes the death of the nestlings to the serpent. That the Pelican opens its breast and feeds its young with its own blood is the common version of the fable. Blood that gives life to the dead suggests the Eucharist and the cross, and so a famous line of the Paradiso (XXV, 113) calls Jesus Christ nostro Pellicano - mankind's Pelican.

The Pelican - The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges

[rclesham]

Here is a partial list of my childhood fears in no particular order Expiration dates, Unexplained secretions, Tree forts, Deer ticks, Entrapped digits, Life preservers, Baseballs, Nails, Tumors, Necrotic flesh, Kidnappers, Strangers, Candy, Mustaches, Beige Cadillacs, Conversion vans with curtains (I guess the previous six are in order), Halloween candy, and Eyes.

From Chris & Cronenberg - a rather uncanny(!) tale of Cronenberg's The Fly.

[fuckyeahrobertobolano]

The novel follows Amalfitano—exiled Chilean university professor and widower with a teenage daughter—as his political disillusionment and love of poetry lead to the scandal that will force him to flee from Barcelona and take him to Santa Teresa, Mexico. It is here, in this border town—haunted by dark tales of murdered women and populated by characters like Sorcha, who fought in the Andalusia Blue Division in the Spanish Civil War, and Castillo, who makes his living selling his forgeries of Larry Rivers …

[rclesham]

New Bolaño!

[rclesham]

[iamsambell-deactivated20140918]

Pierrot le fou (dir. Jean-Luc Godard)

[rclesham]

And now I find that Tarr does, in fact, make films both unique and original, and in a style I find beautiful. I prefer the purity of black and white to color, I like very long takes if they serve a purpose and are not simply stunts, I am drawn into an air of mystery, I find it compelling when a film establishes an immediate, tangible, time and place. For all of its phantasmal themes, "Werckmeister Harmonies" is resolutely realistic. Every person, every room, every street, every action, every line of dialogue, feels as much likecinema verite as the works of Frederick Wiseman.

  This evening I managed to get into conversation with someone who claimed to love films where very little happens, where the overall, and the general interactions between characters matters most; and I was put into mind off Werckemeister Harmonies,  a film where a lot happens, but very slowly, and so I recommended it wholeheartedly, and meant it - it is a film that you don't forget - it is magnificent in a way that only cinema can be (each form has its own magnificence).   The conversation brought me back to the film, and from that to Roger Ebert's review (a critic I much admire and appreciate) and he sums up some part of the film so beautifully in the above passage. The film is one of the most astonishing I have ever seen, it is fantastical, it is otherwordly (or dreamlike, whichever you prefer) yet it is also, as Ebert says, realistic. For a film about an apocalyptic circus, that features just a whale and the elusive 'prince', that might seem like a bizarre statement, yet there is something to Tarr's direction that strips the whole film of any falsity - it feels true: it is affecting in the way that only something really plausible can be.

[rclesham]

[steveflow-blog]

Infernal Affairs Custom DVD Cover

[iamsambell-deactivated20140918]

Melancholia (dir. Lars von Trier): Prologue

[rclesham]

So I missed this on U.K release, heard mixed things about it, but god damn is that a beautiful poster.

Designed by Iron Jaiden

[rclesham]

Roberto Bolaño - The Consummate Exile

By its very nature, the life of an exile — and Bolaño may be remembered as the consummate exile — is fraught with jarring shifts that play havoc with memory. What’s interesting is that he embraced his sense of displacement as if it were the ultimate source of strength. He seemed less interested in his (and his characters’) past, in verifiable dates and events aired out for analysis, than he was in the experiential portfolio derived from mental and physical peregrination. 

Probably all of us, writers and readers alike, set out into exile, or at least into a certain kind of exile, when we leave childhood behind. Which would lead to the conclusion that the exiled person or the category of exile doesn’t exist, especially in regards to literature. The immigrant, the nomad, the traveler, the sleepwalker all exist, but not the exile, since every writer becomes an exile simply by venturing into literature, and every reader becomes an exile simply by opening a book.

Mikel Dunham - The Apocalyptic Tradition (Los Angeles Review of Books)