readingmyselfandothers

[readingmyselfandothers]

the Text is experienced only in an activity of production.

R.B.

[readingmyselfandothers]

“That [Ambiguity] is really important to me. Part of the difficulty facing photographers is that almost any subject matter has accumulated a representational history, so to find a new discursive space, a space to wander around those subject matters, is a real challenge. If I know too much, if the narrative is too well formed, I’m making pictures that are illustrative, and as a maker, that’s not interesting. As a viewer, that’s not interesting.” “But that ambiguity and that play between the ordinary and the surreal or the extraordinary is really the edge that I’m hoping for. So when I photograph a kitchen that looks like a normal kitchen, and you realize slowly that maybe it’s fabricated, the whole kitchen is fabricated, It raises the question, well, why is this picture here? What’s interesting about it? So that, hopefully, encourages people to look, to inspect, and to stay with the picture a little bit. It doesn’t confirm that they’re looking at good pictures. It makes it problematic. It makes it challenging. Why is this there? What do we know? What can we tell from the picture? In that sense, I think finding that room to make pictures that don’t jump off the wall as, or detonate as dramatic, either in lighting or in form or in composition or in subject matter, but more ordinary, That’s the challenge.”

Larry Sultan (via American Suburb X)

[readingmyselfandothers]

"In un tempo remoto e felicissimo, la madre allora giovane e non vinta dalle disgrazie alzava i suoi bambini appena svegli, li lavava, gli dava il caffelatte e li portava fuori. La sua propria madre le aveva insegnato che tutto questo era essenziale. Lei ricorda di essere stata , come si è detto, molto disordinata e pigra: c'era tuttavia nel suo disordine un pensiero incrollabile: che i bambini appena svegli dovevano essere alzati, insaponati con forza, spruzzati di borotalco, e portati, dopo il caffelatte, nel primo e fresco sole del mattino. 

Oggi vorrebbe fare lo stesso con i figli dei suoi figli: ma un'operazione così semplice, come alzare e lavare questi nuovi bambini, non le è consentita. Questi nuovi bambini hanno, nelle loro stanze, biscotti e giornalini illustrati;  si alzeranno più tardi, quando a loro stessi piacerà; gireranno per casa nei pigiami di spugna, spargeranno giornalini e biscotti sui genitori ancora immersi nel sonno.

Infine, anche i genitori si svegliano, si alzano e scendono in cucina, arruffati e scalzi: non hanno ciabatte o non si curano di cercarle sotto i letti: la vecchia madre si chiede per quanto tempo sussisterà ancora l'industria delle pantofole, poiché la gente sembra giudicarle inutili. Brancolando ancora nel sonno, i giovani genitori cercano per la cucina pane e tazze. Comincia una lunga colazione caotica, senza caffelatte: il caffelatte, come le pantofole, sembra stia scomparendo dalla faccia della terra. Girano uova strapazzate e sughi di frutta in bottiglia: e una sostanza orribile, scura e untuosa, che si spalma sul pane e che si chiama Nutella."

-- from "I lavori di casa", in Mai devi domandarmi, by Natalia Ginzburg

(for the English translation: Never Must You Ask Me)

[readingmyselfandothers]

Searching for "Mal d'archivio. Un'impressione freudiana" ( Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression by Jacques Derrida) 

Image via resistenzaletteraria

[readingmyselfandothers]

There was a butterfly locked inside that mailbox surely; would it ever escape? Or was the quality of mailboxness stuck to her forever, like her parents, like her name?

"The Piano Player"  by Donald Barthelme

[readingmyselfandothers]

[readingmyselfandothers]

"The ham died, I couldn’t cure it. I tried everything. You don’t love me anymore. The penicillin was stale. I’m ugly and so are the children. It said to tell you goodbye.”

Wonderful insane speech from "The Piano Player" by Donald Barthelme.

[readingmyselfandothers]

“Sometimes we don’t need words,” the old man said, as if he hadn’t heard me. “Rather, it’s words that need us. If we were no longer here, words would lose their whole function. Don’t you think so? They would end up as words that are never spoken, and words that aren’t spoken are no longer words.”

from Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman in "Where I’m Likely to Find It" by Murakami Haruki

[readingmyselfandothers]

"When he reflects on a metalanguage, the semiologist no longer needs to ask himself questions about the composition of the language-object, he no longer has to take into account the details of the linguistic schema; he will only need to know its total term, or global sign, and only inasmuch as this term lends itself to myth. This is why the semiologist is entitled to treat in the same way writing and pictures: what he retains from them is the fact that they are both signs, that they both reach the threshold of myth endowed with the same signifying function, that they constitute, one just as much as the other, a language-object"

Roland Barthes from "Myth Today" in Mythologies (London: Vintage, 1993), originally published in 1957 by Editions du Seuil, Paris

[readingmyselfandothers]

The simplest way to put this is to say that, in what is often characterized as an age of “spectacle” (Guy Debord), “surveillance” (Foucault), and all-pervasive image making, we still do not know exactly what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be don with or about them.”

W.J.T. Mitchell, "The Pictorial Turn" from Picture Theory.

[readingmyselfandothers]

Robert Lowell by Walker Evans, 1973

[nhmcelroy]

If you’re looking for some summer reading, no-one will furnish you with a better list of suggestions than Donald Barthelme. 

[readingmyselfandothers]

FEAR

Fear of seeing a police car pull into the drive. Fear of falling asleep at night. Fear of not falling asleep. Fear of the past rising up. Fear of the present taking flight. Fear of the telephone that rings in the dead of night. Fear of electrical storms. Fear of the cleaning woman who has a spot on her cheek! Fear of dogs I've been told won't bite. Fear of anxiety! Fear of having to identify the body of a dead friend. Fear of running out of money. Fear of having too much, though people will not believe this. Fear of psychological profiles. Fear of being late and fear of arriving before anyone else. Fear of my children's handwriting on envelopes. Fear they'll die before I do, and I'll feel guilty. Fear of having to live with my mother in her old age, and mine. Fear of confusion. Fear this day will end on an unhappy note. Fear of waking up to find you gone. Fear of not loving and fear of not loving enough. Fear that what I love will prove lethal to those I love. Fear of death. Fear of living too long. Fear of death.

I've said that.

Raymond Carver, from Where Water Comes Together With Other Water, first edition by Ramdom House, New York, 1985 (cover image from here)

[readingmyselfandothers]

I've just finished to read the wonderful Ingeborg Bachmann's collection of short stories Simultan. Here the original and most recent German edition. I've actually read it in Italian. Here the italian edition by Adelphi. The collection in italian is called Tre sentieri per il lago. The book was translated by Amina Pandolfi . Because I've really enjoyed the book, I'm going to read it also in German to understand better Bachmann's use of the language and her unique mix of idioms and phrases in various languages, that she inserts frequently in her stories. I don't know about the quality of the English translation of this collection, and I was able to find only this edition at the moment: Three Paths to the Lake. 

Welcome to my Bachmann period!

The photo above is my favorite cover of Simultan. It is an old edition published by dtv. 

[readingmyselfandothers]

Wonderful posters made by Grant Snider at:http://www.incidentalcomics.com/2013/04/day-jobs-of-poets.html

I'm definitely Emily Dickinson (and a bit of W.B. Yeats and Robert Frost) 

via The Paris Review

[readingmyselfandothers]

Roland Barthes talks about "Le plaisir du texte"

[readingmyselfandothers]

William Faulkner, Light in August, 1932