March 24, 2015
March 24, 2015
Philippe Schuller
Signatures Photographies
John Taylor looks at Malina, translated by Philip Boehm
Context N°13
... I daresay that few novels are further removed in style, narrative structure and philosophical scope from mainstream American fiction._______________________ Plastic Bodies: Rebuilding Sensation After Phenomenology
Reading Malina is like wandering deeper and deeper into a dark, pathless forest. With every step, the temptation is to turn back, yet something invisible and magnetic draws one relentlessly forward at the risk of getting hopelessly lost. And this is the point. As Bachmann explores the origins, manifestations, and consequences of the artistic urge and amorous attraction (in Malina, they are sometimes antagonistic, sometimes intertwined), she depicts a labyrinthine sensibility at once exalted and depressed, desperate and resolved. Yet all along, the nameless “I” (as the narrator soberly designates herself) intends to emerge reunified from what can be likened to a mapless journey through an inferno, both inner and outer.
(....)... herein lies another paradox. This principal, most significant activity of the narrator’s life cannot be observed; the novel can only attempt to help us see what cannot be seen. In her acceptance speech for the Anton-Wildgans-Preis, received in 1972, Bachmann pointedly commented: “I exist only when I am writing. I am nothing when I am not writing. I am fully a stranger to myself, when I am not writing. Yet when I am writing, you cannot see me. No one can see me. You can watch a director directing, a singer singing, an actor acting, but no one can see what writing is.” In this sense, the narrator and perhaps also Malina are “nothing,” “no one,” in the novel. At best, they are apparitions or strangers. They exist authentically only in what is unstated, in what cannot be told. Bachmann leaves us with the redoubtable task of grasping their essence “behind the novel,” as vital sources that can be intuited yet not named.
...(more)
Tom Sparrow
Open Humanities Press
"Sensation is a concept with a conflicted philosophical history. It has found as many allies as enemies in nearly every camp from empiricism to poststructuralism. Polyvalent, with an uncertain referent, and often overshadowed by intuition, perception, or cognition, sensation invites as much metaphysical speculation as it does dismissive criticism._______________________
The promise of sensation has certainly not been lost on the phenomenologists who have sought to 'rehabilitate' the concept. In Plastic Bodies, Tom Sparrow argues that the phenomenologists have not gone far enough, however. Alongside close readings of Merleau-Ponty and Levinas, he digs into an array of ancient, modern, and contemporary texts in search of the resources needed to rebuild the concept of sensation after phenomenology. He begins to assemble a speculative aesthetics that is at once a realist theory of sensation and a philosophy of embodiment that breaks the form of the 'lived' body. Maintaining that the body is fundamentally plastic and that corporeal identity is constituted by a conspiracy of sensations, he pursues the question of how the body fits into/fails to fit into its aesthetic environment and what must be done to increase the body’s power to act and exist."
Proletarierfrau Junge Menschen Or.Holzschnitt
1925
Conrad Felixmüller
d. March 24, 1977
A stammer that passes for language and Other Poems_______________________ The Traduttoreador Tradition
Kelwyn Sole
Prague RevueContent withheld...(more)
Kelwyn Sole
(....)but these days the big men chase
after their own words as if
they were soap bubbles, as if
they were the children playing,
harmlessly, in sun
and now between them and us
is a line of backs, in blue, in uniform,
who themselves seem to be looking
over our heads somewhere
at someone else.
Yes. The cadavers dress in suits,
step over one another and over us
in their haste. To us they describe
a dawn that we shall never see
and the wind shouts and shouts again
but we are silent as the grave
Joe Milutis
(....)_______________________It’s enough to make one wonder at what’s so screwed up with our linguistic entropy, its clinamen, its spin, given the sheer vanilla abstractions of these word roots compared to the monstrosities they’ve become.
(....)In the end, though, “traduttore, traditore,” is taken out of historical context—and like most clichés the impact of its original referent has been dulled or lost altogether. Once meant to imply the dangers of transmitting religious or cult secrets (and thus an anxious holdout from when more local, oral experience of transmitted authority came to be replaced by the written), it has outworn its stay in a more global, secularized context. The most correct translation, and also the most wrong, would be not to translate at all. If you don’t want to be traitorous (or transmittorous), you can just say “I don’t speak Italian,” and shore up your national identity—a choice which has serious implications, merely reinforcing monocultural xenophobia. So we can just stop translating in a jingoistic paroxysm of pride—or misguided overconcern for the fictional purity of our cultural partners—or we can more guiltlessly go with the twist of language as our inevitable condition and across to bear as “unrevealers, unravelers,” “lyre liars,” or perhaps, more simply, traduttoreadors.
...(more)
Interieur Paysage - Russie
estelle zolotoff
..................................................... Kelwyn Sole at Poetry InternationalWhat The Sea Brings
Kelwyn Sole
the common
Don’t trust any harbour. Already
those reflections that match each boat
turn restless, yearn to fracture:
each wave beyond the quay dishevels.
I who have no instinct for bad weather
—scudding wind, nor gale—turn
to watch a late evening ditching sun
that gasps lunges out to drown
in tides of creels lost, and plastic bottles.
You contrive strong, dark fingers
through your hair. Time to head home:
...(more)
Kelwyn Sole: Dreaming the everyday
The Dye Hard Interviews
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