fredag 29. april 2011

onsdag 27. april 2011

mandag 25. april 2011

Anne Sexton at home - 1 (VOSE)

I am tired of being brave

Anne Sexton at home - 2 (VOSE)

Anne Sexton - A Curse Against Elegies

Oh, love, why do we argue like this?
I am tired of all your pious talk.
Also, I am tired of all the dead.
They refuse to listen,
so leave them alone.
Take your foot out of the graveyard,
they are busy being dead.

Everyone was always to blame:
the last empty fifth of booze,
the rusty nails and chicken feathers
that stuck in the mud on the back doorstep,
the worms that lived under the cat's ear
and the thin-lipped preacher
who refused to call
except once on a flea-ridden day
when he came scuffing in through the yard
looking for a scapegoat.
I hid in the kitchen under the ragbag.

I refuse to remember the dead.
And the dead are bored with the whole thing.
But you -- you go ahead,
go on, go on back down
into the graveyard,
lie down where you think their faces are;
talk back to your old bad dreams.


------
I measure every Grief I meet

I measure every Grief I meet
With narrow, probing, Eyes --
I wonder if It weighs like Mine --
Or has an Easier size.

I wonder if They bore it long --
Or did it just begin --
I could not tell the Date of Mine --
It feels so old a pain --

I wonder if it hurts to live --
And if They have to try --
And whether -- could They choose between --
It would not be -- to die --

I note that Some -- gone patient long --
At length, renew their smile --
An imitation of a Light
That has so little Oil --

I wonder if when Years have piled --
Some Thousands -- on the Harm --
That hurt them early -- such a lapse
Could give them any Balm --

Or would they go on aching still
Through Centuries of Nerve --
Enlightened to a larger Pain -
In Contrast with the Love --

The Grieved -- are many -- I am told --
There is the various Cause --
Death -- is but one -- and comes but once --
And only nails the eyes --

There's Grief of Want -- and Grief of Cold --
A sort they call "Despair" --
There's Banishment from native Eyes --
In sight of Native Air --

And though I may not guess the kind --
Correctly -- yet to me
A piercing Comfort it affords
In passing Calvary --

To note the fashions -- of the Cross --
And how they're mostly worn --
Still fascinated to presume
That Some -- are like My Own --


---------

THE MYSTERY OF PAIN.

Pain has an element of blank;
It cannot recollect
When it began, or if there were
A day when it was not.

It has no future but itself,
Its infinite realms contain
Its past, enlightened to perceive
New periods of pain.

-----------

Heart! We will forget him!

You and I -- tonight!
You may forget the warmth he gave --
I will forget the light!

When you have done, pray tell me
That I may straight begin!
Haste! lest while you're lagging
I remember him!

Sara Teasdale

After Love 
 There is no magic any more,
We meet as other people do,
You work no miracle for me
Nor I for you.

You were the wind and I the sea—
There is no splendor any more,
I have grown listless as the pool
Beside the shore.

But though the pool is safe from storm
And from the tide has found surcease,
It grows more bitter than the sea,
For all its peace.

søndag 24. april 2011

fredag 22. april 2011

Sometimes in the shower
Sometimes in the closet
Often in the kitchen

Anyhow or anywhere
The sweetest taste
Of melancholy and self-pity

Drunk tired
Retarded youth
Slowly aging

Waiting for the evening to pass

Take that last sip
And gaze into the bottle
Your reflection fades into a well-known soap opera

Anything can happen
From now and minutes ahead

Whilst the night welds round me
And sleep swabs every taste of romance out of it

----

PAIN (KILLER)

Nagging echoes
Of yesterday's poison
Slams my guts
To pieces

EXE raske utdrag

EXHAUSTION
& EXUBERANCE
Ways to Defy the Pressure to Perform
by Jan Verwoert

(...)

an existential exuberance, i.e., a way to perform without any mandate or legitimation, in response to the desires and dreams of other people, but without the aim or pretense of merely fulfilling an existing demand. It is a way of always giving too much of what is not presently requested. It is a way of giving what you do not have to others who may not want it. It is a way of transcending your capacities by embracing your incapacities and therefore a way to interrupt the brute assertiveness of the I Can through the performance of an I Can’t performed in the key of the I Can. It is a way of insisting that, even if we can’t get it now,we can get it, in some other way at some other point in time.

(...)

One way to acknowledge the debt is to pay tribute to those who have enabled you to practice what you do by inspiring you. With regard to inspiration, the I Can is realised in a very particular way because another person’s thoughts, works or conversation make you experience the liberating sensation of potentiality that, yes, you can also think, feel, speak and act this way. To feel inspired essentially means to realise I Can because You Do. Any form of work that unfolds through addressing the work of others (including this essay) thrives on this sensation. To put the moment of inspiration into practice and act upon the implications of the realisation that I Can because You Do involves transforming the debt to the other into a pro-active gesture of dedicating one’s practice to this other. Overcoming the fear of influence, we could then move towards a politics of dedication.

The work of Frances Stark thrives on such a politics of dedication. In both her visual and written work she continuously borrows and quotes and transforms what she borrows and quotes. Yet, the gesture of appropriation in her work, as much as it always echoes an act of stealing, first of all communicates a sense of appreciation that precisely reflects the conversion of a debt into a dedication. The space her
work opens up is an open continuum in which other voices resonate through her voice, but where her voice remains very distinctively hers.

(...)

So the question is rather how performing the I Can’t could effectively interrupt the self-contained economic cycle of supply and demand and truly break the spell of the pressure to produce for the sake of production. Punk was exactly about this: the unwillingness to submit to industry standards of what music can or can’t be and how professional musicians should deal with what they can or can’t do. This resulted in the transgression of personal capacities by rigorously embracing personal incapacities, rising above demand by frustrating all expectations. In this respect, Stuart Bailey pointed out the iconic status that the closing moment of the Sex Pistols’ final performance: In the video recording of the show, the band are visibly drained of energy as their last song “No Fun” drags on into an endless coda, and their wild posturing routine terminally exhausts itself. As the performance disintegrates completely and ends, singer Johnny Rotten, visibly alienated by both the band and the whole situation, sneers at the audience: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”. At the point of exhaustion, the performance of the I Can’t interrupts the economy of expectations and throws its workings into relief, producing an empty moment of full awareness.

(...)

Bizarrely then, the heartfelt belief that “it’s better to burn out than to fade away” that used to set the rebellious devotees of countercultural creativity apart from obedient employees, now seems to have become the first commandment of the high performance culture endorsed by advanced captitalism.

(...)

What would it mean to escape this vicious cycle and break the spell of the death drive towards exhaustion?




torsdag 21. april 2011

inflasjon i destruksjon: litt lei nå

French artist Orlan: 'Narcissism is important'

Lady Gaga - Gagavision no. 43

..."The creative process is like 15 minutes of vomiting. It all happens in approximately 15 minutes. Then I spend days, weeks, months, years fine-tuning. But the idea is that you have to honour your vomit. You have to honour those fifteen minutes of thoughts and feelings..."

tirsdag 19. april 2011

Standard Operating Procedure Pt 1


Very disturbing

Driving Fail

yes! 1-2-3-4-5 jeg skal ta lappen i sommer!

mandag 18. april 2011

Dmitri Shostakovich – Shostakovich: Symphony No. 11 in G Minor, "The Year 1905"
Optimism bias
Fear
of drowning,
fear of being that alone,
kept me busy making a deal
as if I could buy
my way out of it
and it worked for two years
and all of July.
(…)
Breathe!
And you'll know . . .
an ant in a pot of chocolate,
it boils
and surrounds you.
There is no news in fear
but in the end it's fear
that drowns you.
-----------


I AM THAT GIRL

Thinking that I would find you

Full of stories
I hadn't told you

A born stalker
I wanted to give you each word

I ran through the streets
Wild for love
I ran through the streets

Knowing I would never find you
-----

THE BLACK ART

A woman who writes feels too much,
A writer is essentially a spy.
(...)
I am that girl

HOUSEWIFE , A . Sexton

Some women marry houses.
It's another kind of skin; it has a heart,
a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
The walls are permanent and pink.
See how she sits on her knees all day,
faithfully washing herself down.
Men enter by force, drawn back like Jonah
into their fleshy mothers.
A woman is her mother.
That's the main thing.

søndag 17. april 2011


Anne Sexton (1928 - 1974)
BIOGRAPHY
Much of Anne Sexton's poetry is autobiographical and concentrates on her deeply personal feelings, especially anguish. In particular, many of her poems record her battles with mental illness. She spent many years in psychoanalysis, including several long stays in mental hospitals. As she told Beatrice Berg, her writing began, in fact, as therapy: "My analyst told me to write between our sessions about what I was feeling and thinking and dreaming." Her analyst, impressed by her work, encouraged her to keep writing, and then, she told Berg, she saw (on television) "I. A. Richards [a poet and literary critic] describing the form of a sonnet and I thought maybe I could do that. Oh, I was turned on. I wrote two or three a day for about a year." Eventually, Sexton's poems about her psychiatric struggles were gathered in To Bedlam and Part Way Back which recounts, as James Dickey wrote, the experiences "of madness and near-madness, of the pathetic, well-meaning, necessarily tentative and perilous attempts at cure, and of the patient's slow coming back into the human associations and responsibilities which the old, previous self still demands."

This kind of poetry, which unveils the poet's innermost feelings, is usually termed confessional poetry, and it is the subject of much critical controversy. A Times Literary Supplement
reviewer, for example, said of Live or Die that "many of Mrs. Sexton's new poems are arresting, but such naked psyche-baring makes demands which cannot always be met. Confession may be good for the soul, but absolution is not the poet's job, nor the reader's either." A Punch critic added, "When her artistic control falters the recital of grief and misery becomes embarrassing, the repetitive material starts to grow tedious, the poetic gives way to the clinical and the confessional." Many reviewers raised at least two questions. First, should her poetry be classified as confessional? Second, does her work consistently demonstrate the artistic control which many critics feel is an essential quality of good poetry?

Concerning the first question, Erica Jong objects to the classification: "Whenever Anne Sexton's poems are mentioned, the term 'confessional poetry' is not far behind. It has always seemed a silly and unilluminating term to me; one of those pigeonholing categories critics invent so as not to talk about poetry as poetry.... The mind of the creator is all-important, and the term 'confessional' seems to undercut this, implying that anyone who spilled her guts would be a poet." Sexton also often denigrated the term, but at times she applied it to herself. She told Berg that "for years I railed against being put in this category. Then ... I decided I was the only confessional poet." Moreover, in an interview with Patricia Marx, Sexton discussed the effect on her work of another poet often called confessional, W. D. Snodgrass, and acknowledged the confessional quality of her writing: "If anything influenced me it was W. D. Snodgrass' Heart's Needle
.... It so changed me, and undoubtedly it must have influenced my poetry. At the same time everyone said, 'You can't write this way. It's too personal; it's confessional; you can't write this, Anne,' and everyone was discouraging me. But then I saw Snodgrass doing what I was doing, and it kind of gave me permission."

The second question is perhaps best answered in critics' specific responses to several of her individual books. Like many of Sexton's volumes, To Bedlam and Part Way Back
received a mixed response. Dickey praised the subject of the work, but found that "the poems fail to do their subject the kind of justice which I should like to see done.... As they are they lack concentration, and above all the profound, individual linguistic suggestibility and accuracy that poems must have to be good." On the other hand, Melvin Maddocks believed that "Mrs. Sexton's remarkable first book of poems has the personal urgency of a first novel. It is full of the exact flavors of places and peoples remembered, familiar patterns of life recalled and painstakingly puzzled over.... A reader finally judges Mrs. Sexton's success by the extraordinary sense of first-hand experience he too has been enabled to feel." Barbara Howes thinks that many of the poems are flawed, but overall she judged Bedlam "an honest and impressive achievement."

All My Pretty Ones
also garnered mixed reviews. Peter Davison found one poem, "The Operation," "absolutely superb," but he felt that none of the others are nearly as good. Dickey's critique was even stronger: "Miss Sexton's work seems to me very little more than a kind of terribly serious and determinedly outspoken soap-opera." Yet in an essay on both Bedlam and Pretty Ones, Beverly Fields argued that Sexton's poetry is mostly misread. She contended that the poems are not as autobiographical as they seem, that they are poems, not memoirs, and she went on to analyze many of them in depth in order to show the recurrent symbolic themes and poetic techniques that she felt make Sexton's work impressive.

Dissent among the reviewers continued with the appearance of Live or Die,
Sexton's best known book. A Virginia Quarterly Review critic believed that Sexton was "a very talented poet" who was perhaps too honest: "Confession, while good for the soul, may become tiresome for the reader if not accompanied by the suggestion that something is being held back.... In [ Live or Die ] Miss Sexton's toughness approaches affectation. Like a drunk at a party who corners us with the story of his life,... the performance is less interesting the third time, despite the poet's high level of technical competence." Joel O. Conarroe, however, had a more positive view of Sexton's candor. "Miss Sexton is an interior voyager," commented Conarroe, "describing in sharp images the difficult discovered landmarks of her own inner landscape.... Poem after poem focuses on the nightmare obsessions of the damned: suicide, crucifixion, the death of others ..., fear, the humiliations of childhood, the boy-child she never had.... It is, though, through facing up to the reality (and implications) of these things that the poet, with her tough honesty, is able to gain a series of victories over them.... All in all, this is a fierce, terrible, beautiful book, well deserving its Pulitzer award."

Transformations,
a retelling of Grimm's fairy tales, marked a shift away from the confessional manner of her earlier work, which several commentators found to be a fruitful change. Gail Pool, for example, contended that the tales provided Sexton with "a rich medium for her colorful imagery," a distance from her characters which allowed wit, an eerie realm "where she had always been her sharpest," and "the structure she needed and so often had difficulty imposing on her own work. At last she had found material to which she could bring her intelligence, her wit, all that she knew, and she created, in Stanley Kunitz's words, 'a wild, blood-curdling, astonishing book.'" Christopher Lehmann-Haupt echoed Pool's analysis, arguing that Sexton's earlier work tended to lack control, that perhaps she worked too closely with firsthand experience. Lehmann-Haupt continued, "by using the artificial as the raw material of Transformations and working her way backwards to the immediacy of her personal vision, she draws her readers in more willingly, and thereby makes them more vulnerable to her sudden plunges into personal nightmare." Similarly, Louis Coxe discovers a new objectivity and distance in Transformations, which he considers "a growth of the poet's mind and strength."

In The Death Notebooks,
The Awful Rowing toward God, and 45 Mercy Street, the last two published posthumously, Sexton returned to the confessional method. While these books have been praised, they have also been more severely criticized than her early writings, many readers detecting a deterioration in quality. William Heyen remarked that Sexton's "poems went almost 'steadily downhill, became less intense, less dramatic, less interesting as one book followed another.... There were moments, occasional lines or even poems that wept or raged with her old power," but overall her voice became often "maudlin or patently melodramatic or simply silly." Heyen added that Awful Rowing continues the downward trend; it is touching, "but it's not very good." Robert Mazzocco seconded Heyen, commenting that while the early poems "depict intensely introverted states in highly extroverted style" and are well constructed, the later poems "seem to me less commanding, strike dissonant strains, chromatize the keyboard, or become programmatic." In like manner, Patricia Meyer Spacks argued that Sexton's poems become more and more sentimental in that they overindulge in emotion and fail to evaluate that emotion. The sentimentalism becomes "painfully marked" in Awful Rowing, "with its embarrassments of religious pretension.... The problem of internal division, the perception of divinity, the will to rebuild the soul: all alike register unconvincingly. The poetry through which these vast themes are rendered is simply not good enough."

On the other hand, not all critics disparaged the later books. In a response to Spacks's critique, Jong commented: "Let's be fair about Sexton's poetry. She was uneven and excessive, but that was because she dared to be a fool and dared to explore the dark side of the unconscious." Moreover, Sandra M. Gilbert believed that The Death Notebooks
"goes far beyond [the earlier volumes] in making luminous art out of the night thoughts that have haunted this poet for so long." Finally, Jong, in a review of Notebooks, assessed Sexton's poetic significance and contended that her artistry is often overlooked: "She is an important poet not only because of her courage in dealing with previously forbidden subjects, but because she can make the language sing. Of what does [her] artistry consist? Not just of her skill in writing traditional poems.... But by artistry, I mean something more subtle than the ability to write formal poems. I mean the artist's sense of where her inspiration lies.... There are many poets of great talent who never take that talent anywhere.... They write poems which any number of people might have

Dusty Springfield - Son of a preacher man

lørdag 16. april 2011

Ars Moriendi

mandag 11. april 2011

søndag 10. april 2011

lørdag 9. april 2011

fredag 8. april 2011

torsdag 7. april 2011

I'm seeing things
I'm hearing things

Where do I start?
Where do I stop?

Where do I start?
Where do I stop?

Where do I start?
Where do I stop?

Where do I start?
Where do I stop?

Where do I start?
Where do I stop?

I'm hearing things
I'm seeing things
'There may be some people who kill themselves,' wrote Al Alvarez in The Savage God, his classic 1971 study of suicide, 'in order to achieve a calm and control they never find in life.' He went on to claim that for poet Sylvia Plath, a personal friend who'd committed suicide in 1963, it was a desperate way out of a corner she had boxed herself into. 

Sarah Kane by Aleks Sierz
'Actually, I see her more as a classical writer. Her work is connected with a form of theatre that is quite confrontational because it doesn't reassure you with social context or Freudian psychology - it doesn't explain things. It just presents you with these austere, extreme situations. She is the only contemporary writer who has that classical sensibility.'
(...)
But 4.48 Psychosis inevitably raises troubling questions about the literature of despair. On the one hand, sceptics see Kane's work as a literal reflection of her life. The Telegraph's critic, Charles Spencer, wrote in May 1998 that 'you feel her work owes much more to clinical depression than to real artistic vision'. You could argue that her writing simply reproduces the fears and confusions of mental illness.

On the other hand, Kane's defenders - such as Graham Whybrow, the Royal Court's literary manager - emphasise her dramatic technique. Not only did she have a first-class honours degree in drama, but her work never stayed still. 'Each new play,' he says, 'was a new departure and to some extent an investigation of form. She left behind a body of work which is consistent in vision and diverse across a range of subjects.'

(...)
Besides, what she admired most about Beckett was his sense of overcoming the darkness. When I talked to her, she emphasised that she was essentially interested in love and affection. 'I don't find my plays depressing or lacking in hope,' she said. 'To create something beautiful about despair, or out of a feeling of despair, is for me the most hopeful, life-affirming thing a person can do.'
(...)
If, as Alvarez suggests, some people kill themselves to gain control and find calm, the irony is that Kane, who all her life struggled against being pigeonholed as a 'woman writer', is now powerless against being labelled a suicidal artist. And the problem with seeing Kane as an example of the Sylvia Plath syndrome - with her work refracted through the optic of her death - is that it reduces her art to biography, and limits its meaning.
(...)"There is a poem by Robert Frost that goes: The woods are lovely, dark and deep./ But I have promises to keep,/ And miles to go before I sleep."

onsdag 6. april 2011

Fragments of power. No power.
Fragments of will. No will.
Fragments of thoughts, consider revising.

Consider choosing. Or not choosing.

One button, too many holes.
Only two choices.

Though nothing may remain but the rumour.
Though nothing may remain but the memory of an odour.

Wire from emotion to vision. Cut.
I can still feel the pain in my index finger.

The atoms and the molecules of my hand blends with the atoms and the molecules of the…

…who pushed the mute button?
I did. I am.

A line appears;
parting is all I know of hell.

And without him, I will continue,
stuck inside this flesh.

Attempting to see me, through his eyes.
But all I can find is a reflection of another person,
Aroused, by her own naked skin.

Everything is the same, can't you see?
Even though the sensation may be new.
You’re still by yourself.

I, whom I’ve never met.

And still.
Veracity bores me:

I thought I was silent.
Till I went silent.

I thought I was unique.
Till he left.

And now this question of accepting.
I never wanted it.

The Choice Between Art and Life (LA BELLE NOISEUSE)

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=7260

Passion Jean-Luc Godard

Louise Dahl-Wolfe, Ruth Bernhard,

Night Bathing, 1939
The Seed, 1971

tirsdag 5. april 2011

Confessional poetry

Confessional poetry emphasizes the intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about details of the poet's personal life, such as in poems about mental illness, sexuality, and despondence. The confessionalist label was applied to a number of poets of the 1950s and 1960s.


One of the most well-known poems by a confessional poet is "Daddy" by Sylvia Plath. Addressed to her father, the poem contains references to the Holocaust but uses a sing-song rhythm that echoes the nursery rhymes of childhood:
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
“Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”

He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven by William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

Umulig å være i dårlig humør

når været er så fint i OderBruch!

Vorschau Neulewin Oderbruch


og neste helg§

mandag 4. april 2011

Markus Schinwald at the Austrian Pavilion

Austria will be represented this year at the Biennale di Venezia by artist Markus Schinwald, born 1973 in Salzburg and now living and working in Vienna and Los Angeles. The says Biennale commissioner will be artist Eva Schlegel. Schinwald's works go beyond visual perception and condense that moment when the rational mind's control of the body diminishes. This is to be seen particularly clearly in the manipulations of portraits, lithographs and sketches from the 19th century purchased at auctions, in antique shops or flea markets: the artist matches his interventions to the style of the original so closely that they look as if they had always been there. In his Venice project, Markus Schinwald examines the Austrian Pavilion built 1934 by Josef Hoffmann, an architectural landmark in and around the Giardini district. In the context of the general theme of ILLUMInations as defined by Bice Curiger, Markus Schinwald negotiates the representation and manipulation of space, time, light and shadow. Not only does he transform the spatial experience through an element of disturbance between the visible and the concealed, but also leaves, and addresses, the pavilion's architecture and history as it is, with all its breaches, rifts, and blanks, and thus succeeds to give sociopolitical visibility to the inscrutable.

Reality killed the cat, but curiosity brought it back.
((Reality killed the act))

søndag 3. april 2011

Siste del av: To Have Done with the Judgement of God, Antonin Artaud

      NO
then
to negation;

and this point
comes when they press me,

when they pressure me
and when they handle me
until the exit
from me
of nourishment,
of my nourishment
and its milk,

and what remains?

That I am suffocated;

and I do not know if it is an action
but in pressing me with questions this way
until the absence
and nothingness
of the question
they pressed me
until the idea of body
and the idea of being a body
was suffocated
in me,

and it was then that I felt the obscene

and that I farted
from folly
and from excess
and from revolt
at my suffocation.

Because they were pressing me
to my body
and to the very body


and it was then
that I exploded everything
because my body
can never be touched.


-------
http://ndirty.cute.fi/~karttu/tekstit/artaud.htm
Christian Bök
Ten Maps of Sardonic Wit


atoms in space now drift
on a swift and epic storm

soft wind can stir a poem

snow fits an optic dream
into a scant prism of dew

words spin a faint comet

some words in fact paint
two stars of an epic mind

manic words spit on fate
Robert Barry
Art Work (1970)

It is always changing. It has order. It doesn't have a specific place. Its boundaries are not fixed. It affects other things. It may be accessible but go unnoticed. Part of it may also be part of something else. Some of it is familiar. Some of it is strange. Knowing of it changes it.

Kane- 4.48 Psychosis

Plath

lørdag 2. april 2011

Malena - e - Mio Vestito Nero

 Den siste barndomsdrømmen. Ganske passe film, men fin sang.

Ma lamore, no.
Lamore mio non può
disperdersi nel vento, con le rose.
Tanto è forte che non cederà
non sfiorirà.
io lo veglierò
io lo difenderò
da tutte quelle insidie velenose
che vorrebbero strapparlo al cuor,
povero amor!

fredag 1. april 2011

odilon redon