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Last night we watched Cinema Paradiso — for Andrew a first time; for me, a first time since my father died. But for once, it did not feel like there was this thick layer of him — of life-with-him and life-with-my-parents — underneath it all. No echoes of his voice around the more virtuoso shots, saying did you see how he did that?—gorgeous... No sense as I watched things move across the screen of Andrew's Mac, that just outside the frame was the wall of a bedroom in Dubai, my mother's dressing table to the right, cluttered with the brushed-gold lipstick cases that Revlon made in those days, and the small square-edged bottles of Estée Lauder Night Repair, and three kinds of fine-toothed tail comb. Every day some things are further away and of course some other things are closer, it's just you don't know what those things are that are closer and you can only hope they're good. Mostly good.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giulio Cesare, Santa Marinella]
[sabato 31 gennaio 2015 ore 15:07:30] [¶]
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Do you remember how old Ford was always writing how Conrad suffered so when he wrote? How it was un metier de chien etc. Do you suffer when you write? I don't at all. Suffer like a bastard when don't write, or just before, and feel empty and fucked out afterwards. But never feel as good as while writing.
And no. I have not bought it yet. Not quite this second anyway.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giulio Cesare, Santa Marinella]
[venerdì 30 gennaio 2015 ore 17:19:31] [¶]
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I like the aspect of reflection that comes with the end of the year and the start of the new one. I've always loved that January is named for Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings and transitions — doors and doorways, the closing of old chapters and the opening of new ones in the book of your life. He's always shown as being two-faced — one face looks to the future and one to the past.
I used to do a thing with friends where each of us would write down five things we wished for from the year ahead. We'd read our wishes out to each other, then fold up the papers and put them away, and meet up the next year to open them up again. We'd always be surprised at how, almost always, most of the things on our lists would either have come true (at least partially), or would have become (in the course of the year), well, things we really didn't want any more.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giulio Cesare, Santa Marinella]
[sabato 10 gennaio 2015 ore 22:09:15] [¶]
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WOOD: And of course that's the great theme of your work—meaning and the loss of meaning. It's obvious enough in your work that the insane attention to objects is an attempt to rescue them from loss, from the loss of meaning. It's the tragedy of getting older. We can't ever recover that extraordinary novelty, that newness, that we experienced as children, and so you try to bring those meanings and memories back. There's a lovely thing in Adorno's Negative Dialectics that reminds me of your work. Adorno writes, “If the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the object, not on its category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye.” Does that sound like a reasonable description of what you are trying to do?
KNAUSGAARD: Very much so. Before I wrote My Struggle, I had a feeling that novels tend to obscure the world instead of showing it, because their form is so much alike from novel to novel. It's the same with films, with their attention to narrative structure. Most films, anyway. One thing I did while I was at work on the project was to watch the film Shoah, about the Holocaust. In the end, after you've seen these nine and a half hours, there is no form. Or it's a kind of extreme form, which brings it closer to a real experience. I'd been thinking about that and about the world as it ordinarily comes to us filtered through news, through media. The same form, the same language, makes everything the same. That was a problem I had before I started My Struggle. The traditional form of the novel wasn't eloquent. I didn't believe in it, for the reasons I've said.
— from Writing My Struggle: An Exchange, between James Wood & Karl Ove Knausgaard, in this winter's Paris Review.
[nightingaleshiraz] [?]
[Via Giulio Cesare, Santa Marinella]
[venerdì 02 gennaio 2015 ore 13:24:03] [¶]
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