bloomsboory

[bloomsboory]

I am rooted, but I flow.

Virginia Woolf.

[bloomsboory]

I'm showing you Giotto because it's another thing completely. And I don't believe in historical progress. That is to say, I wouldn't agree with the theory that art advances, that Giotto did this because he couldn't do the other, and then you have, of course, a series of advances, one thing leads to another. I don't think that's the way it works. I think that each artist is himself. In that sense, I would take an antihistorical position in relation to creation.

Philip Guston

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The soldier by Rupert Brooke

“If I should die, think only this of me:

That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Remembrance Day 🇬🇧 11.11.24 🇬🇧

[bloomsboory]

37 years of false starts, but it's all about trying.

[bloomsboory]

And Eliot says that the best thing a poet can do is read aloud poetry as much as he can. This should be sound. Silent reading only employs the parts of the brain that are used in vision. Not all the brain. This means that a silent reader's literary sense becomes detached from the motor parts and the audio parts of the brain which are used in reading aloud - tongue and ear. This means that only one third of the mental components are present in their writing or in their understanding of reading - one third emotional charge.

Ted Hughes, Letters, Faber & Faber

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I was thin and gaunt with distress, yet in her presence I felt enormous, rough-hewn, a maternal rock encrusted with ancient ugly emotion. She told me I had no rights of any kind. The law in these cases didn't operate on the basis of rights. What mattered was the precedent, and the precedent could be as unprecedented as you liked. So there was no primitive reality after all, it seemed. There was no such thing as a mother, a father. There was only civilisation. She told me I was obliged to support my husband financially, possibly for ever. But he's a qualified lawyer, I said. And I'm just a writer. What I meant was, he's a man. And I'm just a woman. The old voodoo still banging its drum, there in the heart of marital darkness. The solicitor raised her slender eyebrows, gave me a bitter little smile. Well, then he knew exactly what he was doing, she said.

•

Winter comes: the days are brief and pale, the sea retracted as though into unconsciousness. The coldly silvered water turns quietly on the shingle. There are long nights of stars and frost, and in the morning frozen puddles lie like little smashed mirrors in the road. We sleep many hours, like people recovering from an operation. Pain is so vivid, yet the stupor of recovery is such that pain's departure often goes unnoticed. You simply realise, one day, that it has gone, leaving a curious blank in the memory, a feeling of transitive mystery, as though the person who suffered is not - not quite - the same as the person who now walks around well. Another compartment has been created, this one for keeping odds and ends in, stray parts of experience, questions for which the answers were never found.

Rachel Cusk, Aftermath, Faber&Faber

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(...) vasellame e delle ciotole, un frammento di paesaggio, un brandello, un niente. Da un soggetto così ridotto egli traeva forme inattese che emergevano da una superficie ambigua, statica e dinamica a un tempo, senza alcuno spazio negativo (anche in composizioni centrate lo spazio è attivato). Ambiguità formale e tonale, riduzione al minimo e armonia cromatica conferiscono il segno distintivo della sua pittura. Mai confusioni informali o di colori primari, raramente colori saturi se non frazioni tonali giustapposte le une in rapporto alle altre entro modulazioni cromatiche di sottigliezza estrema. Per il suo cromatismo e la sua riduzione al minimo sta alla pittura come Webern sta alla musica. La sua pittura suscita la calma, conduce a un'introspezione quasi buddica, chiama alla contemplazione. Movendo da Cézanne egli è passato dal Cubismo ai Valori Plastici e, infine, alla Metafisica, che non ha esitato ad abbandonare. Senza avvedersi di divenire un grande pittore metafisico.

A. Arikha, da saggio su Morandi, Neri Pozza

[bloomsboory]

(..) it is not right to divest from these same ethics at the very moment they come into conflict with other imperatives. The point of a foundational ethics is that it is not contingent but foundational. That is precisely its challenge to a corrupt politics.

Practicing our ethics in the real world involves a constant testing of them, a recognition that our zones of ethical interest have no fixed boundaries and may need to widen and shrink moment by moment as the situation demands.

Zadie Smith, New Yorker, May 2024

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Lucas Cranach the Elder, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1506

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P. Gauguin, Nature morte aux trois petits chiens, 1888

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Sul risvolto di copertina del Flauto [e il tappeto] si legge che lei «ha scritto poco e le piacerebbe avere scritto meno»...

È esattamente così. La parola è un tremendo pericolo, soprattutto per chi l'adopera, ed è scritto che di ciascuna dovremo render conto.

Cristina Campo

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Planète Lalanne

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(..)

But suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask why build.

(..)

A. Sexton

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Bloomsbury, Feb '24

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Siete iperamato (iperalimentato d'amore) nella vita? Probabilmente sì. Ma quello che so (doveste anche sentirlo per la millesima volta!) è che mai nessuno (nessuna!) vi ha così... Ogni millesima volta ha la sua milleunesima. Così, per me, non è una misura di peso, né di quantità, né di durata, è un valore di qualità: di identità. lo non vi amo né tanto, né a tal punto, né fino a... - io vi amo così. (Non vi amo tanto, vi amo come.) Oh, molte donne vi hanno amato e vi ameranno con maggior forza. Tutte - di più. Nessuna - così. Se il mio amore resta unico nelle vite, è solo per la sua doppia identità: con l'amato e con me stessa. Per questo non viene mai preso per amore.

M. Tsvetaeva, Le notti fiorentine

[bloomsboory]

P. Gauguin - Young man with a flower

H. Matisse - The piano lesson