abbott on believing in love

Love is quicksand. You move and you sink, you move and you’re swallowed, you move and you escape But it’s never stationary. It’s never one clear line of forever…. I think the space between magic and bullshit is the space of a sigh. And even if it is all bullshit, I am going to pick magic anyway. I want to pick magic anyway. I pick magic anyway.

“Palmistry” in Elinor Abbott’s  Is This The Most Romantic Moment Of My Life, p 12. Published and distributed through Banango Edition’s echapbooks (link).

 

 

abbott on self and forgetting

We live in a culture that allows us to hold on to things endlessly and creates normalcy around it. On Facebook you never have to leave high school. You can keep it all, every person, every heartbreak, every loss, close as possible. But when you are filled up with what happened to you before, you are ignoring what is happening to you now. When you choose not to lose the past, you lose the present.

That, to me, is the worst pain. Not the pain of forgetting,but the pain of pinning yourself in place, saying “That is me. That is my mistake,” and trying to dissect it. Take all the parts out. Put different things inside. It’s all just cellophane. It’s all memory.

“We Are Built To Forget” in Elinor Abbott’s Is This The Most Romantic Moment Of My Life, p 23. Published and distributed through Banango Edition’s echapbooks (link).

abbott on self and forgetting

We live in a culture that allows us to hold on to things endlessly and creates normalcy around it. On Facebook you never have to leave high school. You can keep it all, every person, every heartbreak, every loss, close as possible. But when you are filled up with what happened to you before, you are ignoring what is happening to you now. When you choose not to lose the past, you lose the present.

That, to me, is the worst pain. Not the pain of forgetting,but the pain of pinning yourself in place, saying “That is me. That is my mistake,” and trying to dissect it. Take all the parts out. Put different things inside. It’s all just cellophane. It’s all memory.

“We Are Built To Forget” in Elinor Abbott’s Is This The Most Romantic Moment Of My Life, p 23. Published and distributed through Banango Edition’s echapbooks (link).

caffentzis and federici on becoming mechanical

‘To live with the machine is to become like a machine: a desexualised angel moving in the interstices of the engine, perfectly integrating work-space and life space as in the astronauts pod, infinitely weightless because purified of the force of gravity and of all human desires/temptations, the ancient refusal of work finally negated.’

George Caffentzis and Silvia Federici, ‘Mormons in Space’. (via Anne Boyer’s ‘Questions for Poets’)

Petrusich on the scope of a critic

In the music-criticism courses I teach at New York University, I encourage my students to address not just the technical particularities of a song or album but also the experience of hearing it: art is measured not just by the space it takes up but by the air it moves. It is important that a critic know some things about music (history, theory, social utility), and, as with any journalistic pursuit, additional research to bolster that knowledge is paramount. But writers also need to know what they think about a record—how it moves them.

“What does it feel like, listening to this song?” I’ll ask a class, over and over. Sometimes a student will have to shift an album around in her life a little before she can really figure this part out: take it for a walk, eat dinner with it, share it with a buddy. To help, I occasionally trot out bits from Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” hoping to encourage the kind of honest self-inventory that good criticism requires: “That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul,” Wilde suggests. “It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself.” Still, my students continue to fret about speaking too subjectively, of abandoning an omniscient critical voice in favor of something more vulnerable and imperfect. Some ultimately find both angles of approach far too hubristic to stomach. (Criticism, after all, is not for the meek.)

 Amanda Petrusich, “The Music Critic in the Age of the Insta-Release” for The New Yorker. 3/9/16 (link to articlelink to article)

content versus form, historical reactions to

[Victoria] Dailey offers perspective on [the Midwestern cast of early 20th century LA] in her essay “Naturally Modern.” In New York, as she points out, crowds gathered in 1913 to see the famed Armory Show. Art patrons and the curious public stood before Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase and wondered if the abstraction might be too far removed from conventional depiction; the subject matter was not a concern. Out west, Angelenos winced at Childe Hassam’s painting of a nude. Angelenos cared little about technique and more about morality. In Los Angeles, nudes were the problem, not the manner in which they were represented.

Introduction by William Deverell, LA’s Early Moderns ed. Victoria Dailey, Natalie Shivers, Michael Dawson.