Some artworks featured in Olivia Laing's The Lonely City

Alice Neel, Andy Warhol (1970)

Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat Eating (1976)

Zoe Leonard, Strange Fruit (1992-7)

David Wojnarowicz, Arthur Rimbaud in New York (times square) 1978-79

Henry Darger

An anachronistic impulse

Lately I have been feeling nostalgic for obsolete "technologies", most notably, the watch, letter writing and journal writing via paper and pen as well as a longing for materiality. 

Some thoughts in no particular order, unorganised:

- iPhones do everything now. It would be inconvenient for a phone not to tell the time, but have smart phones made watches obsolete? There is a pleasure in things: each item having one designated and focused job. In this case, a watch tells you the time. There is something rather touching in the humility of a watch, its role limited to a single task, without the expectation of being more intelligent, more capable, more connected, more more more. It has its expertise and it delivers. It has a thingness that distinguishes it from other objects or things. 

- I bought a watch this week. I am wearing it as I write this. 

- I am reminded of Bill Brown's Thing Theory, probably the article that has most stayed with me from my undergraduate studies. 

- Vivian Gornick's essay on letter writing and the disappointment she felt for having chosen to make a phone call instead of writing a letter to a friend is something that I can relate to, and at times, comes from a place within me of a deep, nostalgic impulse. While I would never opt to live in a previous time given the opportunity (a big reason being the wins to date of feminism and the freedom I have as a woman today), there are definitely certain things I find myself longing for such as letter writing. I wonder if I am getting old - I am certainly getting older. 

- Gornick concludes that phone calls and letters need not be seen as two options with the same purpose, one inarguably more convenient than the other. She concludes that phone calls are responsive and reactive while writing a letter offers the writer a prolonged moment of introspection and reflection, as well as the unique pleasure derived from narrating environments and events, describing your surroundings. 

- Phone calls are in real time while letters necessarily incur a delay, their monologue nature and reliance on national post causing them to be always already out of date, old news, perhaps even irrelevant. There is something really appealing to me around knowing for certain you will be somewhat out of the loop, that everyone else is, and that immediacy is maybe not something to strive for in every respect. No pressure that one will miss out. No pressure of being on top of constant flows of information. This is the freedom to be delayed, to be present and also perhaps occupied elsewhere, unavailable for immediate comment. 

- I have this romantic idea, since starting to write in journals again (and probably for the most consistent / longest period in my life as of yet), that I will collect my journals and store dozens of matching volumes with my thoughts, ideas, poems, reflections that will somehow compose a life's work in a way that will not have comprised or felt like work at all. 

- There is something appealing about going over my notes in 5, 10, 20, 50 years. There is something appealing about the idea of my future children or grandchildren finding them with curiosity. Historical objects of interest. Relics. 

- There is a visual pleasure is seeing the 'collection' of volumes. There is something deeply materially satisfying about this as well as seeing the trace of my handwriting, the indexicality of a moment in my own history. 

- I like the idea of these things existing offline, excluded from data collection and storage by invisible super powers, used for mass/public/machine learned and personalised control in one way or another (the irony of me writing this on my blog is not lost). I maintain that it is important to safeguard the material and the private. 

Films watched over lockdown to date pt 2

• Sweet Bean
• Fireworks
• Endless Poetry
• A short film on love
• Die Hard
• You, the Living
• Watermelon Woman
• Klaus
• All the Vermeers in New York
• Nobody's Daughter Haewon
• The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie 
• It's only the end of the world
• The Straight Story
• The Long Goodbye
• Enola Holmes
• Farewell Amor
• Metropolitan 
• Matthias & Maxime
• Red, White and Blue
• Kikujiro
• Selma
• The Handmaiden
• Enormous
• Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris
• The Truth
• Do the right thing
• The Fall
• The Illusionist 
• In The Mood for Love

Vivian Gornick, Approaching Eye Level (1996)

This collection of essays spoke to me in a manner so profound and so rarely discovered even in the best reading encounters. 

The themes that occupy these essays—feminism, politics/living politically, togetherness, loneliness, marriage, (female) friendship, academic social dynamics, work and creativity, independence, solitude—are ones that I return to time and again in my own considerations of my life, my ambitions, my conceptions around what makes a happy and/or successful life, my capacity to hold onto scholarship outside the academic institution, my vulnerabilities and my relationships. 

An extremely precious book. 

Max Porter, The Death of Francis Bacon

Getting ready to read Max Porter's new book, The Death of Francis Bacon, and knowing in advance it would have an experimental and fragmentary form and execution, I wanted to familiarise myself bit more with Bacon's life.

Last night, I thus watched the 1966 BBC documentary Francis Bacon: Fragments of a Portrait, where the painter is interviewed by art critic David Sylvester. Porter in fact references this film in his book, suggesting a kind of relationship between the two men predicated on esteem, indulgence, praise that may feed a sense of doubt or faltering and a performance that may ensure as a result: 

I deeply enjoyed the 45 minute documentary as much for what was overt as what was implied or what slipped in: the untold stories (of addiction, though alcohol and gambling were mentioned lightly and passingly as the benefits and drawbacks of painting on the drink) and queer undertones (part of the interview takes place on a bed, Bacon and Sylvester each reclined facing one another, not touching). 

The artistic liberties, such as the montage of clips of mouths (open, screaming), mirrored the theme of fragmentation both in the close up framing of the mouth and in breaking the straightforward documentary style (and indeed invokes for me Porter's fragmentary prose). Bacon, explaining his obsession with mouths because of their wet and glittery features, traces the origin of this fascination to the staircase scene in Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin. He claims that while he's been able to paint screams and often renders the open mouth in his painting, he's not been capable of painting smiles, which he is also interested in. 

In addition to this cinematographic influence (in the film, there is also a photograph among his collected scraps of images of Falconetti from Carl Theodor Dreyer 1928 film "The Passion of Joan of Arc", a film that has gripped me for many years now), the documentary reveals that Bacon preferred to paint from photographs. 

Bacon explains that this is a result of feeling inhibited by the presence of the sitter. His paintings undeniably suggest movement: Sylvester describes a quality of the sitter in Bacon's paintings as giving the impression of having been caught off guard by an unexpected intruder entering the room and the blur that ensues from moving one's head quickly. The blur in photographs is often the result of a mistake or spontaneity: the subject or the camera moving unintentionally and in/opportunely, capturing the motion/gesture of the subject the moment the shutter is triggered, distorting the image.

Knowing this, not surprisingly, amongst Bacon's collection of images are pictures from Muybridge's early experiments with photographing movement. The notion of the triptych also suggests viewing the subject from different angles. Bacon presents his subjects as if in front of three angled mirrors. This perspective(s), and the insertion of movement as somehow part of a pursuit to get closer to accessing truth or real life is reminiscent of earlier Cubist projects and formal interventions. 

Porter reveals his project's aim, which is in no way straightforward or immediately accessible. Yet, it attempts to sift through the noise (art history) to reach a different kind of access (more direct?) or answer to, and/or phenomenological encounter with painting:

Ben Lerner, 10:04

Some reflections/notes on Ben Lerner's novel 10:04, which is—as his other books are—incredibly smart and poignant, academic and relatable. 

• EPIGRAPH: "... Everything will be as it is now, just a little different"
• life vs art and mutual influence
• falsifying reality to write fiction
• meta and self-referential writing
• stories within stories
• characters with multiple and mutable (slightly) names and forms / split selves and the boundaries or spilling out of one's self within bodies/realms/environments
• taking from life to make art
• privacy of the lives of those around the writer, and drawing boundaries around what can and cannot be inserted in writing
• the real and the more real
• true and untrue
• detail or narrative that makes something true/fiction/autobiographical
• interrupting life to write and interrupting writing to insert (or experience) life
• addresses the reader directly at the end, claiming she's reading a book "on the very edge of fiction"

I also really enjoyed the comments on art especially with reference to the "Institute for Totalled Art" as well as the part of the book that takes place while the narrator is on a residency in Marfa, Texas. 

Anabel Vázquez Rodríguez (1977-)

 Photos taken from Lenscratch.