Domingo no mundo (28)

John William Waterhouse, St. Cecilia, 1895.

Por ende ambaixo

Alex Ross sobre Willa Cather

I like to think that she pictured herself as Brünnhilde in Wagner’s “Ring,” stranded on a rock and surrounded by fire.

Um texto magnífico, na New Yorker desta semana. 

desejo de voltar mais cedo para casa

Michael Peter Ancher, Marie Krøyer in Paris, 1889.

Duende, bossa, onda, groove* ou It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing

Así, pues, el duende es un poder y no un obrar, es un luchar y no un pensar. Yo he oído decir a un viejo maestro guitarrista: «El duende no está en la garganta; el duende sube por dentro desde la planta de los pies». Es decir, no es cuestión de facultad, sino de verdadero estilo vivo; es decir, de sangre; es decir, de viejísima cultura, de creación en acto.
[...]
Hace años, en un concurso de baile de Jerez de la Frontera se llevó el premio una vieja de ochenta años contra hermosas mujeres y muchachas con la cintura de agua, por el solo hecho de levantar los brazos, erguir la cabeza y dar un golpe con el pie sobre el tabladillo; pero en la reunión de musas y de ángeles que había allí, bellezas de forma y bellezas de sonrisa, tenía que ganar y ganó aquel duende moribundo que arrastraba por el suelo sus alas de cuchillos oxidados.

Federico García Lorca, Teoría y Juego del Duende.

* O Kanimambo de João Maria Tudela é doutro filme.

Retrato das senhoras

Childe Hassam, Mrs. Hassam and Her Sister, 1889.

Método

Actually, I don’t make notes. I rely on memory and its failure.

Aleksandar Hemon numa conversa com Teju Cole.

Domingo no mundo (27)

Andrei Tarkovsky, Série:Polaroids, 1979-84.

A mecânica do desejo

Imagino que o meu amigo seja daquelas mentes modernas que acham o nacionalismo uma doença de velhos, que tanto faz viver neste ou naquele país, que o que interessa é o que o indivíduo carrega dentro de si e não o pedaço de terra onde nasceu. E eu percebo isso tudo, amigo Vieira, e não o censuro. Mas só aqueles para quem a pátria é uma coisa certa podem prescindir dela. Os exilados, os desterrados, os expulsos, os anatemizados, os malditos, esses estão condenados a amar as suas terras. Felizes dos que podem matar o pai, amigo Vieira.

Bruno Vieira Amaral, Hoje Estarás Comigo no Paraíso.

Sobre Sebald

[...] its talent for collecting this and that, and its eye for the sudden shards of brightness that enliven the ordinary.

Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things.

Roque

Andrew Birkin: Serge e Charlotte Gainsbourg, anos 70.

Vida material

In My Life With Things, anthropologist Elizabeth Chin, reckoning with her own “consumerist diaries,” returns to the etymology of fetish. When Karl Marx completed Capital in 1867, fetish did not suggest kinky sexual proclivities. Rather, the word came from the Portuguese and described Africans’ “mistaken” belief that spirits inhabited objects. Already, Marx’s use is divergent: Animists believe that spirits inhabit objects, but they worship the spirit, not the object itself. “Veneration of the object,” Chin writes, “is most certainly not the point of animism,” though when Marx accused European consumers of fetishism, he was “leveling an insult of mammoth proportions, stating directly that those who bought commodities were as primitive and backward as Africans.” In other words, “fetishism,” in Marx’s use, was a racial slur. As much as vital materialists, or object-oriented ontologists, or any other crop of thing-happy philosophers would like to declare their daring leap across the ontological divide as a necessary advancement of Western thought, the fact is that recognizing matter’s agency is a recapitulation of very old knowledge, knowledge that was systematically dismissed and persecuted. Now, much past the eve of environmental collapse, we need to remember this old knowledge, not reinvent it.

Ana Cecilia Alvarez, Trash life.