Still ... looking on the bright side* - three books arrived reminding me that life is worth living, after all ...
°
I'm not sure when Jonathan Miller called Sontag the cleverest woman living in America but I wonder who'd merit that description today? This, the first volume of her diaries, came in the post on Tuesday and I read it right through in one sitting - short entry paragraphs lend themselves to this kind of gobbling: reading as voyeuristic bulimia.
Here's Sontag on New Year's Eve 1957:
Superficial to understand the journal as just a receptacle for one's private, secret thoughts - like a confidante who is deaf, dumb, and illiterate. In the journal I do not just express myself more openly than I could do to any person; I create myself. The journal is a vehicle for my sense of selfhood. It represents me as emotionally and spiritually independent. Therefore (alas) it does not simply record my actual, daily life but rather - in many cases - offers an alternative to it.
& what would she have said of Blogging?
°
°
Martha Verschaffel is a young illustrator & zine creator living and working in northern Belgium. I happened upon her work through a link in a link on someone else's Blog. I love the way she works - almost exclusively with pencil and paper (you can read an interview with her at http://kushkomikss.blogspot.com/ in which she explains her draw-erase cut 'n paste methods). And it turns out she's a big fan of Broadcast and Valerie's Week of Wonders - so what more can I say?).
°
°
& here's the latest volume by Ian Pindar. This demands serious attention & so I'm setting it aside for the time being. However, I had a quick flip through and see that this time poems are being worked in sections and series rather than the separately entitled pieces of Emporium.
Oh ... and I happened to notice on the dedication page: to the Carpenter ... I wonder who that can be ?
°
Yesterday I nipped out to buy card stock for covers; today I found some good flyleaf papers. Yes! ... the beginnings of a new Sticky Pages volume. Keep you posted.
____
* my mum pops by the Blog occasionally and reads the latest entries. "You always seem so sad" she said on the phone the other day. Is this true? I suppose I was hoping for more of an Ed Reardon tone of bitter cynicism, but so be it. Mums always know best.
I will strive to be more jolly in future posts - or "fun" as one of the ghastly experts said, earlier this week. Fun? He must be joking.
°
("Fun" - the American substitute for pleasure. Sontag in an undated entry 1963)
°
1 comment:
"Reborn" is the best of the two volumes of Sontag's journals published so far. The other is less personal, though when it is it is just as horrifying to read. (She was, even she, pursued by demons, and it wasn't until the second volume that I could determine why. This I [this Geof] have written about.)
But how, I ask, as a student of English and a reader of billions of words of British or English prose, is "fun" the American equivalent for "pleasure"? Fun is narrower in focus, and it seems to be so in both dialects, but maybe not. So send word on this word.
Geof
Post a Comment