READINGS

LECTURI, READINGS

Da vieții – Yes to Life

Posted on

Din The Marginalian, buletinul cultural al Mariei Popova din 6 septembrie 2023. Da vieții, în ciuda oricăror împrejurări: prelegerile pierdute ale lui Viktor Frankl despre cea mai profundă sursă de sens. De fapt, o reluare din arhivă.

“Astăzi, fiecare îndemn la acțiune este generat de cunoașterea că nu putem avea încredere în nicio formă de progres. Dacă astăzi nu putem sta deoparte, este tocmai pentru că fiecare dintre noi știm ce și cât „progresează” ceva. Astfel, suntem conștienți că progresul interior este posibil doar pentru fiecare persoană, în timp ce progresul în masă constă cel mult în progres tehnic, care ne impresionează doar pentru că trăim într-o eră tehnică.”

Mi s-a părut adecvat și pentru creativitate. Individual stăm (relativ) bine. Ca societate?! ☹

Print screen.

From Maria Popova’s newsletter, 6 September 2023, Yes to Life, in Spite of Everything: Viktor Frankl’s lost lectures on the deepest source of meaning. Actually, an admirable piece from the archive of The Marginalian.

“Today every impulse for action is generated by the knowledge that there is no form of progress on which we can trustingly rely. If today we cannot sit idly by, it is precisely because each and every one of us determines what and how far something “progresses.” In this, we are aware that inner progress is only actually possible for each individual, while mass progress at most consists of technical progress, which only impresses us because we live in a technical age.”

I thought it’s relevant for creativity as well. Individually we are doing (relatively) well. As a society? ☹

LECTURI, READINGS

Readings / Lecturi

Posted on

From an interview with Agustina Bazterrica, on her new short story book “19 Claws and a Black Bird”. It reminds me of Neil Gaiman’s “Babycakes”.

“Tender Is the Flesh is a meditation on what capitalism is – it teaches us to naturalise cruelty,” she says, speaking over Zoom from the home she shares with her husband and two cats in Buenos Aires. “Capitalism is a system into which we are all born, we have it inside of us, and patriarchy is part of that system. I tried to work with this idea that we eat each other in a symbolic way. With women it’s so obvious, because you can talk about human trafficking, war and the way women are made invisible in different spheres. Here in Argentina, they kill women every day. Capitalism and cannibalism are almost the same, you know?”

“I want the short stories to be like claws that take the reader and scrape them a little bit. If you’re indifferent to a text, the text doesn’t work.”

Source:
The Guardian.

Dintr-un interviu cu Agustina Bazterrica, cu ocazia noii sale cărți de nuvele „19 gheare și o pasăre neagră”. Îmi amintește de schița lui Nail Gaiman “Babycakes” (Prăjituri din bebeluși).

„Tender Is the Flesh (Ce moale e carnea) este o meditație asupra capitalismului – ne învață să naturalizăm cruzimea”, spune ea, vorbind pe Zoom din casa din Buenos Aires în care trăiește cu soțul ei și cele două pisici. „Capitalismul este un sistem în care ne naștem cu toții, îl avem în interiorul nostru, iar patriarhatul face parte din acel sistem. Am încercat să lucrez cu ideea că ne mâncăm unii pe alții într-un mod simbolic. Cu femeile este atât de evident, pentru că poți vorbi despre traficul de persoane, război și despre modul în care femeile sunt făcute invizibile în diferite domenii. Aici, în Argentina, femeile se ucid în fiecare zi. Capitalismul și canibalismul sunt aproape la fel, nu-i așa?”

„Vreau ca nuvelele să fie ca niște gheare care apucă cititorii și îi zgârie puțin. Dacă ești indiferent la un text, textul nu este bun.”

ENGLISH, READINGS

In the eyes of the beholder

Posted on

How do we look at women? And what do we see? In paintings or even in real life? Or do we really see them? Our invisibility is still incredibly strong in spite of some progress made in certain parts of the world.

These are some of the questions that Mary Bevan’s book raises and the answers are often challenging and therefore thought-provoking. Our answers obviously depend on the historical context, on the fate of the painters and, yes, on the eyes of the beholder. Remember?! Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder.  

Mary Bevan tells us the stories of women in some of the paintings she chose – for various reasons. The book she wrote is “Escaping the Frame. Women in Famous Pictures tell their Stories”. It was published in 2021.

It is a small, beautifully crafted book to carry with you around, maybe when you walk in a park and sit down for a rest, maybe in your own house to read in its various corners. For me it’s a book to come back to. It’s not a thriller you cannot put down. It’s a book that makes you reflect, that engages you, that makes you want to come back to it, to draw up the paintings on Google, to decide whether Mary Bevan’s interpretation is in agreement with what you yourself think or not.

I love the cover: a pink background, what else when you choose women for your reflections, with an ornate gilded frame which shows us a black void from which the title emerges trying to escape the frame indeed and reach out to us. On the front cover, the frame encloses the blackness of women’s still little-known history and on the back cover the same frame shows us the rationale behind the book.

The text is minimalist though it sends the reader on her or his own journey of rich discoveries and helps us escape the frames of our own prejudices. The book is written under the form of monologues of the women painted by famous male painters or by women artists who have been disadvantaged in the world of men. Mary Bevan wants to give them the voice they have been denied as objectified characters in a men’s world.  And she does so with great empathy and cultural sensitivity as well as with a skilful selection of the women trying to break out of the frame of silence and their painters’ gaze across six centuries. Only two of the twenty-two monologues of the book are spoken by men. Both men are either imaginary or unknown which is in some way ironical and in another some sort of late justice for the many women muted by society.

Women’s invisibility in Sylvia Pankhurst’s watercolour and in Martha Rosler’s pop art collage.

Sylvia Pankhurst, Hanna Pauli, Martha Rosler and Eleanor Fortescue-Brickdale are the women artists that Mary Bevan has chosen to stand out and show us women painted by women.

It’s through true literary craftsmanship that such a miniature book offers such a wealth of information and discussion points. Its multiple layers send the readers to explore not only the actual paintings, but also the whole world of commentaries, lectures and videos that are connected to them.

Mary Bevan’s book is a book to keep and a book to give – as a gift.

CRITICAL THINKING, ENGLISH, READINGS

Pandemics to remember

Posted on

The World Memorial to the Pandemic, not only the present one, in Montevideo, Uruguay is another wake-up call. Humans are not the centre of the universe and certainly not its masters as we’ve learned for so long.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterhof_Palace

Remember: “we tamed nature, we harnessed the energy of the atom, we conquered space and outer space”. We are so arrogant as a species and the universe so indifferent to us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vidraru_Dam

We are subordinate to nature and should constantly remember we are on borrowed time. The underlying philosophy of the project is presented by its lead architect:

“Although its construction stems from the experience of this pandemic, its purpose is to build a collective consciousness that reminds us that mankind is not the center of the ecosystem in which it lives but that we will always be subordinate to nature itself.”

Can we ever learn?

CRITICAL THINKING, ENGLISH, LIFE, READINGS

Statues – fallen or standing

Posted on

We go (again and again) through a period of demolishing statues. In Romania, but not only, we’ve been somehow used to tearing down and wiping out parts of our history. It’s a primitive mechanism of both revenge on what had been unfair and oppressive to those who are now in the position to be able to order the offensive pieces away and of “if I don’t see it, it never existed”.

It’s just that this happens today in places which we used to admire for their balanced, objective and generally democratic capacity to discuss, analyse and preserve public records so that history does not repeat itself. Well, not anymore it seems. And I do hope I’m wrong. This article, on “What the Removal of a K.G.B. Statue Can Teach America”, raises some thought-provoking questions.

However, what happens to the statues that are no longer desirable? According to Joshua Yaffa, a Moscow correspondent for The New Yorker, they are dumped or, if you prefer, preserved in the Muzeon, the Fallen Monument Park. Is this because they are nostalgic, or just want to revive the old times or … you can imagine as many scenarios as you are capable of imagining.

However, in another article, another journalist is quoted as having said that waging war on bronze men doesn’t make your life any more moral or just. “It does nothing really.” An interesting point coming from an anti-communist expert.

But the most interesting point is made by the granddaughter of Nikita Khrushchev, Nina. “Denouncing Stalin was Khrushchev’s greatest achievement, but removing him from all public spaces, trying to delete that history, was a big mistake,” Nina Khrushcheva said. “Once you demolish somebody’s hero you only incite hatred and force feelings underground.”

And the article goes on giving the example of the Ukraine who tore down the statues reminding them of the Soviets, but the effects has not been beneficial. On the contrary it seems.  

We have our own stories of dealing with our past. The three pictures above are emblematic. The sources for them are below.

However, have we learnt our lesson/s?

1. https://www.agerpres.ro/documentare/2020/03/05/romania-post-revolutie-1990-demontarea-statuii-lui-v-i-lenin-din-fosta-piata-a-scanteii–460114?fbclid=IwAR2-886NZXcU1qLteQqAFQEDZ0-DfgSLn40KLkB4FPL-xXN4BBCn9xqPnQ8

2. https://www.forbes.ro/cover-story-100-cool-ioana-ciocan-transgenerationarul_0_5813-13007

3. http://ioanaciocan.com/