Susan Sontag – Michigan Quarterly Review

Susan Sontag

Killing :: kogonada

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Not long after reading David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, still high on its rallying cry for emotion over narrative, concision over Great American Novel bloat, I came across :: kogonada’s work. In his visual essays I discovered the cinematic version of what Shields called “the folk tradition in action: finding new uses for things by selecting the parts that move you and discarding the rest.”

Killing :: kogonada Read More »

Not long after reading David Shields’s Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, still high on its rallying cry for emotion over narrative, concision over Great American Novel bloat, I came across :: kogonada’s work. In his visual essays I discovered the cinematic version of what Shields called “the folk tradition in action: finding new uses for things by selecting the parts that move you and discarding the rest.”

susan sontag bear suit

Willful Shapes

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* Gina Balibrera *

What I desired, and what I continue to desire, is the willful shape. I desire not those words that do the work of building, of containing, of safeguarding, but those which Ukrainian-Brazilian bad girl writer Clarice Lispector desires when she writes “I want to grab hold of the ‘is’ of the thing,” in Água Viva. I began to feel Lispector’s “perfect animal” of Near to the Wild Heart inside of me; I became a bad, bad girl.

Willful Shapes Read More »

* Gina Balibrera *

What I desired, and what I continue to desire, is the willful shape. I desire not those words that do the work of building, of containing, of safeguarding, but those which Ukrainian-Brazilian bad girl writer Clarice Lispector desires when she writes “I want to grab hold of the ‘is’ of the thing,” in Água Viva. I began to feel Lispector’s “perfect animal” of Near to the Wild Heart inside of me; I became a bad, bad girl.

Thirteen Ways of Talking About a Volcano

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I recall standing on a platform before a television set, which was shrouded in funereal black cloth, and which played on loop a talk given by a grave white-haired scientist in a lab coat. The screen was grainy in a way I discerned to be fake: each trawling black worm was evenly sized, evenly spaced on the screen. The actor playing the scientist would cough when the screen broke up, due to an untimely earthquake disrupting the calm of his lab; the cough gave him away as an actor. My suspicion that the scientist was an actor made the film in which he appeared no less terrifying to me, a sensitive child, a nervous child.

Thirteen Ways of Talking About a Volcano Read More »

I recall standing on a platform before a television set, which was shrouded in funereal black cloth, and which played on loop a talk given by a grave white-haired scientist in a lab coat. The screen was grainy in a way I discerned to be fake: each trawling black worm was evenly sized, evenly spaced on the screen. The actor playing the scientist would cough when the screen broke up, due to an untimely earthquake disrupting the calm of his lab; the cough gave him away as an actor. My suspicion that the scientist was an actor made the film in which he appeared no less terrifying to me, a sensitive child, a nervous child.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Genealogy, Ancestry, and the (Re)making of Selves

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The assemblage of the following thirteen texts, poems, and videos was inspired by Paul Gauguin’s painting in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts entitled “D’ou Venons Nous/Que Sommes Nous/Ou Allons Nous” (“Where Do We Come From/ What Are We/ Where Are We Going?”), and also by Brigitte Schuster’s photo-documentary project objet d’ailleurs.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at Genealogy, Ancestry, and the (Re)making of Selves Read More »

The assemblage of the following thirteen texts, poems, and videos was inspired by Paul Gauguin’s painting in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts entitled “D’ou Venons Nous/Que Sommes Nous/Ou Allons Nous” (“Where Do We Come From/ What Are We/ Where Are We Going?”), and also by Brigitte Schuster’s photo-documentary project objet d’ailleurs.

The Speed of Nature: Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea

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by Nicholas Johnson

Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea is a portrait of Jake, a man who lives a lone subsistence lifestyle in the wilds of Scotland. Rivers’ film is a silent plotless meditation on life at a different pace and begs of the cinema goer a different kind of attention. A piece of contemporary romanticism, filmed on old equipment, removed from society, almost anthropological in its depiction of a human who moves at the speed of nature.

The Speed of Nature: Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea Read More »

by Nicholas Johnson

Ben Rivers’ Two Years at Sea is a portrait of Jake, a man who lives a lone subsistence lifestyle in the wilds of Scotland. Rivers’ film is a silent plotless meditation on life at a different pace and begs of the cinema goer a different kind of attention. A piece of contemporary romanticism, filmed on old equipment, removed from society, almost anthropological in its depiction of a human who moves at the speed of nature.

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