Long Sunday

Against Hebetude

Today is the twentieth anniversary of the death of the writer Italo Calvino.  Particularly fitting for this place (or for these 'places') is a short story about photography, one that I think many here will find interesting.  In any case, I certainly do.  It comes kind courtesy of wood s lot and begins:

WHEN SPRING comes, the city’s inhabitants, by the hundreds of     thousands, go out on Sundays with leather cases over their shoulders. And they photograph one another.  They come back as happy as hunters with bulging game bags; they spend days waiting, with sweet anxiety, to see the developed pictures (anxiety to which some add the subtle pleasure of alchemistic manipulations in the darkroom, forbidding any intrusion by members of the family, relishing the acid smell that is harsh to the nostrils).  It is only when they have the photos before their eyes that they seem to take tangible possession of the day they spent, only then that the mountain stream, the movement of the child with his pail, the glint of the sun on the wife’s legs take on the irrevocability of what has been and can no longer be doubted.  Everything else can drown in the unreliable shadow of  memory...(read the rest)

'Anti-trilogy': The China Miéville interview, part three

In the long-awaited third and final part of our interview, we discuss the disaster in the southern U.S., blogging, fantasy vs. realism vs. magical realism and the value for progressives of international law.
..........

ALPHONSE VAN WORDEN: You're blogging at Lenin's Tomb! I want to know how you're enjoying it.

CHINA MIÉVILLE: Well, it's nice to have an outlet for the occasional rant. I admit though that it i) gives me performance anxiety, and ii) creates a sense of obligation and guilt. That's not necessarily a bad thing, I'm just saying. I'm going to try to do one tonight, in fact.

AvW: What's your topic?

CM: It's a follow-up on Hurricane Katrina. Nothing very surprising - this is one of the problems of blogging, I rarely think I'm saying anything the readers haven't thought of - but I'm just obsessed with this story, can't leave it alone.

JOHN PISTELLI: Well, it's just a catastrophe. It's such sorry proof of the mess we're in.

CM: It's beyond belief. I find it more shocking than 9/11. It's shaping up to be a major crisis for Bush.

AvW: Do you feel it is a bit empowering though? Blogging? Contributing to the instant pool of reaction?

"Whereas, I feel nothing at all..."

Virginia Woolf: though we don't hear much about her in our blogvironment, she's as pertinent as could be... We should all be reading VW. Why? Because what I would argue is her paramount preoccupation - at least in Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, just happens to be (perhaps) the primary issue in our world, the real one, here and now, today...

What preoccupation am I talking about? The preoccupation with not being preoccupied ... Not being preoccupied with the right things. Being distracted by the banal affairs of the day, flowers for the party and the like, while the writing's on the wall, or even up in the sky, just as the shit hits the fan and its all your fault, directly or better indirectly...

A few of my favorite examples... First Dalloway, and then two from TTL...