giovedì, marzo 28, 2013
Abattoir blues
Went for a run this morning and things were still all Nick Cave-y. At least they're pretty here. Pretty creepy.
Literary illgrimages
Visiting Victoria, so the F-word can try to flog his paintings in galleries in Melbourne and organize an exhibition for later this year or early next (email if you'd like to see his 2012 work; it is awesome). We drove over three days, what with being loaded down with a carfull of paintings and Godzilla, which time was made less trying by me being able to work unbrokenly on the iPhone and on the computer by turning the iPhone into a little hotspot. Wow. Technology is magic - makes my life so much better.
We're staying in country Victoria and passed through Wangaratta to get here. I'm not much of a one for literary pilgrimages. I do understand how space shapes mentality which in turn shapes writing, but frankly I don't much care to see it for myself; not being a scholar or an obsessive I'm pretty much alright just enjoying the literature. I visit Anne Bronte's grave when I'm walking in that remarkably part of Scarborough by Saint Mary's, which happens every couple of years, and I've been to Haworth, which I might well have done even without her sisters, since I like Yorkshire, hiking and moors. Those sisters and Haworth are a pretty quintessential literary pilgrimage though; hard to think of a more formative environment for fevered novelists than those big skies and claustrophobic homes. There was also something very appropriate about the unchallenging beauty of Mircea Eliade's house in Cascais, though I stumbled on it purely by accident and would call The Sacred and the Profane, the only book of his that I've read, many things, but probably not literature. It is due for a reread though - have to occasionally challenge the palate with the even-a-stopped-clock-gets-it-right-twice-a-day ramblings of right-wing racialists, whose intellectual strengths are best seen in their ponderings on the mystical.
Anyways, if you accept Nick Cave as a poet Wangaratta is another quintessential and far less pretty pilgrimage than either Haworth or Cascais. . . that dump and the denuded landscape around it suddenly makes Henry's Dream sound more like tarted-up anthropology than a rocking opiate nightmare. God, country Australia is a hole on the face of creation. Don't come here. Just listen to Henry's Dream. Since the F-word is from Nick Cave country and fucked off away from it only slightly less definitively, I'm taking this literary pilgrimage for the team.
We're staying in country Victoria and passed through Wangaratta to get here. I'm not much of a one for literary pilgrimages. I do understand how space shapes mentality which in turn shapes writing, but frankly I don't much care to see it for myself; not being a scholar or an obsessive I'm pretty much alright just enjoying the literature. I visit Anne Bronte's grave when I'm walking in that remarkably part of Scarborough by Saint Mary's, which happens every couple of years, and I've been to Haworth, which I might well have done even without her sisters, since I like Yorkshire, hiking and moors. Those sisters and Haworth are a pretty quintessential literary pilgrimage though; hard to think of a more formative environment for fevered novelists than those big skies and claustrophobic homes. There was also something very appropriate about the unchallenging beauty of Mircea Eliade's house in Cascais, though I stumbled on it purely by accident and would call The Sacred and the Profane, the only book of his that I've read, many things, but probably not literature. It is due for a reread though - have to occasionally challenge the palate with the even-a-stopped-clock-gets-it-right-twice-a-day ramblings of right-wing racialists, whose intellectual strengths are best seen in their ponderings on the mystical.
Anyways, if you accept Nick Cave as a poet Wangaratta is another quintessential and far less pretty pilgrimage than either Haworth or Cascais. . . that dump and the denuded landscape around it suddenly makes Henry's Dream sound more like tarted-up anthropology than a rocking opiate nightmare. God, country Australia is a hole on the face of creation. Don't come here. Just listen to Henry's Dream. Since the F-word is from Nick Cave country and fucked off away from it only slightly less definitively, I'm taking this literary pilgrimage for the team.
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