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Crash: Auto-Fetish
In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the Cypriot sculptor, Pygmalion, carves an ivory statue and falls in love with her after being disillusioned with real women and the wickedness of the environment around him. He is no longer capable of enjoying the pleasures of reality; he must shun them and create his own artificial delights. Pygmalion dresses the statue, gives gifts of orient pearls, and even takes her to bed. The fantastical element is one where the girl—and it is always a girl—transcends her quality of objectness and loves him back.
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The Waves: The Little Language Is Enough
This is The Waves; written in such a way that it can’t be interpreted at a distance. Woolf herself called it a ‘playpoem’ rather a novel. There is no action, no descriptions, only a rotating cycle of soliloquies: deeply vulnerable statements that have almost no natural connection to the ones that precede them or the ones that follow. The six speakers are unique characters, and yet they’re all the same. They’re defined by their types, then they subvert the portraits they’ve been painting of themselves. Instead, this whole collection must be read granularly; macro interpretations betray its architecture.
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Either/Or: Longing Correctly
Responding to critics of his colossal 800-page debut philosophical work, which is buried in pseudonyms and essays, Kierkegaard insisted that people had to read every page. In fact, he demanded it. It’s not that he was clickbaiting towards an exciting finish (“the last one will shock you!”) but instead, the book’s dialectic structure of argument and counter-argument meant that critiquing a part was pointless if it didn’t consider the whole, like judging a joke before hearing the punchline. Listen to all of what I’m saying, or don’t listen at all.
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Backrooms: Against Reanimation
Think of the worst moment of your life. Reanimate everything from the exact moment your heart collapsed to every dust mote that happened to eavesdrop on that scene. Now re-reanimate it. In fact, conjure this scene daily for the rest of your life. After six months of these daily reveries, are the details the same? What about after a year, or a decade? In your canonised history, you may have substituted wallpaper for plaster, or day for night. Memory reconstruction has turned into memory replacement.
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The Punctum
Raid every suburban home in Canada or the States and you’ll find, in the middle drawer of the pedestal cabinet devoted to childhood graduation photos, a photo album just like this one. The cover is blank. They always are. It’s either a muted blue; an uninspiring green; or, if it’s especially old, brown with a leathery texture to it. It doesn’t have a name. Any other scrap bits of paper, sewing equipment, islanded polaroids, discarded buttons, or inkless pens only inhabit that drawer amidst the album to make it seem like a genuine discovery
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Tarkovsky’s Mirror and the Crisis of Sentimentality in Art
Mirror’s aesthetic differs from Tarkovsky’s other films, to me. Maybe it’s the flurrying long grass or the delicate sunbeams through log cabin windows, but there’s such joy in every frame. Nostalghia is set amid ruins, Stalker an apocalypse, Solaris a derelict spaceship. They’re purposefully grim, but only to contrast the clear sentiment at the heart of them: hope. As their protagonists soak in their surroundings, like Baudelaire’s flâneur who wanders but doesn’t engage, they’re forced to look inwards to avoid the despair of their environment.
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Intermezzo: Chess and Love
Why is it that when a writer is tasked with putting chess to paper, they feel compelled to personify the game with hidden ley lines? As if a mysterious force imbues its moves with a deeper meaning: the soft, subtle bishop move to G7 is actually the player’s internalised trauma, the loss of the father figure manifesting itself within the game. The long diagonal? Simple. It represents their future in clear sight, the rest of their life perfectly spanned out in front of their eyes.
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Derrida’s Signification and Simulation in Vandermeer’s Annihilation
Jeff Vandermeer’s Annihilation turned 10 years old earlier this year. I only realised recently, when I was rereading it, that the entire trilogy turned 10 this year. He actually released them all in 2014 like the staggered singles of an upcoming album. The novel sees a group of nameless scientists enter a biologically contaminated zone called ‘Area X’ whose expedition causes their bodies to mutate as each organism within the zone metamorphosizes and blends into one another. It creates a (kind of?) body horror aesthetic this way.
Prone to spelling mistakes.
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