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an__otherbook

@an__otherbook

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‘The bloodless duty of critique in the service of Enlightenment blinds us to what is rich, strange, and provocative about the tradition of thinking and experience that we label as mystical. The obsession with rigor ossifies into rigor mortis, an inflexible unwillingness or obsessional rigidity that refuses to acknowledge vast swathes of human experience which are felt to be undeniably real but cannot defend themselves readily in the tribunal of reason.’ Critchley takes an exploration into a realm beyond what seems reasonable to the modern person and asks them to step outside of their self and see what is possible in some wider, weirder, and potentially very profound unity. He tempts his reader to feel something more than the everyday, what about some self-annihilation that leads to a greater capacity for love? by @an__otherbook
‘I was chilled by their merriment, even though it was meant to warm me. It could only remind me of the laughter I had often heard at home, laughter which I had sometimes deliberately elicited. This laughter is the laughter of those who consider themselves to be at a safe remove from all the wretched, for whom the pain of living is not real. I had heard it so often in my native land that I had resolved to find a place where I would never hear it anymore. In some deep, black, stony, and liberating way, my life, in my own eyes, began during that first year in Paris, when it was borne in on me that this laughter is universal and never can be stilled.’ Baldwin’s writing is unfailingly astute, sensitive, and reflective, whether writing about film and literature, the complexity of Black lives during the dawn of the civil rights movement, his life in Paris, or the taut relationship he had with his father. Every single sentence and moment is beautifully crafted and effective. His pen can be fiery and provocative as well as deeply vulnerable. A voice that never allows the reader to drift off but to sit up and take notice of every word. by @an__otherbook
‘The path back to the house is long, endless. Elisabeth walks upon the surface of the darkness. But darkness is a membrane. And inside the membrane she can see a large egg. Around the egg come powerful sparks of light. The strings in the trees sway wetly back and forth. Elisabeth looks down and discovers her arm to be composed of tiny incandescent grains. The taste in her mouth is of wickerwork, rain and butter. For a prolonged moment she is a doll. For a prolonged moment in the grass she is me.’ A haunting tale of witchcraft and persecution written in the most incantatory language imaginable. A composition of folklore and historical sources, Ravn conjures a story that enchants and repulses the senses, unsettles the mind, and completely mesmerises. Beautiful/eerie witchcraft and women seen through the perspective of a wax doll who is all seeing, all knowing, and all sensing. Are these women longing for psychological and physical release of the people and time that bind them or are they consorting with the devil to bring misfortune on those around them? A question that finds its fingerprints over our times still. by @an__otherbook
writing about blue, narration, artistic intent, and a month of spinning 🌀 by @an__otherbook
‘Naturally I shall not opt for narrative, which would mean inventing reality instead of searching for it. Neither shall I content myself with merely picking out and transcribing the images I remember; I shall process them like documents, examining them from different angles to give them meaning. In other words, I shall carry out an ethnological study of myself.’ Ernaux is a master of self-excavation. She opens Shame with a violent memory and spends the book trying to understand how it shaped her life moving forward. What she refuses to do is draw a solid conclusion, she resists settling on an absolute truth. Instead, the process of exploring and examining her teenage years that follow the incident is the whole point of the book. By refusing to reach for a grand narrative, the reader is left with a book of self-inquiry—which is all the more powerful in its resistance to find an answer. by @an__otherbook
‘She did not really see the streak of sunlight on the floor more than she saw the statues: she was inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home and over the English fields and elms and hedge-bordered highroads: and feeling that the way in which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clear to her as it had been. But in Dorothea’s mind there was a current into which all thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to flow—the reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good. There was clearly something better than anger and despondency.’ The backdrop of Eliot’s novel is coloured by politics, local elections, a nation on the verge of change. What takes centre stage is the complex and complicated nature of relationships. Relationship to one’s self, to others, to the place you come from, to where you desire to be. A cast of characters wrestle with their positions in life, their motivations, and their desires. It is so much a novel about imperfections, the struggle to be good, and how the course of a life is one strand in a tapestry of many—and that’s how life comes together. by @an__otherbook
late summer languishing 🥀 heat, florine stettheimer (1919) by @an__otherbook
writing about living and burning mountains, the importance of reading for the mind and body, lost letters, and other thoughts that caught on and held my attention 🥀 by @an__otherbook
‘The worst cruelties of life are its killing injustices. Almost all promises are broken. The poor’s acceptance of adversity is neither passive nor resigned. It’s an acceptance which peers behind the adversity and discovers there something nameless. Not a promise, for (almost) all promises are broken; rather something like a bracket, a parenthesis in the otherwise remorseless flow of history. And the sum total of these parentheses is eternity. This can be put the other way round: on this earth there is no happiness without a longing for justice.’ A meditation on the nature of terrorism and the deep despair it creates. An exploration of the profoundly human need for hope and art and how the art that is birthed from this need is indeed a powerful tool for resistance. A beautiful book that ties together shared absurdity and pain to provide a sense of consolation. by @an__otherbook
‘Nobody plants leylandii out of love for their form or flourishing, they’re living expressions of passive aggression: live walls. They’ve done well for themselves out of human enmity, like all those other natural forms that proliferate with human misery, bacillus anthracis, ricin, prussic acid, or gamma rays. Some species, certain fungi and viruses, like rare individual humans, make a life that is so rampantly aggressive that it can be difficult to see such a lifeway as the strenuous effort to survive in a merciless environment, easier to call it an expression of character.’ During a time of isolation and confinement, a woman reminisces on her upbringing in rural Yorkshire during the 1990s. What comes to light is the interconnectedness of humans with the natural world around them and how power and profit, time and again, will choose to dissolve them no matter the cost to local life. A story that illustrates the damage of globalisation and depicts an unrelentingly lively world 🖤 by @an__otherbook
‘In any case, one thing seems clear: whether or not one intends for one’s art to express or stir compassion, to address or rectify forms of social injustice, to celebrate or relieve suffering, may end up irrelevant to its actual effects. Some of the most good-intentioned, activist, “compassionate” art out there can end up being patronizing, ineffective, or exploitative. And, of course, vice versa: much of the work that has no designs on eliciting compassion or bringing about emancipation can be the most salutary, the most liberating. This paradox is central to this book’s enterprise. For not only do our work and words speak beyond our intentions and controls, but compassion is not necessarily found where we presume it to be, nor is it always what we presume it to be, nor is it experienced or accessed by everyone in the same way, nor is it found in the same place in the same way over time. The same might be said of cruelty.’ Nelson’s exploration of the ethical concerns and convictions surrounding the cruelty of art raises questions of how the intentions of art collide with the effect it has on its viewers. Can we be shocked into a more just and less lonely society by violent art? What makes cruelty become art instead of simply banal violence being put on display? An extremely powerful work of criticism that only seems more relevant now than it was when first published. by @an__otherbook
writing about time and heat and what i’ve been noticing lately 🥀 by @an__otherbook

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