Missing out / fields of difference

Adam Phillips & Paul Holdengräber discuss 'Missing Out'

On jokes:

Paul Holdengräber: Jokes are problematic on so many levels because they demand a response. They’re not unlike gifts, which demand a response as well. But a joke also excludes… A joke is also there to humiliate.

Adam Phillips: Jokes are really a test of sociability, because if I tell a joke… If I say to you, ‘I’m going to tell you a great joke’, obviously I can’t tell you a great joke. I can tell you a great joke and you will tell me whether it’s a great joke with your response.

If I were to tell a joke now, it could be excruciatingly embarrassing or a roar in success. But it would be like some love test to the audiance: ‘am I, are we all together in this? Or am I an isolate?’ So it’s a real test of sociability and a real test of one’s relation to the group. The other bit which I think is very interesting (which I think Freud says)  is that , ‘we never really know what about a joke amuses us’. And in that sense, jokes are like some tacit communications in the sense of, if we get it we laugh. But what we don’t get is what getting it involves. We don’t actually know what we’ve got. All we know is that we’ve been amused. And Freud makes a lot of this because there is a lot in it. It’s a very strange form of… You never know, with a joke, whether it’s creating a collusion or a collaboration. Whether you’ve got a sort of gang of accomplices who all share a sense of humour, whether it’s a cult, so to speak, or whether it’s a group of differently minded people. Whether you’re coercing a sort of group by shared sense of humour. And Freud’s obviously very on to this, because he’s wondering what kind of intimacy jokes create… And do they, in a sense, gloss over differences between people or are they a sort of magical act between people? 

People will say, ‘we share a sense of humour’, then…

All those things, Freud is suspicious of. Not in a cynical way, but in a genuinely questioning way. Wondering what we’re doing with this stuff.

[…]

Adam Phillips: Any culture that puts so much value on knowing, must be very frightened of not knowing… And it’s very clear that there are limits to knowing.

About Paul Holdengräber

"The way we miss our lives is life" - Randall Jarrell

Svalnar / The day cools...

The day cools...

I
The day cools towards the evening...
Drink the warmth from my hand
my hand has the same blood as the spring
Take my hand, take my white arm
take my thin shoulders' yearning...
It would be curious to feel,
a single night, a night like this
your heavy head against my breast.

II
You threw your love’s red rose
in my white womb
I hold in my hot hands
your love’s red rose soon to wither
Oh you lord with cold eyes
I take the crown you offer me
which bends my head down to my heart…

III
I saw my master for the first time today,
trembling I recognised him at once.
Now I feel his heavy hand on my light arm…
Where is my singing virginal laugh,
my emancipation with head held high?
Now I feel his firm hold over my quivering body,
now I hear reality’s hard sound
against my frail frail dreams

IV
You sought a flower
and found a fruit.
You sought a well
and found an ocean.
You sought a woman
and found a soul -
You are disappointed.

Edith Södergran 1916

Protect me from what I want / dos homens que odiavam as mulheres

"Porque é que ele me humilhava desta maneira? Creio que não foi, como acontece muitas vezes, porque as qualidades que o inicialmente encantaram – a minha vivacidade, a minha liberdade, o meu sentido de igualdade com os homens – acabassem por o irritar.
[...]
Ele tinha medo de mim: é a razão por que era cruel comigo. Tinha medo de mim de uma maneira vulgar e de outra invulgar. No primeiro caso tinha medo de mim da maneira que os homens costumam recear as mulheres: porque as amantes (ou esposas) os compreendem. Alguns homens são muito pouco adultos: querem que as mulheres os compreendam, e para atingir esse fim contam-lhes todos os seus segredos; e depois quando elas os compreendem totalmente, eles odeiam-nas porque elas os compreendem.
No segundo caso – o mais importante –, ele tinha medo de mim porque tinha medo de si próprio. Tinha medo de me amar completamente. Não era o simples terror de eu lhe invadir o escritório e a solidão; era o terror de eu lhe invadir o coração. Era cruel porque me queria afastar, porque receava amar-me completamente. Vou contar-lhe o que, no meu íntimo, acredito: que para Gustave, de um modo que ele não apreendia totalmente, eu representava a vida, e que me rejeitava ainda mais violentamente porque isso lhe criava a mais profunda vergonha. E eu tenho alguma culpa? Eu amava-o; há alguma coisa mais natural do que eu querer dar-lhe a oportunidade de ele me amar a mim?
[...]
É verdade que era um homem difícil de amar. O seu coração estava distante, afastado; tinha vergonha dele e muito cuidado com ele. O verdadeiro amor sobrevive à ausência, à morte e à infidelidade, disse-me ele uma vez; os verdadeiros amantes podem passar dez anos sem se verem. (Não fiquei impressionada por estas observações; limitei-me a concluir que ele se sentiria mais à vontade se eu estivesse ausente, se fosse infiel ou se morresse.)

Gabava-se de estar apaixonado por mim; mas nunca vi um amor tão impaciente. "A minha vida é como andar a cavalo", escreveu-me ele uma vez. "Dantes gostava de ir a galope; agora gosto de ir a passo". Quando escreveu isto ainda não tinha trinta anos; já tinha decidido ser velho antes do tempo. Enquanto eu... o galope! O cabelo ao vento, a gargalhada que vem de dentro, do fundo dos pulmões!

A sua vaidade lisonjeava-se com a ideia de estar apaixonado por mim; creio que também lhe dava um prazer não assumido o desejar constantemente o meu corpo e, no entanto, proibir-se de o ter: negar-se o prazer era tão excitante como ceder. Costumava dizer-me que eu era menos mulher do que a maioria das mulheres; que era uma mulher na carne, mas um homem no espírito; que eu era um hermaphrodite nouveau, um terceiro sexo. Afirmou-me muitas vezes esta teoria louca, mas na realidade estava só a afirmá-la a si próprio: quanto menos mulher ele me fazia, menos amante ele precisava de ser."

Julian Barnes, O Papagaio de Flaubert [pg 172, 173, 174]

Dido and Aeneas

Dido and Aeneas, Mark Morris Dance Group

Story writing is love in progress

George Saunders - On Story

The problem of men writing about sex

Emasculated — The problem of men writing about sex

"... and what a relief we might assume the reader to feel when this kind man imagines things from her perspective – that she has the right to find him physically repellent – and when he proposes a platonic friendship instead. The darkness is dispelled and the protagonist’s decency is rewarded in the next page by the young woman’s eventual erotic desire for him, his kindness overriding all."

"We’ve had to listen to men’s accounts of desire for a long time; now it’s women’s turn. Men are always reducing women to minor characters. Why should we listen to them exalting their lust? Isn’t this the cultural noise that allows a man like Weinstein to make his moves? Aren’t you embarrassed to be making the case you’re making?"

Aqui

Cupid and Psyche

"Ele tinha medo de mim: é essa a razão por que era cruel comigo. Tinha medo de mim de uma maneira vulgar e de outra invulgar. No primeiro caso tinha medo da maneira que os homens costumam recear as mulheres: porque as amantes (ou esposas) os compreendem.. Alguns homens são muito pouco adultos: querem que as mulheres os compreendam, e para atingir esse fim contam-lhe todos os seus segredos; e depois quando elas os compreendem totalmente, eles odeiam-nas porque elas os compreendem.
No segundo caso – o mais importante –, ele tinha medo de mim porque tinha medo de si próprio. Tinha medo de me amar completamente. Não era o simples terror de eu lhe invadir o escritório e a solidão; era o terror de eu lhe invadir o coração. Ele era cruel porque me queria afastar, porque receava amar-me completamente."

Julian Barnes, O Papagaio de Flaubert [pg 172]

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

Attention Seeking - Perguntar não ofende

Adam Phillips on 'Attention Seeking'

Q: Is criticism always shaming or does it have a useful function?

A: We're encouraged to believe that we should be good at taking criticism. That's a really impressive thing to be able to do. It certainly isn't my experience. I'd much rather be praised. Occasionally people say critical things that engage me and I'm struck by them, but I often feel got at. Now... that's me... I'm not saying that that's true to all of us (laughter). But I do think that there's something, that the risk is that criticism becomes the wish to shame. On one end there's a wish to modify, or a genuine question, and on the other end there's a wish to humiliate and it would seem to me much better if we stopped humiliating people and start asking them questions.


"The object is defined by the distractions to which it leads".
Devorah Baum

Espelho: o símbolo da vaidade das mulheres

No entanto, a hipocrisia masculina é igualmente evidente. Pinta uma mulher nua porque dá-lhe prazer olhar para ela. Coloca-lhe um espelho na mão e intitula a pintura de 'Vaidade'. Deste modo, condenando moralmente a mulher cuja nudez retratou, para o seu próprio prazer.
Não fazendo mais senão repetir o exemplo bíblico de culpar a mulher.

Aqui

Memory is a responsibility

Sense and Sensibility - A Conversation Beyond Borders (Viviane Reding & Elif Shafak) | DLDwomen 14

of restlessness

Between The Bars

Drink up baby, stay up all night
With the things you could do
You won't but you might
The potential you'll be
That you'll never see
The promises you'll only make

Drink up with me now
And forget all about
The pressure of days
Do what I say
And I'll make you okay
And drive them away
The images stuck in your head

People you've been before
That you don't want around anymore
That push and shove and won't bend to your will
I'll keep them still

Drink up baby, look at the stars
I'll kiss you again between the bars
Where I'm seeing you there
With your hands in the air
Waiting to finally be caught

Drink up one more time
And I'll make you mine
Keep you apart,
Deep in my heart
Separate from the rest,
Where I like you the best
And keep the things you forgot

The people you've been before
That you don't want around anymore
That push and shove and won't bend to your will
I'll keep them still

Fakery and Stony Truths

"Mr. Gaddis knows almost everything: not only how the world works - the pragmatic cynical business-machine that we call worldliness - but also how myth flies into being out of the primeval clouds of art and death and money."

"Mr. Gaddis has become famous for not being famous enough."

Aqui

Chance / uma martelada na meritocracia

“Even intelligence is rather an accident of Nature,” White writes, “and to say that an intelligent man deserves his rewards in life is to say that he is entitled to be lucky.” It doesn’t seem like coincidence that White played poker.
Aqui

“Let me embrace thee, sour adversity, for wise men say it is the wisest course.”
Shakespeare

L'Illustration

Para folhear este número da revista, clicar aqui.

A página web.

Recognitions / repetition / resonations

"As fantasias sempre estão ao serviço de algo, de uma posição que desejamos manter. Não somos objectos. Somos sujeitos que organizam as próprias fantasias. A situação em que me encontro é a situação na qual eu me coloco".
Jacques Sedat

William Gaddis by William Gaddis

Hans Memling - Portrait of Barbara van Vlaendenbergh, c. 1480

"... I guess it's both the force and the flaw of those paintings, the thoroughness with which they recreate the atmosphere, and the, I mean a painter like Memling who isn't long on suggestion and inferences but piles up perfection layer by layer. But, well it's like a writer who can't help devoting as much care to a moment as to an hour".
The Recogntions, by William Gaddis [pg 124]

livros / Visual complexity

"Devoted"

About Cara Barer

I have this big question... / Breaking out of echo chambres

The Future of Education - Yuval Noah Harari & Russell Brand - Penguin Talks

"I have this big question and I'm on a quest, following it wherever it leads me"

... We need to walk the last mile by ourselves.

Black Lives Matter / Cops / Where is the love?

"Wrestle with this for a minute: if all of someone’s material needs were met and all the members of their community were fed, clothed, housed, and dignified, why would they need to join a gang? Why would they need to risk their lives selling drugs or breaking into buildings? If mental healthcare was free and was not stigmatized, how many lives would that save?"


"I believe that if everyone understood how we’re trained and brought up in the profession, it would inform the demands our communities should be making of a new way of community safety. If I tell you how we were made, I hope it will empower you to unmake us. [...] Many cops fantasize about getting to kill someone in the line of duty" "Capitalism requires a permanent underclass to exploit for cheap labor and it requires the cops to bring that underclass to heel."


"We imagine a world not divided into good guys and bad guys, but rather a world where people’s needs are met and those in crisis receive care, not dehumanization."

Here

19th century Jesuit hip hop poet

Gerard Manley Hopkins - To Seem a Stranger -Everyman - documentary

Official website

• The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo

• (Maidens’ song from St. Winefred’s Well)

• The Leaden Echo
• How to keep–is there ány any, is there none such, nowhere
• known some, bow or brooch or braid or brace, láce, latch
• or catch or key to keep
• Back beauty, keep it, beauty, beauty, beauty, . . . from vanishing
• away?
• Ó is there no frowning of these wrinkles, rankèd wrinkles deep,
• Dówn? no waving off of these most mournful messengers, still
• messengers, sad and stealing messengers of grey?
• No there’s none, there’s none, O no there’s none,
• Nor can you long be, what you now are, called fair,
• Do what you may do, what, do what you may,
• And wisdom is early to despair:
• Be beginning; since, no, nothing can be done
• To keep at bay
• Age and age’s evils, hoar hair,
• Ruck and wrinkle, drooping, dying, death’s worst, winding
• sheets, tombs and worms and tumbling to decay;
• So be beginning, be beginning to despair.
• O there’s none; no no no there’s none:
• Be beginning to despair, to despair,
• Despair, despair, despair, despair.
• The Golden Echo
• Spare!
• There is one, yes I have one (Hush there!);
• Only not within seeing of the sun,
• Not within the singeing of the strong sun,
• Tall sun’s tingeing, or treacherous the tainting of the earth’s air.
• Somewhere elsewhere there is ah well where! one,
• Óne. Yes I can tell such a key, I do know such a place,
• Where whatever’s prized and passes of us, everything that’s
• fresh and fast flying of us, seems to us sweet of us and
• swiftly away with, done away with, undone,
• Undone, done with, soon done with, and yet dearly and
• dangerously sweet
• Of us, the wimpled-water-dimpled, not-by-morning-matchèd face,
• The flower of beauty, fleece of beauty, too too apt to, ah! to fleet,
• Never fleets more, fastened with the tenderest truth
• To its own best being and its loveliness of youth: it is an ever-
• lastingness of, O it is an all youth!
• Come then, your ways and airs and looks, locks, maiden gear,
• gallantry and gaiety and grace,
• Winning ways, airs innocent, maiden manners, sweet looks,
• loose locks, long locks, lovelocks, gaygear, going gallant,
• girlgrace–
• Resign them, sign them, seal them, send them, motion them
• with breath,
• And with sighs soaring, soaring síghs deliver
• Them; beauty-in-the-ghost, deliver it, early now, long before
• death
• Give beauty back, beauty, beauty, beauty, back to God, beauty’s
• self and beauty’s giver.
• See; not a hair is, not an eyelash, not the least lash lost; every hair
• Is, hair of the head, numbered.
• Nay, what we had lighthanded left in surly the mere mould
• Will have waked and have waxed and have walked with the wind
• what while we slept,
• This side, that side hurling a heavyheaded hundredfold
• What while we, while we slumbered.
• O then, weary then whý should we tread? O why are we so
• haggard at the heart, so care-coiled, care-killed, so fagged,
• so fashed, so cogged, so cumbered,
• When the thing we freely fórfeit is kept with fonder a care,
• Fonder a care kept than we could have kept it, kept
• Far with fonder a care (and we, we should have lost it) finer, fonder
• A care kept. Where kept? Do but tell us where kept, where.–
• Yonder.–What high as that! We follow, now we follow.–
• Yonder, yes yonder, yonder,
• Yonder.

Richard Burton reads Gerard Manley Hopkins' poem 'The Leaden Echo & The Golden Echo'.

I Burn but I Am Not Consumed

I Burn but I Am Not Consumed

Karine Polwart website

This isn't a book. It's a landscape

Robert Macfarlane: The Waterstones Interview


"The Lost Words by Robert Macfarlane is the kind of book that you need to hold in your hand to really appreciate. Twenty spells to conjure the names of common animals and plants back into our language accompanied by gorgeous paintings by Jackie Morris​. It's a book to take time over".

"That's what we wanted. Something you could enter, be lost within, be astonished by the contents".

The Lost Words: website

There was a man of double deed...

And Also The Trees - There Was a Man of Double Deed

Also see The Recognitions (William Gaddis, page 98/99)

There was a man of double deed,

Who sowed his garden full of seed;

When the seed began to grow,

'Twas like a garden full of snow;

When the snow began to melt,

'Twas like a ship without a belt;

When the ship began to sail,

'Twas like a bird without a tail;

When the bird began to fly,

'Twas like an eagle in the sky;

When the sky began to roar,

'Twas like a lion at my door;

When my door began to crack,

'Twas like a stick across my back;

When my back began to smart,

'Twas like a penknife in my heart;

And when my heart began to bleed,

'Twas death, and death, and death indeed.

[anonymous]

The words to say it

William Gaddis consegue materializar, em palavras, aquilo que nos escapa quando comunicamos com os outros (expressões faciais, movimentos corporais, subtilezas...).
Usando as palavras, de forma exímia, ele fixa, no tempo, gestos, atitudes e comportamentos, que o inconsciente deixa escapar.
Tem uma sofisticada habilidade para reter, para fixar no tempo, para sempre, o efémero da linguagem não falada.

"He puts his hand there, his right hand to his forehead and draws it down with feverish application, as though in this to pull away the features so long forming, revaluing for this moment; but above his hand, his face comes back into shape, the forehead quickly rises and recovers its lines, then the brows, and the eyes vividly devious permit nothing to enter".

"Esther watched him now, standing in the middle of the room, drawing his hand down over his face as though, again, to wipe out some past, how long ago, or how recent, or all of it?".

The Recognitions, William Gaddis [pg. 93]