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jeffalessandrelli · 3 days
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I should be at standing rock instead of listening to laura nyro under a river tree and drinking coconut water in the columbia river gorge on a beach that would not exist unless the earth was exploded to construct a series of man-made dams along this rivers natural course that would not exist unless sacred indigenous lands and cultural artifacts were drowned or displaced entire populations relocated removed by force by gunpoint by threat of death
now this site is a nude beach primarily populated by cismale white queers
a couple months ago someone complained on facebook about the amount of heterosexuals who were taking over the beach / the prime real estate / fallacious queer utopic destination: “Do you remember when Rooster Rock was a gay beach?” I chimed in “Remember when Rooster Rock was Indigenous Land?” someone said “This comment should have ended the discussion.” but you know how white progressives are they keep going and going and going
but before I allow the frustration to consume me I have to remind myself that everyone has a right to their opinion and we live in a time of corruptive culture desperate for attention desperate to leave our mark somewhere desperate to give away any soul we have left for a momentary glimpse of validation
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jeffalessandrelli · 3 days
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Until Guy died of lung cancer at a Lexington hospital in January 2005. His partner and lover, Bonnie Jean Cox, survived him by twelve years. Bonnie was the Director of the Collection Development Department At the University of Kentucky, where Guy was a professor of English. I loved Bonnie. She was nerdy and warm, but with Yankee sarcasm. She developed Alzheimer’s, right after Guy died, and forgot everyone. Their vibe was: he would say outrageous things and she would chide. People joked that “Bonnie Jean seems like a lesbian and so does Guy” And it was kind of like that, they sort of seemed like a lesbian couple, Although, you know? Not really. Guy had his own kind of masculinity. The strangest part of his biography was that he had been in the army. He understood well, like his hero Fourier, that our sexuality’s a chord Made up of notes. We play a few in our lives and leave others muted. After Guy died somebody tactlessly asked Bonnie Jean if he was gay. She said something quite colourful about how good the sex had been. I remember sitting with them in front of Guy’s ground-floor fireplace. He would burn trash in there, paper bags and empty cigarette packs. Now and then they would scrounge around for more stuff to throw in, Especially after they’d exhausted the stack of rejected review copies, Talking that famous Guy Davenport talk, which will never exist again, Literary-historical free-association punctuated with dramatic pauses, Ready to laugh but rarely silly, sometimes gossipy, sometimes bitchy. He might tell you about a conversation that he had with his neighbours Or about one that he had with Samuel Beckett at an old café in Paris. He told me an anecdote about a visit he’d had from Cormac McCarthy, Who for a time considered Guy’s Geography one of his favourite books.
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jeffalessandrelli · 6 days
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3/22/24
There was a letter that Ted Hughes wrote to his son, Nicholas. He said the only calibration that counts is how much heart people invest and how much they can ignore their fears of being hurt or caught out or humiliated.
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jeffalessandrelli · 10 days
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jeffalessandrelli · 16 days
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Breton argued instead for embracing the “omnipotence of dreams” and exploring the unconscious and all that was “marvelous” in life. Art that could reach beyond the rational could liberate humanity, he felt. “The mere word ‘freedom’ is the only one that still excites me,” Breton wrote in his “Surrealist Manifesto.”
It was a literary idea that became an art movement and revolutionized nearly all forms of cultural production. It’s now commonplace to call pretty much any weird experience “surreal.”
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jeffalessandrelli · 20 days
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jeffalessandrelli · 21 days
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While discussion of My Life has been central to Hejinian’s reception history, her poetry and poetics transformed substantially afterwards. In the 1980s Hejinian taught herself Russian as a way to establish a direct dialogue with poets in the Soviet Union. This led to her translations of Arkadii Dragomoschenko and to her books Leningrad (with Michael Davidson, Ron Silliman, and Barrett Watten) and Oxota: A Short Russian Novel (1991). Other books from this period include The Cell (1992) and The Cold of Poetry (1994). In the first decade of the twenty-first century Hejinian published a series of shorter works — The Beginner (Tuumba, 2002), Slowly (Tuumba, 2002), The Fatalist (Omnidawn, 2003), My Life in the Nineties (Shark, 2003) — as well as the longer book, A Border Comedy (2001), which Hejinian considered her most important work. Hejinian’s more recent poetry books include The Unfollowing (Omnidawn, 2016), Positions of the Sun (Belladona, 2018), and Tribunal (Omnidawn, 2019).
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jeffalessandrelli · 29 days
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Jayson Musson
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jeffalessandrelli · 1 month
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How many hours do you sleep? Six at the max. Three if I’m in the throes of a body of work.
What are you obsessed with? Up until a couple years ago, I didn’t miss many Blazers games. I would sacrifice studio time. Even if I had a project to do, I would go to a bar with friends to watch a game.
Describe being an artist in America. Foolish. It’s that age-old thing: why would you choose this? But it’s also empowering, to have this outlet to take in all the negative, the positive—all the things—and throw them back at people in a creative way.
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jeffalessandrelli · 1 month
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L’Enigme d’Isidore Ducasse, 1920, remade 1972, consists of a sewing machine, wrapped in a blanket and tied with string. Man Ray’s idea of using a sewing machine was inspired by a simile used by the French writer, Isidore Ducasse (1809-87), better known as the Comte de Lautréamont, ‘Beautiful as the accidental encounter, on a dissecting table, of a sewing machine and an umbrella’. It was a phrase that was greatly admired by the writers in Paris with whom Man Ray was close friends and who formed the nucleus of the Paris dada and later surrealist groups. They saw it as paradigmatic of a new type of surprising imagery, as well as replete with disguised sexual symbolism. (The umbrella was interpreted as a male element, the sewing machine as a female element, and the dissecting table as a bed.). Man Ray’s wrapped object, however, was a mystery, and suggested not so much a sewing machine as some utterly undefined, and therefore potentially more disturbing, presence. The word ‘enigma’ in the title echoed some of the titles of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico (1888-1978), also much admired by the proto-surrealist group, while its image of something wrapped and hidden can be seen as a forerunner of images of disguised or concealed objects by the Belgian surrealist René Magritte (1898-1967), as well as the later wrapped works of Christo (born 1935).
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jeffalessandrelli · 1 month
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Books appeared to be at the center of Mr. Navalny’s prison life, all the way until his death.
In a letter last April to Mr. Krasilshchik, Mr. Navalny explained that he preferred to be reading 10 books simultaneously and “switch between them.” He said he came to love memoirs: “For some reason I always despised them. But they’re actually amazing.”
He was frequently soliciting reading recommendations, but also dispensed them. Describing prison life to Mr. Krasilshchik in a July letter, he recommended nine books on the subject, including a 1,012-page, three-volume set by the Soviet dissident Anatoly Marchenko.
Mr. Navalny added in that letter that he had reread “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” the searing Alexander Solzhenitsyn novel about Stalin’s gulag. Having survived a hunger strike and gone months “in the state of ‘I want to eat,’” Mr. Navalny said he only now started to grasp the depravity of the Soviet-era labor camps.
“You start to realize the degree of horror,” he wrote.
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jeffalessandrelli · 1 month
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jeffalessandrelli · 1 month
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The first question I have about your book Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts concerns your relationship to yourself through the vehicle of the text, but also through psychoanalysis as it runs through the collection. Would you say your writing practice is also a way of considering yourself through different means?
When Archway Editions and I first started thinking about how to market Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts, my editor Naomi Falk and I came up with this term, fauxtofiction, like autofiction, but fake autofiction. There’s various Claire avatars in the book. There’s also a voice that my colleague Christopher Rey Pérez generously characterized in an email as feeling “close to the self” that I think a lot of the stories maintain. But the stories, even when they contain actual memories, are fiction. Memory is always a form of rewriting, and therefore a combination of experience and fantasy.
As I wrote Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts, I was in a six-year psychoanalytic treatment. That treatment involves refining and sweeping my unconscious. Pretty early on in the treatment, I said to my psychoanalyst, “You’re going to write a book. It will be called: Kind Mirrors, Ugly Ghosts.” My psychoanalyst is also a writer. I posited that my book would be her book. And now six years later, her book is my book.
Regardless as to what that Claire avatar does in the stories, my unconscious—the unthought known—guides the prose. I trust that my unconscious is more clarified than it was before I began the treatment, and that I’m more in touch with it—however in touch one can be with that unconscious wilderness. My namesake also means clear, and that etymology arises in some of the stories. I hope the clarity, or the claire-ity, of the work is autobiographical, if nothing else is.
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jeffalessandrelli · 1 month
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I empathize with that compunction to take out the phone and film everything the kids are up to. I’ve got to fight myself to keep the damn thing in my pocket, to be a part of what my kids are experiencing rather than just a passive documenter of it. I remember what you said in an interview you gave ten years ago, how “horrifying” it was that all these parents are obsessively recording their kids. 
“I was probably being dramatic when I said horrifying, but let me give you an example of what I meant. Here at Harvard there are nonstop tour buses. I saw a guy yesterday with a cell phone camera, striding along, recording everything as he walked. It was as if he didn’t have the time or the interest even to consider Widener Library or the chapel now as architectural presences, but maybe he’d catch up with them later on his cell phone. He was by himself, too, that was the strange thing: striding along, shooting this, shooting that, in a hurry to get to the next attraction that he also won’t fully see or appreciate. And I thought about that afterwards: what does it mean that he’s recording these images now, expecting to look at them later? What will they mean when he looks at them later? Will he think: I recorded that, good, now I don’t have to think about it, or will it occur to him, Wow, I was actually there and I didn’t take it in, didn’t sense that I was in this centuries-old important location. He was too busy recording to actually respond to or feel what he was seeing. That must happen a billion times a day, people recording images with no purpose, assuming that later they might want to look at them and reflect on them, but of course they never do because they’re too busy recording other images. It’s a real conundrum, much more so than when I gave that interview in 2004.” 
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jeffalessandrelli · 2 months
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2/11/24
About—
Richard Hell
Something there is about
the (very small amount of) information
upon which we base our thoughts
that Bruce Nauman breaches. 
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jeffalessandrelli · 2 months
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Cindy Sherman
“Untitled #474
2008
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jeffalessandrelli · 2 months
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What is the impulse behind art? “I have to be moved in some way,” the guitarist Michael Bloomfield said in 1968, explaining why he didn’t like the San Francisco bands of the time. “They just don’t move me enough. The Who moves me, their madness moves me. I like to be moved, be it by spectacle, be it by kineticism, be it by some throbbing on ‘Papa ooh mau mau’ as a chorus, a million times over.” And that, he said, was why he played.
Bloomfield was saying, in his way, what I am trying to say: whatever language is the language of your work, if I can move any­one else as that work moved me—as “Gimme Shelter,” Al Pacino’s voice in The Godfather, that painting by Titian, moved me from one place to another, from this place on earth to one three steps away, where the world looks not the same—if I can move anyone even a fraction as much as that, if I can spark the same sense of mystery, and awe, and surprise, as that, then I’m not wasting my time.
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