tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-54259510740722724532024-02-07T14:23:14.716-05:00Beard & Bicycle“Snapshot photography, comparative study of religions, folklore relative to various amatory and superstitious practices, contemplation of the celestial constellations.”aileverte :: Ela Kotkowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05024805730684431752noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5425951074072272453.post-45236701952915810352016-08-23T13:08:00.001-04:002016-08-23T13:09:16.369-04:00An attempt at an exegesis of an Amazon book review of Robert G. Wetzel's Limnological Analyses, 3rd edn.
The review, posted on November 12, 2014, and long unnoticed by readers browsing the website, reads:
I didn't buy this book
As soon as I've read it, with bated breath, from
beginning to end, I understood that it is a piece of critical writing
deeply misunderstood by all readers, including myself. In a feat of
concision, the author liminally comments on the science of limnology the
way aileverte :: Ela Kotkowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05024805730684431752noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5425951074072272453.post-8353640881506985062016-07-23T17:48:00.000-04:002016-07-23T18:18:16.518-04:00Evan Dara's Lost Scrapbook, or the art of listening to static
In Wim Wenders's Wings of Desire, there is a scene in which the angel Damiel (portrayed by Bruno Ganz) flies over the city listening to people's thoughts: a small snippet unlocks an entire life. The reader of Evan Dara's novel might feel a bit like that: inhabiting multiple consciousnesses one after another, although perhaps without all the intimate knowledge afforded to an angel. No, there aileverte :: Ela Kotkowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05024805730684431752noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5425951074072272453.post-4951752385728121532015-03-06T14:04:00.003-05:002015-03-06T14:15:13.846-05:00Experience of absenceThis entry in my long-neglected blog is prompted by Terry Pitt's blog post, Modiano's Dora Bruder, with & without images which made me think again about the status of photographs in the novel. A complete set of photographs was published for the first time in 2012 in the Cahier de l'Herne no. 98 devoted to Patrick Modiano. The new English edition of Dora Bruder (2014) apparently containsaileverte :: Ela Kotkowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05024805730684431752noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5425951074072272453.post-14054108101407155132013-12-25T15:36:00.003-05:002013-12-29T19:47:26.624-05:00Translating, ruins
I came upon this book the way one comes upon one's own reflection in the mirror and views it as other. Or perhaps the other way around: seeing another's reflection and mistaking it for one's own. To talk about oneself when talking about a book might be a fallacy of interpretation, yet the constellation of ideas mapped out here, and thinkers invited to dialog, so closely matches what I have aileverte :: Ela Kotkowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05024805730684431752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5425951074072272453.post-36243274530230726712013-12-13T00:41:00.001-05:002014-01-25T13:10:25.850-05:00Constellation of imagesRené Char shares with visual artists a love for the gesture of writing, drawing, a love for the line traced by hand on paper. His poems often re-appear, in handwritten form, in his correspondence, on painted pebbles, or in what we call today "artist's books," often one-of-a-kind. This beautiful Trousseau de Moulin Premier, which I picked up a few years ago at Librairie Compagnie, rue des Écoles, aileverte :: Ela Kotkowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05024805730684431752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5425951074072272453.post-81975280847660724802013-12-05T16:00:00.001-05:002013-12-05T20:32:42.101-05:00Truth is a stranger
"Ceci n'est pas un récit imaginaire. Tout ce que j'ai écrit s'est réellement passé, les personnages de cette histoire ont réellement existé." / "This story is not an invention. Everything I have written down did really happen; the protagonists of this story did really exist." This assertion, the author's plea to be believed (curiously absent from the English edition) is contained in the opening aileverte :: Ela Kotkowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05024805730684431752noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5425951074072272453.post-80354995625564566852013-11-30T21:52:00.000-05:002013-12-05T20:33:20.587-05:00A loop, a noose, and a plot
If one were to plot the narrative topography of Paweł Huelle's mercedes-benz (in the original edition, published by Znak, 2001, the title and the author's name appear in lower case), one would come up with a coiling serpentine squiggle, or perhaps a childlike doodle -- if you imagine a three-year-old, her tongue sticking out, diligently applying a crayon to paper, with satisfaction retracingaileverte :: Ela Kotkowskahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/05024805730684431752noreply@blogger.com0