ellefsens

Sommerferie! En uke offline.

SC om Simple Minds her.

Hans Petter Blads Det oseaniske anmeldt her.

Min artikkel om Johan Harstads forfatterskap fra Vagant 2/09 kan nå leses på internettet, nærmere bestemt her.

Andre oppdateringer i Vagant Europa:

Som et supplement til Vagants temanummer om RIKDOM (ute nå!) presenterer vi tre netteksklusive tekster:

Simen Hagerup: Retten til å lese i den digitale redistribusjonens tidsalder

Walter Benjamin: Kapitalismen som religion

Nicolas Truong: Liten håndbok i politisk opprør Om det franske tidsskriftet Lignes’ temanummer om vold og politikk

… og fra bladet:

Aksel Kielland: Å investere i samtiden Om 2000-tallets norske filmproduksjon

Cathrine Knudsen: Resort

My kind of weather report.

«På dette tidspunkt var det, vi for første gang bemærkede en lidenskabelig interesse for dyr hos min fader. Det kunne såmænd i førstningen både opfattes som en jægers eller kunstners lidenskab, men den stak måske også dybere, var en skabnings rent zoologiske sympati for sine medskabninger, selv hvor disse repræsenterede andre livsformer, og blev således en eksperimenteren i endnu ikke afprøvede tilværelsesregistre. Først i sin sidste fase tog sagen denne uhyggelige, forvirrende, dybt syndige og naturstridige drejning, som det er bedre ikke at drage frem i lyset.»

Bruno Schulz, Kanelbutikkerne

«en eksperimenteren i endnu ikke afprøvede tilværelsesregistre»! For fantastisk.

Louis Menand om Creative Writing:

This skepticism is widely shared, and one way for creative-writing programs to handle it is simply to concede the point. The University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop is the most renowned creative-writing program in the world. Sixteen Pulitzer Prize winners and three recent Poet Laureates are graduates of the program. But the school’s official position is that the school had nothing to do with it. “The fact that the Workshop can claim as alumni nationally and internationally prominent poets, novelists, and short story writers is, we believe, more the result of what they brought here than of what they gained from us,” the Iowa Web site explains. Iowa merely admits people who are really good at writing; it puts them up for two years; and then, like the Wizard of Oz, it gives them a diploma. “We continue to look for the most promising talent in the country,” the school says, “in our conviction that writing cannot be taught but that writers can be encouraged.”
…
Kay Boyle once published a piece arguing that “all creative-writing programs ought to be abolished by law.” She taught creative writing for sixteen years at San Francisco State.
…
Mark McGurl doesn’t mention Cassill’s speech in his book about creative-writing programs and American fiction, “The Program Era” (Harvard; $35), but it fits his argument perfectly. The argument is that teaching creative writing should always be a scandal, since it’s a scandal that suits everyone. It allows people in creative-writing departments to feel that, unlike their colleagues in the traditional academic disciplines, they are not cogs in a knowledge machine; and it allows the university to regard itself as what McGurl calls a “difference engine,” devoted to producing original people as well as original research.
…
Academic creative-writing programs are, as McGurl puts it, examples of “the institutionalization of anti-institutionality.” That’s why institutions love them. They are the outside contained on the inside.
…
A second thing that “The Program Era” does well, and sometimes entertainingly, is to treat the world of creative writing as an ant farm, in which the writer-ants go about busily executing the tasks they have been programmed for. Writing is a technology, after all, and there is a sense in which human beings who write can be thought of as writing machines. They get tooled in certain ways, and the creative-writing program is a means of tooling. But McGurl treats creative writing as an ant farm where the ants are extremely interesting. He never reduces writers to unthinking products of a system. They are thinking products of a system.
…
Nabokov taught a course on the novel at Cornell, in which Pynchon was a student, but he never taught creative writing. Harvard once considered hiring Nabokov to teach literature; Roman Jakobson, then a professor of linguistics there, is supposed to have asked whether the university was also prepared to hire an elephant to teach zoology.

«Takket være avantgardens montager og assemblager sejrer pengeøkonomien i en sådan grad, at den ikke blot betragter sin verden som et resultat af en lang historie, men som den primitive betragter skoven: som sit naturlige miljø. Det er ifølge Tafuri avantgardens tragiske situation: den udfører kapitalens arbejde; der er en ubevidst forbindelse mellem avantgarden og kapitalen, hvor avantgarden på én gang sublimerer og bekræfter kapitalens nivellerende bevægelser.»

Mikkel Bolt, Avantgardens selvmord

«The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age. [...] That glimpse, like all dread glimpses of truth, flashed out from an accidental piecing together of separated things – in this case an old newspaper item and the notes of a dead professor.»

H.P. Lovecraft, «The Call of Cthulhu»

«I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopedia.»

J.L. Borges, «Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius»

Følg Audiatur bokhandel på Twitter.