Writings, Reviews, Cultural Criticism
I think it was Jean Mohr who recommended that all serious photographers produce a self-portrait at least once a month. I can’t locate the source of the quote, so I don’t know the reasons for his recommendation. However, I can come up with some reasons on my own.
Although The War of the Worlds, by H. G. Wells, concerns an alien invasion by Martians, it is nevertheless relevant in the context of a pandemic. Microscopic pathogens figure in the plot.
Canada may end up adopting the province of Québec’s motto: je me souviens. In years to come, we will say to ourselves: I remember the day America betrayed us.
Ma used an agent named Helga Heimlich who showed up one morning to make sure I cleaned everything proper. There’d be no cockroaches, no bed bugs, and no half-smoked doobies on the balcony, not on her watch.
In the human imagination, a disease is never just a disease, a plague is never just a plague. Humans cannot help but ascribe meanings that lie far beyond the medical descriptions of these events.
A standard question during a psychiatric intake interview is: Do you ever feel that the people around you can read your mind? I wonder if our cultural habits have rendered this question obsolete.
Whenever I embrace the future, there inevitably follows a feeling of disappointment as I discover that the future is just the past wrapped in a shiny new package.
The protagonist goes by the name Louise. I don’t know much about Louise that isn’t obvious: she is a black woman in her mid-thirties. She may be a lesbian.
When power seeks to exploit disaster, we look to the arts for our prophetic voices, those who will ground authority by exposing folly and drawing us back to the centre. In White Noise, DeLillo does this through satire.
Near the end of Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell’s memoir of his service in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell confesses that he was not above resorting to graffiti.
when Christ blew out the candle
darkness hit the road
three days down on my knees
fumbling for matches from Joe’s
What will be the longterm consequences of this pandemic. Will it permanently alter the way we gather in public? Will public authorities take greater care to manage crowd control? Will photographers ever again be able to follow Capa’s dictum as we try to document what happens in the streets of our cities?
To amuse myself during this period of Covid-19 isolation, I have started to work through a reading list of plague-based writings starting with Albert Camus’ 1947 novel, The Plague (La Peste).
In his 1947 novel, The Plague, Albert Camus writes of an epidemic, probably bubonic plague, that decimates the inhabits of the French Algerian town, Oran. One of the curious observations he makes is that the “[p]lague had killed all colors”.
The following commentary considers After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, by George Steiner and asks whether it has anything to say about non-verbal forms of communication, most notably photography.