Please let this be as good as it seems. There is nothing as good in life as a quarterly or bi-annual mens fashion magazine with a good view on art. The fact that we get new titles two weeks after the rest of the world here in Stockholm will probably cause my death later in life. From the people of Wonderland, with external design I believe.
Every Sunday we have a dinner for our friends. We bake bread, drink wine, and cook. We talk about nice and interesting things. The word has evidently spread and now there is a magazine that wants to do a story about our Sundays. Ha ha. I’m going to dress up like the Great Gatsby and stand very straight with a glass of champagne in my hand all night and say strange things on literature. Made up things like; The impression Proust made on the world has never been about literature, it´s all about folding your pants properly. He was a pioneer on that you know. Have you not heard? I wrote a paper on it at the university.
Drinking René Barbier and baking Walnut bread. Isn´t that a worthy ending of this week?
I am usually not that keen on things that students do because they are students, like all the silly partytraditions and revues and things like that. This is however shockingly brilliant. I was going through an old used-bookstore that has a lot of old fashionmagazines from the 50´s when I found a big pile of beautiful magazines. I called for the clerk to explain and it turned out to be an old publication, still being printed though, from a Swedish university. It seems Pontus Hultén, the man who pretty much made the Modern Museum of Art in Stockholm, had a finger in it in the 50´s. Anyway, it´s brilliant in layout and typography.
GÃ¥sblandaren, autumn 1954. They say a part of the collage is from Marcel Duchamp.
An old friend who is a psychologist once told me that something happened to me when I was young and that it manifests itself today in the way I manically sort my things (desk, bookshelves, closet etc). Looking at my desktop makes me feel that she was right.
PS. Corky got new shoes today, with built in counter and everything. Its already 2008.
If darling Corky would have been living in Rue Caulaincourt around 1910 she probably would have looked something like this. Now that she is living in Stockholm she looks more like the right one. Its a rather nice thing to do on a Sunday in the autumn, to sit in a studio and paint a portrait.
Fantastic interpretation. See and listen here.
Björn Wetterling is throwing a big party tomorrow to celebrate his birthday and I still haven´t had the time to buy a new suit. Damn.
Oh dear. The reply is as long as it is well written. I might have forgotten that dear Corky has a degree in English literature. I will respond in the fields of my expertise, lets broaden the battlefield.
Lets take a look at the premises. Erika seems to be implying that a biography is not a story. Now my professor in logic at the University always said that one must interpret an argument in a way that makes it as strong as possible. I will therefore conclude that she is talking about narrative and/or possibly the degree of truth implied by the word ’story’. With that in mind we might be right in assuming that the reference to her recent storytelling as stories might imply that the content of those stories are false, if stories at all can be false. It might however be just as right to assume that F. Scott is making a false statement in saying that ‘Unloved women have no biographies– they have histories.’
Another perspective in which we might see this is to question the reality which the story, biographical or not, is reflecting. There is of course the possibility that in writing about that autumn, the narrator felt unloved, and judging by Fitzgeralds quote draws the conclusion that it must be a history on pure semantics. This would of course raise the question about reality. Does it matter if the narrator felt unloved if she, perhaps without knowing about it, actually was loved. Ask McNaughton, he might know.
The battle is on. Corky responded with long lost tears and autumn walks, high society parties and broken hearts, and a rather large portion of semantics. There is however a misdirected logical branch nestled into your logical three Corky. I am of course a Coop and not a Windom merely because of the fact that I was the stealer of a heart, and not the one stolen from. Ergo, the lost tears and autumn walks belong in a biography and not a history.
Me and Erika took a walk last night. When passing a videostore showing The Fox and the hound pt 2 Erika looks really sad. And yes, the first part is one of the saddest movies I have ever seen. She looked at me with sad eyes and said ‘thats like if we broke up and you got me thrown out of Spybar’.
Dear Corky, or Erika really, is on plane home from Paris, hence the intense posting on this blog. One of my biggest interests at the moment are literature from Ireland concerning the catholic church, homosexuality, sin, judgement and all of that. Basically James Joyce with friends. Now the fantastic thing is that Corky, or Erika, wrote a paper on that at the University when she was studying English literature. So I’m in the sofa reading intensely for hours, reading originals, translations interpretations thinking I’m rather clever in my analyses. And she just smiles at me without saying anything and I know that she knows everything I’m saying and more, but she lets me think I’m sort of clever and that is one of the things I really love about her. She knows more than most but never rub that in. At least not in an impolite manner.
I found a first edition on J.D. Salingers The Catcher in the Rye a while ago which I bought out of sentimental reasons. Who didn’t love it in highschool I mean. I re-read it this afternoon and is in a state of chock. I really dislike the narrative. I mean really. I cant even finish it. I left it thirty pages from the end. The book itself is still brilliant I suppose, considering the style and when it was written. I think ill give it a rest for a while and then give it another try. A possible reason might be that I read John McGaherns The Dark just before, which is dead serious and in a quite different tone. It makes Salingers feel sort of immature, which come to think of it, is what it is supposed to be.
A funny note on The Catcher in the Rye is that it still makes me feel uneven drinking Tom Collins during the winterseason. I actually only do it when I’m visiting my father.
I’m going to invite Corky to a little battle on quotes since she is reading Zelda Fitzgerald while I’m reading F. Scott Fitzgerald. I am not at all saying that I agree to what was happening between them, or favouring one over the other, I just feel that a little drama would be nice. So I’m going to start with F. Scott from The beautiful and damned:
‘Unloved women have no biographies– they have histories.’
A pretty hard quote in a way. When reading it out of context like this one easily assumes that it is negative, it could be of course. But couldn’t it be positive as well? Guess its all about the perspective.
The despair. When thinking about it is probably not that related to the fact that galleryvisitors are reluctant to discuss, or draw conclusions from discussions, on modernism. A wild guess could be that I haven’t had a day of for month. Not really. I have always spent a lot of time finding references through books, exhibitions, films and such but lately I have been short out of time and that, I conclude, is the source for this despair. Because of that I will do nothing tonight but have a bath, a glass of wine and a long session with my old friend Dante Alighieri. We have been close friends since I was fourteen, me and Dante, and now I have started to read the English interpretations having read all the swedish ones many times. Must say I am a little annoyed about Virgil, who is called Virgilius in swedish. The name Virgil feels a bit to modern, that’s all.
This means I will have to postpone writing dear Kyle an e-mail about a shoot I was supposed to write tonight. A shoot that will probably be the best I have ever done. I have a great feeling about it. And yes, I will take a couple of days of to read up on references about it. And Kyle, Ill mail tomorrow.
Promised a friend to spend the day in an exhibition of his. I had a long discussion on modernism in art with a couple of visitors. As it turned out, people seem more eager to have a discussion around the subject rather than to try to come to any conclusions. How much can there be said about a subject without actually saying anything? Endless referencing of course. The feeling, I think, is despair.