Blogs

Letters To A Young Poet - Rilke

For every teacher/student: This is Rainer Maria Rilke's letters to a young poet written from 1903-08.

http://www.carrothers.com/rilke_main.htm

"Letters To A Young Poet are ten letters written to a young man about to enter the German military. His name was Franz Kappus, he was 19 years old, and he wrote Rilke looking for guidance and a critique of some of his poems. Rilke was himself only 27 when the first letter was written. The resulting five year correspondence is a virtual owner's manual on what it is (and what is required) to be an artist and a person."

Stevie Schmiedel: With or Without Lacan? Becoming-Woman between the Language of Organs and the Anorganism of Language

Stevie Schmiedel writes: There seem to be two “camps,” two ways of reading Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s concept of “becoming-woman” as described in their Thousand Plateaus. My own reading of Deleuze and Guattari’s work confirms an anti-psychoanalytic and anti-dialectical understanding that turns against the psychoanalytic feminism presented by Luce Irigaray, and even against Judith Butler’s Foucauldian re-reading of Lacan with which she defines a political practice of parodic performances.

Ticket to ride: Claire Denis and the cinema of the body

In "Screening the past" Adrian Martin wrote a piece on "Claire Denis and the cinema of the body": "Recall any single film by Claire Denis, or any aggregate image of the mood and texture of her work as a whole: every thing, every body, is in motion.

This is not a Dylan movie

New York Times writer Robert Sullivan has published a great long piece on Todd Haynes new movie: "You could begin the story of Todd Haynes’s Dylan movie at the very beginning, about seven years ago, while Haynes was driving cross-country in his beat-up old Honda.

Faust/Faustus In Deptford

Faust/Faustus in Deptford, a 15-minute digital video directed by Leon Johnson, imagines Christopher Marlowe’s 16thC Faustus and Goethe’s 19thC Faust in the last few minutes of their lives as nomadic allies. This travelogue interweaves documentation of live performance and psycho-geographical drift, triangulating the unmapped distances between the Faustus legend, Christopher Marlowe's death in Deptford near the river Thames and Oscar Wilde's vandalized tomb in Paris.

Alain Badiou: Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art

I think everybody has the 15 theses, it is necessary, I think, for the talk. I'll comment about the theses and you can read them. I think the great question about contemporary art is how not to be Romantic. It's the great question and a very difficult one. More precisely, the question is how not to be a formalist-Romantic. Something like a mixture between Romanticism and formalism. On one side is the absolute desire for new forms, always new forms, something like an infinite desire. Modernity is the infinite desire of new forms.

Info about films week 42!

If you want some (short)information in Norwegian about the films being screened this week check out: http://www.nfi.no/cinemateket/ ! All you need to do is search for the title

Far from home - Chinese art in Berlin

Berlin has in recent years become a particular focal point for contemporary Chinese art. The journalist and writer Annett Busch has talked to some of the major galleries and art critics to find out why, and uncovered interesting trends in a fast changing scene.

Casting Shadows on the Visionary City

This is a close reading of "Bicycle thieves" by Millicent Marcus, the Mariano Di Vito Professor of Italian Studies and Director of the Center for Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.