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Petite enveloppe urbaine no. 19
(Added 18 September 2011)
Image: Double page spread from Petite enveloppe urbaine no. 19, Amanuensis, 2011
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On April 9, Leisure Projects received the following intriguing email.
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Dear Leisure Projects (Meredith and Susannah),
I hope this email finds you well!
This is an invitation for you to contribute to the Petite enveloppe urbaine No. 19. The PEU is a small-run publishing project, ongoing since 1998 issued by the Centre de recherche urbaine de Montreal. Each issue typically assembles projects around a specific theme and is launched in a city related to that theme. Each issue is published under Creative Commons in the interest of a free and shared culture.
The theme for No. 19 is AMANUENSIS
The location is the PRELINGER LIBRARY, San Francisco
ALL YOU HAVE TO DO IS SEND ME ONE SENTENCE. Something that has been on your mind lately. Don’t think to hard about it.
Read Petite enveloppe urbaine no. 19
Restless Reader: she was aware of a strange woman inside herself, a woman wakened up and imperious.
(Added 21 March 2011)
Image: The First Lady Chatterley, D.H. Lawrence, 1973 Penguin edition
She ran into the park, running with impatience, as if running away from something. She recognized the power that passion had assumed over her. She felt strange, different from herself. It was all very well entering on these voyages of new and passionate adventure, but they carried you from yourself. — D.H. Lawrence, The First Lady Chatterley (The first version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover) first published in 1944
This is post seven of the “Restless Reader” a Leisure bibliography of restlessness in literature.
Read Restless Reader: she was aware of a strange woman inside herself, a woman wakened up and imperious.
Restless Reader: I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know.
(Added 20 March 2011)
Image: Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys, Penguin edition, 1980. Smile Please, Jean Rhys, Penguin edition, 1981.
I hated the mountains and the hills, the rivers and the rain. I hated the sunsets of whatever colour, I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know. I hated its indifference and the cruelty which was part of its loveliness. Above all I hated her. For she belonged to the magic and the loveliness. She had left me thirsty and all my life would be thirst and longing for what I had lost before I found it.
So we rode away and left it — the hidden place. Not for me and not for her. I’d look after that. She’s far along the road now.
Very soon she’ll join all the others who know the secret and will not tell it. Or cannot. Or try and fail because they do not know enough. — Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea, First published 1966.
This is post six of the “Restless Reader” a Leisure bibliography of restlessness in literature.
Read Restless Reader: I hated its beauty and its magic and the secret I would never know.
Restless Reader: A little while ago, when I picked them, they were living flowers.
(Added 29 January 2011)
Image: Simone Beauvoir, Les Belles Images, Fontana Modern Novels, 1979.
“Laurence thought of that king who turned everything he touched into gold and whose little daughter became a splendid metal doll. Everything she touched became a picture. With wooden paneling you combine the elegance of town with all the poetry of the forest. Through the leaves her eye caught the black run of the river: a ship went by, searching the banks with its white glare. The light splashed against the windows and suddenly it lit up a pair of entwined lovers: a picture of the past for me, who am the picture of their loving future, with the children whose existence they guess asleep in the bedrooms at the back. The children made their way into a hollow tree and there they found themselves in an enchanting room all paneled in natural wood. Follow up on this idea.
She had always been a picture. Dominique had seen to that, Dominique whose childhood had been fascinated by pictures that were so different from her own life — a life that had been obstinately directed, with the whole of her intelligence and her immense energy, at filling the gap between the two….” p.18-19
This is post five of the “Restless Reader” a Leisure bibliography of restlessness in literature.
Read Restless Reader: A little while ago, when I picked them, they were living flowers.
Restless Reader: she wanted the courage and the power
(Added 10 January 2011)
Image: Alice Munro, Who Do You Think You Are?, Macmillan of Canada, 1989
She had another feeling as well, not envy but a shaky sort of longing (…) She wanted to fill up in that magical, releasing way, transform herself; she wanted the courage and the power.
Alice Munro, Who Do You Think You Are?, 1978. (Macmillan of Canada, 1989, p. 200)
This is post four of the “Restless Reader” a Leisure bibliography of restlessness in literature.
Read Restless Reader: she wanted the courage and the power
Sally Potter's The Gold Diggers (1983)
(Added 17 December 2010)
Sally Potter : I see this film as a musical describing a female quest. Making it has demanded asking the same questions during the working process as the film endeavours to ask about the connections between gold, money and women; about the illusion of female powerlessness; about the actual search for gold and the inner search for gold; about imagery in the unconscious and its relationship to the power of cinema; looking at childhood and memory and seeing the history of cinema itself as our collective memory of how we see ourselves and how we as women are seen. Working with two female central roles meant continuously asking how can I build/find characters and images of women that will serve our intelligence and mirror the complexities of our struggles.
(…) In the making of the film I used to go back, over and over again, to a remarkable phrase of Foucault about the metaphysics of money… The relationship between contemplation of the cosmos and knowledge of the glittering metals.
The marks of similitude, because they are a guide to knowledge, are addressed to the perfection of heaven; the signs of exchange, because they satisfy desire, are sustained by the dark, dangerous and accursed glitter of metal. An equivocal glitter, for it reproduces in the depths of the earth that other glitter that sings at the far end of the night; it resides there like an inverted promise of happiness and, because metal resembles the stars, the knowledge of all these perilous treasures is at the same time knowledge of the world. And thus reflection upon wealth has its pivot in the broadest speculation upon the cosmos, just as, inversely, profound knowledge of the order of the world must lead to the secret of metals and the possession of wealth. (Foucault)
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- From an interview between Pam Cook and Sally Potter in the chapter, “The Gold Diggers”, from Screening the Past: Memory and Nostalgia in Cinema by Pam Cook (2005, Routledge).
more after the jump…
Read Sally Potter's The Gold Diggers (1983)
Restless Reader: A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her
(Added 16 December 2010)
Image: The Awakening, Kate Chopin, Washington Square Press, 1988
Edna Pontellier could not have told why, wishing to go to the beach with Robert, she should in the first place have declined, and in the second place have followed in obedience to one of the two contradictory impulses which impelled her.
A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her, – the light which, showing the way, forbids it.
At that early period it served but to bewilder her. It moved her to dreams, to thoughtfulness, to the shadowy anguish which had overcome her the midnight when she had abandoned herself to tears.
In short, Mrs. Pontellier was beginning to realise her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her. This may seem like a ponderous weight of wisdom to descend upon the soul of a young woman of twenty-eight – perhaps more wisdom than the Holy Ghost is usually pleased to vouchsafe to any woman.
But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!
Kate Chopin, The Awakening , 1899. (Washington Square Press, 1998, p. 21)
This is post three of the “Restless Reader” a Leisure bibliography of restlessness in literature.
Read Restless Reader: A certain light was beginning to dawn dimly within her