Tag Archive Sjon

ByGD

Looking at the grave of the invisible man

invisiblegrave

Björk’s new album is deservedly getting a lot of attention, but there is another, much quieter release from an Icelandic artist – literally quieter. It’s not an album, it’s a poetry chapbook. Wait! Don’t go! I know what it sounds like. It sounds like photocopied, stapled pages sold out of a backpack on the sidewalk by attractive yet poorly groomed, self-absorbed youths. If you buy a copy (out of an impulse to support the arts, and greatness might appear anywhere, even in a homeless kid; or you want to help the homeless; or simply because you’re charmed by the poet’s combination of sincerity and homemade tattoos) inside the pages you will find verses without rhyme or meter or quite possibly, meaning. I know. That’s usually what it means. But I’m talking about Sjón here. Read More

ByGD

An Imposture of Writers at Iceland Writers Retreat

In the library at Bessistadur (the Icelandic White House)

In the library at Bessastadir (the Icelandic White House)

Ironically, there is no collective noun for writers. According to Google, James Lipton has suggested “a worship of writers.” Although Lipton is an expert on collective nouns (he’s written a book about it after all) the term hasn’t caught on. The very people who both enshrine common usage of words and mint new words where language provides none have for centuries neglected to establish a collective noun for their own work. Perhaps this is because writing is such solitary work. Read More

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A Hearing Trumpet for The Whispering Muse Pt 2

Leonora Carrington

Leonora Carrington

This is part two of the story of my recent foray into Surrealist fiction. Read Part One here.

Suddenly I remembered – Leonora Carrington was Remedios Varo’s best friend! (Okay, I confess. I googled her.)

A long time ago in a galaxy far away, I became a member of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. I never made it to DC to visit the museum, but the member materials acquainted me with Varo, a Spanish surrealist who lived in Mexico. Her life was every bit as shockingly bohemian as that of her contemporary Frida Kahlo, but her art more closely resembled Hieronymus Bosch. According to my special-ordered copy of Janet Kaplan’s biography of Varo, she and Carrington

established an association between women’s traditional roles and magical acts of transformation…stimulated by the Surrealist belief in ‘occultation of the Marvelous’ and by wide reading in witchcraft, alchemy, sorcery, Tarot, and magic.

They collaborated on plays, constructed elaborate hats, and victimized their famous art world friends with performance art/pranks that sometimes made their way into each other’s painting and writing.

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ByGD

A Hearing Trumpet for The Whispering Muse Pt. 1

Lead SkyAs we trickled into the room our yoga teacher commented on the cold. “Yes, and it’s so dark,” one woman replied, “It’s like the sun never even rose today.” Leaden skies are commonplace in Seattle, and December can be forgiven for freezing temperatures, but her words, like the echo of a prophesy, filled me with foreboding. What if the earth’s magnetic poles really had begun to shift, triggering a new ice age and plunging the world into darkness?

How did I, scientifically trained product of a Jesuit education, come to harbor such dark fantasies? It wasn’t just the sheep heads mysteriously scattered in my neighborhood the night before. No, the root of my unease stretched much deeper. It all started, as such things do, at the Nordic Heritage Museum.

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