Surreal inspiration

May 25, 2010 - Leave a Response

“Every morning, upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dali, and I ask myself, wonderstruck, what prodigious thing will he do today, this Salvador Dali.”

Salvador Dali

*

Jeff Koons after having met with Dali, talking with his pleasant, charming, slow voice…:

“I thought, I can do this too, art can be a complete way of life to me, I can spend all my time doing it, you know, I really had a sense of possibility. I think Dali very much was about the EXPANSION of horizon, and of possibility… (giving the listeners time to take that in – expansion of horizon, and of possibility, what life can be, if one think what life was for Dali, lobster phone, Mae West’s lips as a sofa, white house by the blue sea, big windows, dreamy landscapes, the vividness of dreams, self-indulgence…) a great symbol of the avant-garde.”

Categorized in Poetry, ramble, Surrealism and Uncategorized

Weekend

May 16, 2010 - One Response

“Christianity is the refusal of self-knowledge.. it’s the death of language.”

Categorized in Film, Godard, Poetry and Uncategorized

Pierrot Le Fou

May 16, 2010 - One Response

Ferdinand: “Then why are you sad?”

Marianne: “Because you speak to me with words, and I look at you with feelings.”

Categorized in Film, Godard, Poetry and Uncategorized

inspired by Godard’s “passion for expression”

May 16, 2010 - Leave a Response

“One must alway be sensitive to the intoxication of life.”

– from Two or Three Things I Know About Her. Her = Paris

Categorized in Film, Godard, Poetry and Uncategorized

society of the spectacle

May 11, 2010 - Leave a Response

Inspired by Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle, I deactivated my Facebook account this morning. Realizing that Facebook is  an extreme example of Debord’s thesis that “all that was once directly lived has become mere representation”. And that was only in 1967! .. so now I’m without the representation of Facebook and it feels liberating. I’m watching Godard movies and reading about situationism – it is time for exams and revising and the module is 20th century avant-gardes. Inspiring. Today, Duras Hiroshima mon amour is on my plan. Love it. Very sad, very beautiful, very powerful. This is my lunch break. Drinking smoothie with kiwi and apples. It is green.

Categorized in Film, ramble and Uncategorized

Et eksperiment

April 13, 2010 - One Response

Nå gjør jeg et eksperiment. Jeg skriver på norsk og ser hva som skjer. Norsk er språket mitt, det er på norsk jeg tenker drømmer føler, og likevel prøver jeg å studere litteratur og kreativ skriving på engelsk. Det er forvirrende. Jeg tror at på sikt vil det være veldig givende på mange måter og når man er et skrivende vesen så er ingen lærdom unyttig, i det hele tatt når man er et vesen, et pustende vesen, et levende vesen, et vesen som åpner og lukker seg, et vesen som sover og drømmer, et vesen som prøver seg på et Zen sinn, begynners sinn, i sin tilnærming til verden, altså så lenge man er et vesen, så er ingen lærdom unyttig. Men for øyeblikket er det forvirrende. Da jeg begynte for snart to år siden, så tenkte jeg at kanskje ender jeg opp med å skrive på engelsk. Men, det jeg syns jeg har lært, i tillegg til mange spennende fag og flere emnevalg innenfor litteratur, moderne litteratur, avantgarde litteratur, poesi og emosjon, psykoanalysen i litteratur, feministisk litteratur, kvinnelige forfattere fra Nord Amerika, amerikanske ekspatrioter, altså mange flere emner enn jeg kunne blitt tilbudt på noe universitet i Norge, også har jeg truffet mennesker jeg ikke ville truffet om jeg ble i Norge, i det hele tatt har jeg dratt avgårde sånn som jeg ville og gjort ting som jeg ikke trodde jeg ville gjøre og kanskje til og med et par ting jeg hadde til hensikt å gjøre, men uansett, det jeg virkelig syns jeg har lært verdien av, det er det å ha et morsmål. Morsmål. Norsk. Det språket jeg vokste opp med, det språket jeg fortsatt skriver dagboken min på og drømmer elsker føler husker minnes assosierer de første luktene av vår og dessuten smaken av kanel, det er på norsk. Mønstrene inni hjernen. Symmetrien eller usymmetrien i min ubevissthet, de ni lagene under overflaten ved Freuds berømte isfjell. Og, som skrivende vesen med fokus på det emosjonelle, intime, nære, personlige, utleverende, eller kanskje ikke så utleverende, men alltid, alltid, intimitet. Intimitet. Det er viktig for meg. Og da blir språket mitt viktig for meg. Det har jeg lært nå. Så skal jeg altså bli i England et år til, jeg skal også tilbake nå snart for å ta eksamener for dette året, jeg har essay å skrive og jeg har tenkt til å blogge videre på engelsk. Men nå gjorde jeg likevel et eksperiment.

Categorized in norsk and ramble

the first days of spring..

April 11, 2010 - Leave a Response

… this weekend, it really has been the first days of spring, also in Norway. I sat in the sunlight in Bergen yesterday, eating ice-cream and collecting freckles on the tip of my nose. Today I had a run by the sea and lay down on the veranda when I got back home, in my blue bikini, I love tanning and now I have a mark from the bikini on my skin. Like it. I’m also reading a Norwegian book at the moment, Geir Gulliksen’s Våkner om  natten og vil noe annet, Wake up in the night and want something else, or something like that, not sure if I should use the ing-form or not, it could be both, waking up/wanting something else, or just wake up/want something else. It depends on the situation. The line is also used inside the book, as a part of a whole sentence with the subject there as well, it’s not about the narrating “I” but about the character called “E”. I like the book. It’s a novel written like a diary. The “I” is the author but he is also someone else, someone created in fiction. It reminds me of something I want to achieve with my writing, something about existentialism and questioning the distinctions between the private and the public, or questioning what is true, or not true.

I feel lazy after the hours I spent in the sun, lazy and content. Had a nice dinner with my family this evening, my dad took out the grill and we ate outside on the veranda for the first time this year. I have been writing on the Cummings essay after that but think I’ll stop writing and continue reading now. And a cup of tea.

Categorized in ramble

the way of the cat

April 8, 2010 - Leave a Response

One more quote from Alan Watts’ “Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen”, about “the ancient dispute between salvation by works and salvation by faith, or between what the Hindus called the ways of the monkey and the cat”:

“The cat – appropriately enough – follows the effortless way (…) thus for beat Zen there must be no effort, no discipline, no artificial striving to attain satori or to be anything but what one is.” … the way of the cat!

I love the idea and I often behave like my cat, Tussi, and just lie down around in the house, in front of the fire, in bed, on the floor, but I’m not so cool or so Beat Zenish as Kerouac, I can’t just dig life and be cool with it, I rather strive for the satori and do lots of things that I think is necessary before I can lie down like the cat, so I guess I’m a bit like a monkey as well, or maybe like a girl, an “I” or a “you”, that is always a possibility and I think it’s ok, as long as I’m not like what Cummings defines as “mostpeople”, I much rather be just “i” without the capital letter, as long as i can sometimes be not just “you & i” but “we”

Categorized in lazyness, ramble and Zen

Noah and the Whale

April 8, 2010 - Leave a Response

I’m also in love with Noah and the Whale and they’re coming to Parkteatret in Oslo 22nd of April and I’m going there to see them and I’m so excited and here are my favourite songs right now, from The First Days of Spring, it’s a break up album and maybe pathetic but I like it, I think the lyrics are quite good, and it’s about spring again, and a new chance, we all need it, don’t we?

*

Slow glass

We’ll sing love songs about heartbreak and grief
Sing it’s not just music but the pains not brief
We sing, how your love is like a knife to the back
Well I was stabbed and bleeding
but still begging for attack

But I was looking through slow, slow glass
looking through slow
slow glass

Well I heard you been singing
Well I was, what I am
Well I never tried to change you, honey I’m your biggest fan
and I loved you back then
but I don’t recognize you now

Yeah in fact we’re almost strangers and I don’t know how,
but I’ve been looking through slow, slow glass
Yeah I’ve been looking though slow, slow glass

*

The First Days Of Spring :
It’s the first day of spring
And my life is starting over again
The trees grow, the river flows
And its water will wash away my sins
For I do believe that everyone has one chance
To fuck up their lives
But like a cut down tree, I will rise again
And I’ll be bigger and stronger than ever before

For I’m still here hoping that one day you may come back
For I’m still here hoping that one day you may come back

There’s a hope in every new seed
And every flower that grows upon the earth
And though I love you, and you know that
Well I no longer know what that’s worth
But I’ll come back to you in a year or so
And I’ll rebuild, be ready to become
Oh the person, you believed in
Oh the person, that you used to love

For I’m still here hoping that one day you may come back
For I’m still here hoping that one day you may come back

*

Categorized in music

“10”

April 8, 2010 - Leave a Response

I’m in love with this poem. I read it every day and feel that yes it is spring and yes I’m alive again and yes it’s no cliché cause when Cummings writes it, it’s no longer a cliché but a cliché with a twist and a cliché with a messed up syntax and it’s fresh and I fall in love with every line and word and empty space. I also experiment with baking bread nowadays, one of the recipes suggested that I placed a tray with water in the oven to make the bread better more succulent and sourdoughish but that was a failure, I had to throw that bread in the bin. This week I was more lucky and baked two nice Danish rye breads with a flour mix that I got in Copenhagen when I was there over easter, Copenhagen was lovely and springy, I got a polkadot dress and Siri Hustved’t What I loved which I have been meaning to read for some years now and I now consider moving to Copenhagen sometime. And while the breads where in the oven I lay down on the kitchen floor and read some more Cummings and Stevens, Wallace Stevens, “Six Significant Landscapes” and “Thirteen ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (fantastic), since I’m writing an essay about the two of them, about poetry and emotion, about the down to earth sense of spirituality in Cummings and Stevens, about Zen, or something that seems a bit like Zen to me, together with a bit of Heidegger and Suzuki and Wittgenstein, I put them all down in one big recipe and try to bake a bread. According to Allan Watts you can be Beat Zen, Square Zen or simply Zen and I think I’m something in between or none of them, but according to Watts that is ok, because, as the great T’ang master Lin-chi says:

“In Buddhism there is no place for using effort. Just be ordinary and nothing special. Eat your food, move your bowels, pass water, and when you’re tired go and lie down. The ignorant will laugh at me, but the wise will understand.”

Watts also says that Kerouac is “too self-conscious, too subjective, and too strident to have the flavor of Zen”, but that is also ok.

So here is the Cummings poem that I’m in love with, it is in the collection “73 poems” and it is called “10”:

*

“because it’s

Spring

thingS

dare to do people

(& not

the other way

round) because it

‘s A

pril

Lives lead their own

persons(in

stead

of everybodyelse’s)but

what’s wholly

marvellous my

Darling

is that you &

i are more than you

& i (be

ca

us

e It’s we)

*

Categorized in e. e. cummings, Poetry and ramble

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