torsdag den 28. januar 2016

"February has taken my wife and daughter and is destroying the town, I said. I'm sorry. We too feel an overwhelming sadness. We too cry more than we laugh."
- Shane Jones, Light Boxes

Vil februar gøre mig den tjeneste at være mild og smuk netop det år hvor jeg skal skrive speciale?


søndag den 17. januar 2016

Death and Desire. Dissertation prep.

To dance with joy in the forest. Umberto Eco, Interpretation and Overinterpretation. On the syndrome of the secret in western culture, sacred text, Pars pro toto. Nietzsche, Birth of Tragedy, Apollonian, Dionysian. Hermann Nitsch. Eurypides, Bacchantinderne. Heinrich Heine. Sacher-Masoch, Venus in Furs. Furies. Ecstasy. Transgressions. The Devil. Paganism and Christianity. Praz, The Romantic Agony, Medusean beatury, the metamorphoses of Satan. Walter Pater. Bullen, The Sun is God. Arthur Evans, The God of Ecstasy. Arthur Machen, The Great God Pan -> Clark Ashton Smith, Lovecraft, Weird Fiction. Stefano Evangelista, British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece. Théophile Gautier, Les Dieux et les Demi-Dieux de la Peinture, Mes fantômes. Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred. Brian de Palma, Richard Schechner, Dionysus 69. Kleist, Penthesilea. Karl Heinz Bohrer, Skrækkens æstetik. Rita Felsky, chok. Balzac, La Peu de chagrin. Bloody fairytales. Mysticism, religious delirium. Taste for evil. Marquis de Sade. Fr. Paulnan, Le Nouveau Mysticisme, 1891. Gothic flesh. Vernon Lee, spectres of antiquity, walking art. Satanism, occultism, LaVey. Joost van den Vandel, Lucifer. Joseph Roth.

lørdag den 16. januar 2016

søndag den 10. januar 2016

Immanent Evil


Writing report.

Like a proper nineteenth-century artist-genius I like to do my work last minute in fits of desperation and sublime inspiration.


Tonight we are developing a grand theory, which has nested in our minds for weeks, reading Vernon Lee's gothic tale "A Wicked Voice" as an intricate critique of hegemonic ideals of aesthetic theory from the side of those ideals. The chilling ghost story relates a musicological battle between Wagner and the baroque opera set on the stage of fin de siècle Venice, as the effeminate ghost of a castrato singer hunts down the composer Magnus and tragically prevents him from finishing his Tannhäueresque grand work. Venus in the Mountain is an over-sexualised, uncannily high-pitched voice which troubles the composer's composition.
In a surprising twist everything is revealed to the avid student of history, as its complete contradiction. The author in reality hated Wagner with a passion (or rather, without a passion), and the protagonist/narrator has by the end of the work, rather than simply become obsessed with the past, actually finally, after years of copying his idol, come across some original inspiration. It is frigtening to him only, we realise, because he is the inadequate product of his time.