Posted on: March 1, 2013
Tis a strange month, March. Both Winter and Spring, cold and temperate, it transitions us from Death to Life, fallow to green. Depending upon the region, depending upon one’s position on this earth, by design or chance, this month will bring us all great changes.
For Spinozablue, March brings us poetry by Virginie Colline, and fiction by Donal Mahoney. For this editor, March takes me closer to the lighthouse, and another rereading of the masterful, brilliant goddess of prose, Virginia Woolf.
The Lighthouse at Two Lights. By Edward Hopper. 1929
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Posted on: February 12, 2013
Agua Viva, by Clarice Lispector. 1973. Translation 2012
Yes, it’s even better than The Passion. Why? Because the aphorisms here do not push for a certain resolution. They are what they are. More at ease with themselves. They are it, as she says repeatedly. It being something so essential, so real, so basic, that it defies naming beyond it. It just is.
The work is short. Too short. Just 88 pages. Edited posthumously by Olga Borelli and newly translated by Stefan Tobler. But it can and should be read over and over again. It’s thick with bright language gems and shockingly obvious surprises. As in, I read her, noted with wonder her startlingly original conceptions, but then said, yeah. Of course. That makes sense in a surreal way.…
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Posted on: February 9, 2013
The Passion According to G.H. By Clarice Lispector
Writing without plot. Writing about writing. Each word, each sentence, each paragraph like an explosive compulsion. An aphorism of despair and delight. Clarice Lispector wrote as if her life depended upon it. As if she couldn’t help herself. And though her chaos was contained and expressed through words, the result was not chaos. It was poetry.
Clarice Lispector (1920 – 1977) was born Jewish in what is now the Ukraine. To escape from the frequent pogroms there, her family fled to resettle in Brazil, via Romania, when Clarice was not yet two. She wrote in Portuguese, considered herself Brazilian through and through, and is considered by some to be among the greatest writers of the 20th century in that language.…
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