Mamiyaroid 12.5
Cult of Remembrance
This week I read Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” and this stood out:
“The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuse for the cult value of the picture.”
When he says “cult” he means ritual rather than our modern understanding of a charismatic leader who brainwashes a following. I was immediately brought back to my grandmother’s Buddhist/ancestor altar in Taiwan where a black and white photograph of my grandfather stood, watching over us. My mother, in her turn, has a photograph of my grandmother on her altar.
Since I have no religion, I treat flowers as cult objects.
fuji fp100c , polaroid land camera 195
kodak tmax 400, canonet ql17 giii, developed using cinestill df96 monobath
(This was the same man from a few weeks ago. He asked for this to be titled “For the Ladies”)
Recommendations:
I love this Yo La Tengo song, “And the Glitter is Gone”, and I love that they played a 15 minute version of it on a roof in New York City, with an orange and purple sky as backdrop.
I read Sigrid Nunez’s What Are you Going Through
It’s in the same fictional vein as Weather by Jenny Offill, (concerned with climate change) and while both are affecting, and I enjoyed both, Nunez’s is the more mature book. Offill’s prose often feels like an eager six-year old rattling off facts, with the facts standing out like a utilitarian desk painted shocking pink. Nunez integrates Big Name Writer’s ideas into her fiction in a way that doesn’t call too much attention to itself. She feels like a peer to those writers, rather than an acolyte. These are the near last words of the novel. (I will save the very very last words for you to read yourself.)
“Blessed are they that mourn.
What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about, said Benjamin.
I have tried. I have put down one word after the other. Knowing that every word could have been different. As my friend’s life, like any other life, could have been different.
I have tried.”
Until next time…
Adalena
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-Adalena Kavanagh