Archives: March 2020

Dispatches

A diary from Moyra Davey, New York, USA

March 29, 2020

One by one, in less than 24 hours, nearly all of my ‘projects’ toppled like dominoes, until on the afternoon of Friday, 13 March, my assistant and I found ourselves staring at each other and realising there was nothing left for us to do.

Since then I’ve wasted the better part of two weeks reading the news, but I’ve also been in touch with many friends and family members, and am doing yoga with my teacher and our group via Zoom. To briefly see their faces and hear their voices and to go through our routine together is a lifesaver.

I usually open the New York Times first thing in the morning, but today instead I read Catherine Malabou on finding her solitude within confinement, in order to write (‘the psychic space where it is possible to do something’). I copied out parts of the essay, and for one day at least, determined to shut out the noise, I cleared off my desk, which was a disgrace, if not to write then at least to read (books).

Listening: Duane Train, an updated and expanded mini-Mancuso Loft party. DJ’d by the laid back, droll Duane Harriott every Wednesday from noon to three on WFMU. Eleven years of music and playlists are archived here.

Reading: I just finished Carson McCullers’ five novels and some of her stories, and have begun her unfinished autobiography, Illuminations and Night Glare. Writing in the 1930s and 40s, her stories feel singularly undated and contemporary. Notably, she had a way of conjuring queerness that manages to be both forthright (taken for granted), and coded. This quality is most striking in my favourite of the novels, the slim, perfect The Member of the Wedding.

Catherine Malabou, ‘To Quarantine Within Quarantine: Rousseau, Robinson Crusoe and “I”‘ (with thanks to Vincent Bonin, Montreal).

Moyra Davey is an artist and writer based in New York. Her essay collection Index Cards is forthcoming from Fitzcarraldo Editions on 3 June 2020.

 

Dispatches

Recommended isolation watching and listening from Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, Loir-et-Cher, France

Anime: Parasite by Kenichi Shimizu.

Albums I’ve been listening to lately: Debris by Keeley Forsyth, You Will Not Die by Nakhane, Fixion by Trentemøller, The Inevitable End by Royksopp…

Movies I’ve been watching lately: For Sama dir Waad Al-Kateab, Naked Island dir Kaneto Shindo, Inland Sea dir Kazuhiro Soda, This Transient Life dir Akio Jissôji.

Docu series I loved: Wild Wild Country, Making a Murderer, The Keepers...

Jean-Baptiste Del Amo is the author of Animalia, translated by Frank Wynne.

rabbit

A fable from Charlie Fox, London, UK

Here’s this weird squelchy-voiced fable about a rabbit being eaten by a wolf which I recorded for my friend the artist Jason Yates’ radio show in LA a few weeks ago. I made this mix for him called DMT Trip D’Un Faune, which was an hour-long magic-realist simulation of a drug-addled faun’s mindscape, kind of as an homage to Debussy but with ambient jams, and I stuck this fable on its tail.

Anyway, the wolf eats the rabbit, they fall in love. I was thinking about Prometheus a lot – did he befriend those vultures that devoured his insides eternally? – and the eerie song, ‘Bright Eyes’, from the cartoon Watership Down, which is an elegy for a dead rabbit haunted by ecological meltdown. Is it a kind of dream? Being eaten up by and/or feeding off a hot beast might be the perfect romance: trippy, magical, inside-out intimacy that lasts forever. Which seems extra strange and sad to think about now when we can’t touch at all.

Listen here.

xo

Charlie Fox is the author of This Young Monster.

Dispatches

A diary from Esther Kinsky, Friuli, Italy

In Italy we’re in the third week of lockdown now. People are still friendly, patient, polite, considerate, but tempers are fraying. For children and adolescents, this is the fourth week without school. The fourth week of patchy online teaching, clueless parents, absent grandparents – the latter being the ones who have to be protected from the mythical beast of spring 2020.  The empty streets, the silence, even the absence of traffic – all this is beginning to feel leaden and bleak. I look at the village in this dove grey dusk in March and wonder – shall we ever return to thinking first and foremost of Paul Celan’s poem when we read or hear the C-word? 

Nevertheless, it’s good to be in the country. The deserted streets of a city must be even harder to bear. People have their gardens here. There’s chatting across the fence. My eighty-year-old neighbour is worried about his potatoes. They should’ve been planted during the last lunar phase – potato planting only under waning moon – but his field is three kilometres away. He’s worried about running into a control officer. Potatoes wouldn’t be a good enough reason for the ‘Autocertificazione’, the form one has to fill out and carry for every errand now, in case of a police control. ‘We’ll have to wait’, my neighbour says, with some sadness. ‘Perhaps we’ll just plant them under the luna giovane’ – the young moon. What a beautiful expression, pronounced with such melancholy. Meanwhile, a cold wind has descended from the north. The light is very bright, and the mountains seem so near, very blue, every crag and rocky excrescence visible. The patches of snow on the peaks glistening. A world beyond reach for lack of a good enough reason.

Esther Kinsky is the author of River and Grove, a novel of grief, love and landscape, published in April 2020.

Ed Atkins performs OLD FOOD in Helsinki

On 29 February 2020, artist and author Ed Atkins gave a performative reading of Old Food at the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki. An audio recording of the performance, which features songs, is available to listen to here on Soundcloud

Thanks to Sanni Pajula, Patrik Nyberg, Sonya Merutka and all at Kiasma. Courtesy Ed Atkins and Fitzcarraldo Editions. Copyright © Ed Atkins, 2019 and 2020.

Old Food is available to purchase at https://fitzcarraldoeditions.com/books/old-food.

Fitz Carraldo Editions