Амстердам: завтра (и рабочее-пунктирное)

В кои-то веки я (почти что) молодец: разослала авторам своего сборника рецензии с подтверждением их участия (повезло не всем, ну да что поделать) — корпела над формулировками весь день, но, наконец-то, все сделала.
А завтра, меж тем, Амстердам! А у меня еще конь не валялся и чемодан не собран. Но предвкушение Рембрандта, мельниц и каналов несомненно радует!

“Quicker Than Thought: Prophecy in a “Shocker” that Has Come True” by Arthur Machen

Just spare a minute and read this short gem from Machen about weird peculiarities of wireless telegraph transmission as scientific prophecy: you won’t be disappointed.

“I need scarcely add that the possibility of “wireless” had never entered my mind.” ©

«Под знаком -нео»: вышла!

Так, ну что) у вашей покорной вышла тут долгожданная статья в коллективной монографии, которая смогла состояться только лишь благодаря усилиям прекрасной Вероники Зусевой-Озкан, за что я ей бесконечно признательна. Даже не верится, что мой кропотливый труд многих месяцев, долго ждавший своего часа, наконец-то, увидел свет. Ура! Неплохой подарок к грядущему пятидесятилетию, я считаю)

“Night visions: fantastic gloomth: Victor Hugo the artist” by James Hall (TLS)

Fuseli? Walpole? Hugo!

The drawings of Victor Hugo (1802–85), of which about 3,000 survive, mark the smouldering confluence of night scenes and night drawing. Hugo began making caricatures c.1830, then drew landscape views and architecture for his own amusement and as a kind of spiritual exercise. Technically daring and courting accident, they were made on his travels, at home with his wife and children, during seances, but mostly on the dining-room table of his lifelong lover, the actress Juliette Drouet, who followed him into exile in Jersey and Guernsey (1852–70). Only a handful of the seventy-seven drawings in an impressively lugubrious show at the Royal Academy look as though they were made during the day. They are early travel sketches, tremulously wiry architectural bits and bobs, gothicky but insufficiently picturesque to be “ye olde” or “pre-loved”. Daylight strips them down to “poor, bare, forked” things, vivisections revealing shameful dilapidation and structural nervous exhaustion. The author of Notre-Dame de Paris (1831) was a pioneering advocate of preserving and restoring gothic buildings, but artistically he was half in love with their decline and death. ©

“A Deleuzian Conversion” by Claire Colebrook (EUP)

Yet it feels at times that their works have become obsolete (they aren’t, but the feeling remains).

It was in this post-1990s context that reading Deleuze and Guattari was remarkably transformative (despite being contemporaneous with the other French philosophers who had been taken up in a supposed general textualism, anti-realism or anti-essentialism). Things perhaps started with a little too much of a market correction, as if Derrida had said everything was text, Foucault had said everything was discourse, and the feminists had erased the body. Reading Deleuze and Guattari as if they provided the cure for linguistic idealism or textualism not only fails to recognize the ways in which they were part of a milieu attempting to think forms of difference beyond signifying systems, but also misses the subtle but revolutionary practice of philosophical intuition: we may always be asking questions from a distinct political formation, but those formations invite the creative and speculative endeavour of exploring their actual conditions of genesis. ©

“Empire’s fall: The shifting boundaries of Russian literature” by Boris Dralyuk (TLS)

I should ask Prof. Franklin about this volume next time I see him.

The first of the strands is organized around “Movements”, in which the contributors subtly challenge and revise the traditional scheme of periodization favoured by Moser, acknowledging from the outset, for instance, that the texts of the “Age of Devotion” – treated with supreme nuance by Franklin – are the shared inheritance of the Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian cultures, not merely the first stage in the development of Russian literature [...] ©

May is the best month to get these two neat gems (god only knows when I’ll manage to go through them: let’s hope it happens in the near future):

“Harsh Sentences: H. P. Lovecraft v. Ernest Hemingway”: a brilliant comparative essay from Deepcuts

TWIMC. Just a friendly reminder of how a picture perfect article in comparative studies must look like. Impeccably done: chapeau, Bobby Dee.

For H. P. Lovecraft, missing Hemingway would have been much more difficult—nor did he. Though they were very different in their fictional focus, output, and success, Lovecraft and Hemingway were still contemporaries, and there are a number of references to Hemingway and his works in Lovecraft’s letters. These mentions of Ernest Hemingway, who had not yet become “Papa” of later years, reflect more on Lovecraft than on Hemingway himself, but show Lovecraft both coming to grips with a Modern writer of very different style and interests and how Hemingway’s influence spread.

Trends come from deeper sources than what is written on the surface of literature, and the average domestic adjustments of 1980 or 2030 will not depend on the question of whether Ernest Hemingway is suppressed or encouraged in 1930.
—H. P. Lovecraft to Maurice W. Moe, June 1930?, LMM 267

Nothings and triviality

Came across the workshop in my subscription titled “Between SCOPUS fetishisation, predatory journals and survival strategies of researchers.”

Immediately felt like one of those characters in zombies/dystopian/Apocalypse games.

...и немножко нервно

«24-летний поэт Александр Блок курит папиросу за папиросой, то и дело вскакивает и подходит к окну: он слышал выстрелы и знает, что войска стреляли в мирных людей» © etc. — а где про нервные тонкие пальцы, густые клубы дыма и зарево над крышами™? Унесите.