digital photo diary

I am interested in texts that are pure voice or deal with difficult experience using a tone that does not offer relief or stop for comfort. Sometimes, the power in the text comes from powerlessness, whether personal or political. Sometimes, death is close or danger beckons or violence is threatened or enacted. Sometimes, there is a sense of real personal risk in the text’s revelations. Sometimes, there is little left to lose. All the time, the tone is incantatory or staccato or filled with melancholy recognitions.

Euripides, Medea

Sophocles, Electra

Sophocles, Antigone

Sylvia Plath, Ariel

Louise Glück, The Wild Iris

Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red

Juan Goytisolo, Forbidden Territory

Joan Didion, A Book of Common Prayer

Oscar Wilde, De Profundis

Nadine Gordimer, The Late Bourgeois World

Ingmar Bergman, Autumn Sonata

John McGahern, The Barracks

Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky, The Turin Horse

Doris Lessing, The Grass Is Singing

J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron

Béla Bartók, Bluebeard’s Castle

Profound reflection from Chekov's The Cherry Orchard:

The Greek novel is not a monolithic genre. It can be divided into an Early and Later Period, each with its own authorial characteristics and audience composition. To explore the differences between the first and later novels I will cite Chariton’s Callirhoe (c. 50 CE) and Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon (c. 110 CE). This exploration will illuminate what the inspirations for the genre were and how broader cultural shifts fundamentally altered, co-opted, and expanded the original functions of the genre.

[…] In erotic narratives, desire is usually dangerously dislocated: the Greeks spoke of an atopos pothos, an ‘out-of-place yearning.’ What is distinctive about novels, I submit, is that they resist succumbing to the temptation simply to judge and condemn this ‘dirty’ love, and offer instead something more complex, empathic and challenging. In a novel, a figure like the Iliad’s Helen would become a more rounded character than Homer’s ‘cold, evil-contriving dog’ whose union with Paris was responsible for the suffering of male warriors. Certainly, the poetic tradition could offer a more positive, even celebratory account of transgressive passions. Already in Sappho’s lyrics we find a Helen endowed with agency, will and purpose; her pursuit of her own desires is presented as an exemplum for the poet to follow, and thus implicitly legitimised according to the poem’s moral scheme. But the female poet is also aware of how outrageous she is being, and the male lyric tradition quickly reverts to aggressive condemnation of Helen. In tragedy, those experiencing transgressive desires are given room to express themselves, often with sensitivity (e.g., Phaedra in Euripides’s Hippolytus) but all the same, transgressive desires inevitably lead to disastrous outcomes.