Observations in Culture

Observations in Culture

"I sound much more sophisticated in Japanese than in German," my student at the writing course in the library says. "Great opportunity to un-sophisticate!" I encourage her.

I'm teaching in Halle at the art university on Tuesdays. So I take the opportunity to buy some new clothes. I always think it's cheaper in the "province" than in the capital but that might be an illusion. I bought a Levi's T-shirt, something I've been wanting to do for a while now. "That's so 2018", A. tells me. "Well, in Halle it's very 2019," I smirk.  

My neighbour gave me three "detectives" to read: All That I Have by Castle Freeman, Case Histories by Kate Atkinson and Samaritan by Richard Price. After a while I notice that they all start with a quote from the same source. "Shakespeare?" A. guesses. Very British to think so. But no, it's the bible. A. tells me it's probably because of some moral need that books about murder do so. 

My favourite book is All That I Have about a sheriff in Vermont. It uses sparse language, just the way I imagine a sheriff talks, and a very sparse amount of thinking, as I also imagine a sheriff's mind to be - blank and calm most of the time. For instance, when he's offered his deputy job and asked to think about it: "I thought about it for two minutes. No, I didn't. I didn't think about it that long. I didn't think about it at all; I didn't have to." 

Or take this beautiful bit of philosophy in the chapter titled "It is what it is": "How do people get where they are? I don't mean in any fancy way, but just that: where they are at. Location, location, location is what counts, they tell you, and they're right. Where have you passed through to get here, what's your geography? It looks as though you can work it either or two ways: straight line or winding. Some people, if they left tracks all through their lives and you could follow them, you'd find they wandered around like a deer in the snow. [...] They're not me, those people. I'm the other way: straight line. It's like I was born at the station, got right aboard the train, and then went along on the rails. Started here, here I am, here I'll finish up."

From Richard Price's book I got this beautiful idea of "leaning in." When something happens to Price's characters, then they lean into it and they don't brush it off. It reminded me of what curator Ikechukwu Onyewuenyi told me about Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, describing Janie and how something "fell of the shelf inside her" and Janie "going inside there to see what it was."

It was at the library, in a lull of some sort, when I thought about how in some places eyes are dominantly looking in the same direction. Take the library where eyes are mostly looking down. I drew those downcast eyes until the lull passed and I got back to work.  




A student told me she took a course at Sotheby's where she learnt how to look at art. You look from left to right, then from right to left, then up and down, down and up, then from the left corner to the opposite corner and from the right corner to the opposite corner. It's a full-on approach that doesn't leave anything undetected. My advice would rather be to see where your eye stumbles and to zoom in on that. 



“What happened?” the mother asks her kids after school.
“Nothing happened.” the boy says.
“Nothing happened to me either”, says his little brother.
“Homework?” she asks.
“No.” the older boy says. 
“Again?!” the mother yells. 

Diest is a nice small town where nothing much happens. But the names of its cafés make me think it must have had a tougher and especially cooler past - probably in the eighties. I have a beer in an old  bar called “De Zigaret” followed by a spaghetti bolognese, topped with an extra portion of cheese in a bar called “De Garage”.





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