Welcome to Litsy!

When you are at a great reading but the room is too hot and stuffy and crowded and has no disabled seating and you have to stand there in the heat so you end up posting on Litsy from the disabled restroom till your friend comes out. 😥😥😥

This is my first time reading and experiencing the photography of Teju Cole. You know that amazing feeling when you have discovered a new favorite, a new strong voice of wisdom in your life? I'm having that feeling.

On its own I doubt I‘d find the photo series very interesting. However, the poetic, factual, contemplative words were apt partners for the pictures made during his travels and reminded me of Hallberg‘s “Field Guide to the North American Family” but in no comparable way competed in attraction. Although at times too erudite to hold my interest, the fluid connection between history, current events and Cole‘s personal history is fascinating.

Photography is good at showing neither political detail nor sweep. Politics is a matter of discourse & discursive compromise. Photography is quite good at metaphor and evocation. But politics is hard to compress into a rectangular frame. At best a photojournalistic image can show some of the theater of politics. In process, it can bowdlerize what is political about politics. Unfortunately the public often reads this as political truth in itself.

“I last walked there on September 11, 2001. Since then, I‘ve gone near it many times—in taxis on West Street, on foot on Greenwich Street, by Trinity Church—but have been unable or unwilling to go into the plaza. 13 years pass. I finally return, in May 2015, with the camera as a mask. The fusion of dream and reality into a single reality.... The power of a gesture that speaks without being spoken to.”

The first time our ancestors climbed a tall tree or came in a migrating band to the edge of a cliff they experience vertigo. Hundreds of thousands of years later we experience jet lag, which is to chronological displacement as vertigo is to spatial displacement.

Finally we figured out how to move across time faster than time moves across us. In epiphany you are neither here nor there. In jet lag you‘re both here and there at the same time.

🧐

I‘ve been chosen for cuddles! My perfect Christmas!

📚+🐕+💗+🕑🕘🕦=😊

Hope everyone else is having a great Xmas Eve with people & pets you love or if not celebrating, then I hope you‘re having a relaxing Sunday 🙂🙃🙂

#ReadingThroughTheHolidays2017

Human beings have poor peripheral vision. We pay attention to what is most salient—we are prone to cultural biases. They vary from place to place, are notoriously stubborn, and are often unconscious. Sexism and racism are born of skewed perceptions, of overvaluing masculinity and whiteness and treating them as absolute categories, which they are not. We, all of us, are prone to these debilitating forms of blindness.

Foreword by Siri Hustvedt 🙌🏻

I have yet to read any of Teju Cole's stuff and my oh my does this his latest ever sound intriguing!

http://brittlepaper.com/2017/06/excerpt-teju-coles-book-blind-spot/