what art does for us
john berger and our faces, my heart, as brief as photos \\ larissa pham the limits of the viral book review \\ frantz (2016) dir. françois ozon \\ johann wolfgang von goethe the sorrows of young werther (tr. david constantine)
kofi
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"Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story."
fleabag (2016-2019), user starpeace, larissa pham, richard siken, taylor swift, boygenius, richard siken, nicole homer, mitski, sarah kay and phil kaye, sue zhao
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A crush is distinct from friendship or love by dint of its intensity and sudden onset. It is marked by passionate feeling, by constant daydreaming: a crush exists in the dreamy space between fantasy and regular life. The objects of our crushes, who themselves may also be referred to as crushes, cannot be figures central to our daily lives. They appear in the periphery of our days, made romantic by their distance.
Larissa Pham, from 'Crush'. Published in Pop Song: Adventures in Art and Intimacy.
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What can art show us? It can make us feel less alone. It can describe a feeling. It can lift up stories we haven’t heard before, told from the point of view of people we haven’t heard from before. It can be revenge or merely vengeful. It can entertain, stupefy, propagandize, and perhaps even illuminate with startling clarity. But for any of this to happen, art needs to have a place for the reader to witness the stakes of what’s happening. That space seems to be rapidly diminishing.
Larissa Pham, from her essay “The Limits of the Viral Book Review”, published in The Nation, November 10, 2020
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cannot remember who recommended this to me but yeah i think everyone should read abject permanence by larissa pham
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“All kinds of colors are running through her head while he drives. Colors of plants and flowers. Colors she can name and not name. The weekend has the palette of a fantasy. She loves to daydream; she thinks she has the face for it—a small pointed chin, deep-set brown eyes above an ordinary nose and a sad mouth. Acne on her chin, thin eyebrows. It's fun, like right now, to imagine herself as a character in a book, directed by some unseen narrative. Letting her agency fall away, her hands empty and limp. In the heat of the sun, she is thinking about how in love she is, about how its intensity seems to make all the colors of the world porous and bright, like tube watercolors. The mound of her pelvis, fat and tender, pulses from the sex they had the night prior.
She wishes she had more words for color, more words to describe how everything feels.”
— Larissa Pham, “Trust”
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larissa pham, 'body of work' in pop song
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or are you normal?
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The bruise in Nan Goldin’s “Heart-Shaped Bruise” could be anyone’s. A woman reclines on floral sheets, her face out of frame. She lies on her side like an odalisque. Her black-and-white striped dress is pulled up above the knee, her sheer black tights are yanked down. Framed in the middle, as if between curtains parted to reveal a stage, is the titular bruise, high on the woman’s right thigh. It is defined by its outline, like the imprint left on a table by an overfull coffee cup. One edge is beginning—just barely—to purple; the bruise is at most a day old.
The photograph can’t show how the bruise will turn purple, as bruises do, then deepen into blacks and blues. We won’t see how the burst capillaries, like lace under the skin, will sour into greenish yellow and mauve. But we know. The bruise will move through a rainbow of colors, mottled like the translucent surface of a plum, until finally—weeks later, and no longer heart-shaped—it will fade back to the pink of healthy skin. We know that as we look, the bruise has already healed: Nan Goldin took the photograph in 1980. It is an old wound. It exists now only as a memory—a mark destined to fade, captured before it did.
—Larissa Pham, from “The Art of the Bruise” (The Paris Review, February 2019)
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insane. insane.
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vote yes if you have finished the entire book.
vote no if you have not finished the entire book.
(faq · submit a book)
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