On Damnation at Montevidayo

A new review of Damnation is up by James Pate at Montevidayo.


Excerpt:


Damnation. In Lee’s book, it’s a kind of gravity, a weight pulling us into the mud, into a constant state of corruption. We’re all damned to this state of things. The lover, the machinist, the eerie girl and her cat, the doctor: all of the figures in this book live in the shadow of the guillotine (to quote Victor Hugo).


Read the full review here.


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Also, a nice mention at Jacket 2: “A same time speed Moyra Davey’s ‘The Problem of Reading’” by Ariel Goldberg & Rachel Levitsky:


I’m reading Damnation by Janice Lee, an ekphrasis of Béla Tarr’s films. It is a book that among other things addresses time and cinema, or image, against the time of narrative. Both of these writers pose the question of correspondence between the time of writing and the time of image. Take for example the case mentioned above, in which Davey switches from talking generally about the subject to talking about herself as the subject invoking herself by using a “she” pronoun. We know that the position of interpretation has shifted. You cannot make a pronoun of a character change in a photograph as you can in a progression of sentences. You can’t represent the writing in the photograph or the photograph in the writing but what Davey does do in both is produce a corresponding or same time, speed, and affect. Deeply contemplative. Sort of slow. At least steady. There is a trust to the next footfall, like a walking meditation. It’s a modernist time. Virginia Woolf. Calvino. I have no patience for Harold Bloom and I was interested in Davey’s patience with him, the crotchety adult with mean requirements versus pleasure, play, politics.

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Published on January 08, 2014 19:46
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