Bomb magazine

>Maybe memory must marry itself to imagination

Posted on October 25, 2010. Filed under: AGNI, Bomb magazine, creativity, Marilyn Abildskov, personal essay |

Marilyn Abildskov recounts all those scenes of the mind that survive after loss @ AGNI.

All winter that year we shared a small office and walked home together at night and I would think how strange it was, what I used to hear about you—how cold you could be, how distant: the quintessential Ice Princess, people said. But it was always from a distance, what these people observed.

Before I knew you—when you were just an acquaintance, a familiar face in the coffee shop or on the street—I met a woman at a party who said she thought you were very strange. She said the two of you had been good friends some time before but that you never spoke with her anymore, that you passed her on the streets of our small town and never looked up and all the while, she said, you wore that hat.

That hat! Apparently she’d given you that hat some winters before.

Sometimes when we walked home at night, I’d look at you out of the corner of my eye—you, so tall and thin and walking with such perfect posture and care—and I’d wonder if you knew what people said about you, how everyone seemed to be a little in love with you. But we never talked about it as we passed the coffee house we liked and the bars we never went into and the orange house where the noisy young drummer boys lived and then, finally, the small square park, the park that was brown and frozen in winter but whose grass would soon turn bright Easter-grass green. That’s when we knew we were almost to your house, a big white house where you lived in a second-floor apartment with your big fat cat Stella.

It was a very small winter hat—tight-knit, flecked in myriad colors—and it suited you.

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>Margin Comments: The Unconcious Work of Things

Posted on September 7, 2010. Filed under: Adam Phillips, Bomb magazine, Margin Comments |

Sameer Padania interviews essayist Adam Phillips about his new collection On Balance @ Bomb magazine:

I prefer writing essays rather than books. Over a period of time I’m invited to give various nonspecific talks and lectures. Nobody says to me, Will you talk about X? That tends to crystallize things that I’ve been preoccupied by, and a piece fairly quickly writes itself once that happens. I don’t think too much about whether it all hangs together. I just write things that engage me, and then, when they get collected into a book like this, I trust that certain preoccupations will work themselves through. Otherwise, it becomes too tendentious and too focused and I don’t want that to be the case. When I read through the essays, I’ll keep the ones that I do still think are good and then I’ll think of what sort of order they might go in. The writing of the book, in a way, is putting them in an order.

In reading the book over, different things emerge at different times, but clearly one of the themes of the book is excess—that seemed to turn up in lots of different places. The idea for the title of On Balance, I don’t know how it came to me. I had read the Auden piece again, “Forms of Inattention,” where there’s that bit at the end about the tightrope walker. Ideas of composure or equanimity or balance or integration—all those words that have something to do with a kind of harmony—are at the heart of psychoanalysis in what it sets itself against, and also relate to what I seem to be preoccupied by.

I rely on the unconscious work of these things. When I sit down to write, I have a lot to write, but beforehand, I don’t. I’m not full of ideas. Writing is the way I think . . . .

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