Welcome to issue nine of The Attention Span Newsletter by me, Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil. I’m a writer, a literary translator, an artist and a curator of cultural programmes based in Amsterdam.  

Every other week, I take the time to reflect and offer a glimpse of how I see and feel the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature. Each issue has a short essay or reflection, a nerdy look at translation, a page from one of my notebooks, a list of things to read, watch or listen to, and a highlight from my archives.

I invite you to support my work via Patreon: http://patreon.com/theattentionspan

Thank you for your presence and attention!

SHOW NOTES

City in Translation: https://www.cityintranslation.com

Poetry Translation Centre: https://www.poetrytranslation.org

Reading/Watching/Listening to

Listen/ I started listening to Living Archives, an oral histories project co-produced by the Stuart Hall Foundation and the International Curators Forum. The project is made up of six intergenerational conversations. Each conversation considers an alternative history of contemporary Britain through testimonies shared by UK-based diasporic artists working between the 1980s and the present-day. The project will form what Stuart Hall calls a “living archive of the diaspora”, which maps the development, endurance, and centrality of diasporic artistic production in Britain. It is hosted by ICF’s Deputy Artistic Director, Jessica Taylor who invites practitioners to reflect on the reasons they became artists, the development of their practices, the different moments and movements they bore witness to, and the beautiful reasons they chose to be in conversation with each other. https://www.stuarthallfoundation.org/projects/living-archives-podcast-artists/

Read/ “Picturing things, taking a view, is what makes us human; art is making sense and giving shape to that sense. It is like the religious search for God. We are well aware that making sense and picturing are artificial, like illusion; but we can never give them up.” These are notes from 1962 by painter Gerhard Richter, published in The Daily Practice of Painting, which assembles writing and interviews between 1962 and 1993, edited and introduced by Hans-Ulrich Obrist and translated from the German by David Britt. It’s one of the many books I have been gathering from the library (I go to university libraries and the local ones and have always a dozen of borrowed books around the house). I love reading several books in parallel. The context in which I read (whether it is external or internal) always influences how I will feel a text. I admire Richter as a painter and reading his thoughts, his process and vision is just fascinating. https://books.google.nl/books/about/The_Daily_Practice_of_Painting.html?id=lPoE70v9ERQC&redir_esc=y

Watch/ I waited for weeks to find the right time to see Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer at the cinema. I would need to have had eaten before, bring water and snacks, make sure I am rested so I can make it for more than three hours seated in a cinema. But these all went out the window last week when, following a conversation which made me reflect on questions regarding integrity, moral and ethical responsibility in the positions I hold within culture, I decided to go for a walk and my steps made me cross the IJ river to the EYE Cinema where they show Oppenheimer in 70mm. I didn’t check the time once, I was deeply engaged in the complicated story, the magnitude of Nolan’s visual language, the mesmerizing music, the superb acting and flawless cinematography. Of course, there are many angles to read this film from, and I understand the different critical point of views. But in that moment, I needed that intense cinematic and human experience. I have loved many of Nolan’s films and was disappointed in a few others. This one will be added to my beloved ones. https://www.eyefilm.nl/en/whats-on/oppenheimer/976513