Tag Archives: silence

Poem on the Death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Posted on September 20, 2020 by Mark Kerstetter

I built a machine of words.It did its job.It worked its greaseand when it became dryit was anybody’s businessto speak.Again.Today.Every time the first time.Every time different.It lived as long as it could.It hung on.Oh how it hung on!“Past its prime” … Continue reading →

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Al Gore’s Cowboy Boots

Posted on May 29, 2018 by Mark Kerstetter

Until recently I had never taken note of Wittgenstein’s parenthetical remark in the Tractatus that aesthetics and ethics are one. According to Google it would seem that academic discussions of the question focus on either contrasting the differences between the … Continue reading →

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Nature Is Cruel, Staros

Posted on July 18, 2017 by Mark Kerstetter

In terms of fashion, the 1977 film Saturday Night Fever is fixed in time and place. Its disco beats, big collar polyester shirts, bellbottoms and platform shoes place it squarely in late 1970’s big-city America. The economic milieu of the … Continue reading →

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Beckett’s Labyrinth

Posted on September 18, 2016 by Mark Kerstetter

The Minotaur, not Narcissus, presides over the birth of art —Rosalind Krauss Patrick Bowles records a conversation he had with Samuel Beckett while the two were working on the English translation of Molloy. Bowles had shared a quotation from Blanchot: … Continue reading →

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The Silence of the Work

Posted on May 24, 2016 by Mark Kerstetter

Blanchot: The writer never knows if the work is done. What he has finished in one book, he begins again or destroys in another. ….although the artist is not capable of ending it, he is nevertheless capable of turning it … Continue reading →

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The Writing of the Disaster and Lucky

Posted on May 23, 2016 by Mark Kerstetter

Where power does not reign—nor initiative, nor the cutting edge of a decision—there, dying is living. There dying is the passivity of life—of life escaped from itself and confounded with the disaster of a time without present which we endure … Continue reading →

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An Exhortation to Silence: Comparing Mulholland Drive to The Blind Owl

Posted on May 15, 2016 by Mark Kerstetter

David lynch’s film Mulholland Drive and Sadegh Hedayat’s novel The Blind Owl are essentially the same story.

Posted in book review, film essay | Tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Samuel Beckett and the Silence of the Work

Posted on April 13, 2013 by Mark Kerstetter

Next month I’ll be exhibiting some of my artworks (more on that soon) and was asked to write about the connection between my visual art and my writing. Those words are the basis for this post which happily coincides with … Continue reading →

Posted in visual art essay | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments