Correspondances

Featured

From an empty room

/ Anna Evans / Leave a comment

The motif of wandering, the feeling of restlessness is there in the Rodinksy book - it circles around the myth of the room and is always starting out. In the book, I like the aura of the photographs, the suppressed and concealed histories that buildings contain. It helps me to think about what is hidden and hopeless, what seems lost about my own project. How it changes and disappears before my eyes. Sinclair writes about Rachel Lichtenstein and her quest, how she is drawn to an empty space that is at once charged with energy, about what is paralyzing about her obsession, how she must 'find some resolution or lose herself forever in the attempt.'

Featured

The Vagabond

/ Anna Evans / Leave a comment

The book is semi-autobiographical, and recreates aspects of Colette's life on the stage. I am fascinated by her portrayal of the music hall, and the people she met there, and her bringing to life of the streets and locale of Montmartre and Paris. Mostly for her use of language, her words like a gift, with their warmth, grace, ease and clarity. With its poetic, vivid and direct style of writing, this is a voice which feels alive and never dated. Intoxicated, I am under its spell.

Featured

Escapade

/ Anna Evans / Leave a comment

I am following through connections on the books Rhys reads and admires, and this has led me to Escapade, which seems to be one of the few books by Evelyn Scott I have been able to track down. Rhys also mentions the book in her letters. In reading Escapade, I’ve been thinking about Evelyn Scott and her relation to Rhys. They were contemporaries, and admirers of each other’s work. They share a clarity of expression and perception that makes their writing feel modern and ahead of its time. This is about an experimental style but in both I detect also the expression of a state of mind, of a certain experience of life or philosophy, and a tendency to radical acts and ideas.

Eugène Atget

/ Anna Evans / Leave a comment

Atget’s project to photograph a disappearing Paris, places him in the tradition of street photography and the flâneur, observing the city, preserving and capturing its details and subjects. His photographs capture a moment contained within the spaces of a Paris in flux. They capture the transitory, fleeting glimpses of courtyards, streets, shop windows, interiors and reflections.

Violette

/ Anna Evans / Leave a comment

Leduc's attentiveness to her marginal subject, and the way she writes about the city reverberate with me. Like the transient figures in Jean Rhys's novels, she exists in the same fine line between inside and outside; and occupies the city as another layer of its movement. She exists side by side with the residents of the city, the passersby; and yet is so invisible. They only see her when she reaches out her hand to beg...

Featured

Astragal

/ Anna Evans / Leave a comment

‘My own words were not enough, only another’s could transform misery into inspiration.’ This encounter with another’s words and its capacity to change, to alter or steer one a certain way – the all important journey of the mind – is what I’m reaching for in my own work. And although I feel temporarily silenced by my admiration for Patti Smith’s essay, for its clarity and precision, by my wish to craft my own writing in a similar way, I know at least the flow of ideas begins by breaking the silence. Reading other’s words starts off the trail, the invisible connecting lines and the flow of thoughts; like walking.

Correspondances

/ Anna Evans / 1 Comment

On the Métro, I look at the signs listing the correspondances that connect to other lines, other stations. Correspondances seems a good way to describe it, and to introduce my section of notes on the books I read, or films and photographs that correspond to my own writing in some way, that correlate with my interests. I am thinking about meeting points, the points of connection to other lines, other destinations.