kate wehwalt

@katewagner.wehwalt.net

37075 Followers 2325 Following

Unheil-bringer. architecture critic @thenation.com my blogs are https://late-review.com, https://wehwalt.net and mcmansionhell.com she/they

My illness, despite its reputation for extremes of irrationality, has, in a backwards way, made me wise. Many people seem to trust themselves implicitly, to believe that they know themselves. This is not the case for me. Everything I do and feel is done and felt interrogatively, in a suspended state, because I have no other choice. The condition of absolute doubt is a powerful critical and creative tool when applied to anything else, to one’s moral choices and to art and to the political world, but to be forced to apply it ceaselessly to the way one is, to what one is, to what and how one feels, over the days and weeks and years, becomes wearisome and hopeless. Am I happy or is this something else, something that could harm me?—that is not a thought normal people have on repeat. Nor: Am I sad, or is this the return of some kind of embodied haunting that will push me into the darkest corners of myself?
the age of diagnosis how our obsession with medical labels is making us sicker by drsuzanne o'sullivan
One of Wagner's most progressive choices in Die Walküre is his wholistic and sympathetic depiction of Sieglinde as a victim of rape. Not only does he openly make equivalent arranged (i.e. forced) marriage with the stark reality of sexual coercion, he situates her rape within the systemic injustices - the feudal structures of honor and shame - that facilitate it. His refusal (contra Brünnhilde) to both equivocate on the morals of the situation and to depict the rape itself, to instead make it a largely psychological affair, not only decenters the man involved, it insulates his heroine from a kind of secondary violation, that of the spectacle of violence and the subsequent albeit unintended libidinal gratification of the audience which is all too common in depictions of rape in opera - including, of course, Wagner's earlier work, Götterdämmerung - or, for example, the rape scene in Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth.
big semi truck with tiny truck affixed to the back
McDonald’s play place
Goodtime Jesus Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn't afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How 'bout some coffee? Don't mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody. James Tate (1979)
Startlingly, as though remembering that she is indeed telling a story, Sieglinde gathers herself and brings Siegmund rhetorically back into the room. “Da wusst ich, wer der war / der mich Gramvolle gregrüsst” -- I know who he was / who consoled me in my grief, she tells him, as the fragments of the story begin to gather around her and pick up like a storm – the father, the sword, the father who I know you might know – from major to minor to major key – and then, with sudden, utter clarity, there is Siegmund standing before her and with Siegmund the possibility, fervent and graspable now, of being free. All this in just a few minutes of music!
Even a handful of bars later, when Sieglinde is describing Wälse’s mighty thrust of the sword into the tree accompanied by all the masculine bombast of horns– this, too, becomes a moment of utterly unspeakable sadness. Suddenly whole score is evacuated and the theme of the sword has, with the line “Keinen Zoll entwich er den Stamm” – not an inch it stirred from the tree -- rings stalwart and lonely out into the empty hall because for Sieglinde its arrival is not a moment of triumph but one of sorrow. Alone is the voice, almost from a distance, of the young woman in white facing the bedroom door, for whom, in such a short span of time, both love and heroism have failed.
In between the musical patronymic and the revelation of the sword, is a passage of music just for Sieglinde. As she describes first the fear in the hearts of the other guests (Angst schuf es allen /traf die Männer / sein mächtiges Dräun) E-flat opens big and wide into F-sharp minor, which passes searchingly and incompletely into D major like an excited gasp of recognition only to, in the next second, diminish, literally, into the small, sparsely orchestrated agony of the gaze between father and daughter. The mournful chromatic half-steps down to “süss schnenden Harm” (sweet, sorrowful joy) describe the human being who has been recognized but to no end, that of the little girl who is still searching for her father even though he is right there in front of her. All of it is sung by the woman who must live with the fact that this man elected neither to fully reveal himself nor intervene directly in sparing her from devastation. All there is, in the exchange of those half-steps, is the reality of one man passing her off to another, and this is an affect that can only come through in music.
claude saying the adjacent passage in e major is the key of the Wälsungs
gremlin woman with sick internecine ring cycle tattoos
John C Calhoun rat experiment
Part of the reason mapping the events and impetuses of the Ring is so difficult owes itself to the fact that “truth” in the Ring, like the pursuit of knowledge in real life, is never entirely complete – it can’t be because no truth is all-encompassing (i.e. true to all people.) It is instead a combination of truths and untruths that are never fully reconciled, but which form from this failure of reconciliation the forward motion of a complex process. This is why the boundaries within the curse of the ring materialize in such different ways, why there is a great degree of freedom within ostensible unfreedom, why this freedom and unfreedom appears partially contingent on its own self-knowledge (i.e. whether one is aware of the ring or, more importantly, of its curse), and why the ring’s curse is, despite its devastation, also a deeply generative process.