August 2011
2 posts
the beautiful and the ugly
the beautiful and the ugly, in Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty
“For a man, there is nothing more depressing than the ugliness of a woman,” so writes the aptly titled “metaphysician of evil”, Georges Bataille.
Bataille suggests the bleakness of ugliness; its lack of any opportunity for sacrifice, or occasion to pollute. Beauty, on the other hand, is abundant. Beauty gives rise to desire for...
For Marie Curie
In 1929, Adrienne Rich wrote a poem about the great Marie Curie, proclaiming the dichotomy of her existence. Rich writes of a body that was slowly being bombarded by the very element she had purified. She reflects on Curie’s resolute denial of her wounds, “the cataracts on her eyes,” the frightening truth, that the cause for her steady demise was born in the same source as her power.
Eighty...