The Maverick Variations

Los Angeles

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LATEST POSTS

It’s All An Illusion

That illusion of a world so shaped that it echoes every groan, of human beings so tied together by common needs and fears that a twitch at one wrist jerks another, where however strange your experience other people have had it too, where however far you travel in your own mind someone has been there before you – is all an illusion.

Imagination Is The Permanent Revolution

What alienates the Writer from the State is that the State – any State – is always certain it is right.

Inexhaustible Readings, Unlimited Reviews

The fault of impatience is the desire for the work to mean something. In Kafka’s case, as he sometimes writes in his diaries, this was the desire for the work to be a means of salvation. The other side of his experience, however, was the failure of writing; the numerous stories begun and then abruptly aborted. Writing as a terrifying experience of the impossibility of writing. This as the ‘truth’ of writing, rather than as a sanctuary for someone expelled from the ordinary world of work and love.

For An Imperfect Cinema by Julio García Espinosa

The “boom” of Latin American cinema — with Brazil and Cuba in the forefront, according to the applause and approval of the European intelligentsia — is similar, in the present moment, to the one of which the Latin American novel had previously been the exclusive benefactor. Why do they applaud us? There is no doubt that a certain standard of quality has been reached. Doubtless, there is a certain political opportunism, a certain mutual instrumentality. But without doubt there is also something more. Why should we worry about their accolades? Isn’t the goal of public recognition a part of the rules of the artistic game? When it comes to artistic culture, isn’t European recognition equivalent to worldwide recognition? Doesn’t it serve art and our peoples as well when works produced by underdeveloped nations obtain such recognition?

Variation #3

The commentariat in every age and epoch, with their eagerness to adjudicate and their need to dictate meaning, have in their various commissions formulated countless ways to capture the essence of liberation, as though it could be tapped and extracted like a syrup, or clad about with a definition both bespoke and interminable. The impulse to frame and fetter, to bind within some concrete distinction, may occur any time a person becomes narrativised, the story etching out a permanent record within which an existential death is often guaranteed. It is said that a person is not a person without a story, but in the end a story may after all serve as executioner rather than liberator, undermining the very personhood claimed to be inhered.

Variation #2

This being, for whom those that tried found impossible to articulate or apprehend, was neither individual nor horde, neither avatar nor void; this icon built from negative space; this blank dream whirling like a death mask in a feverish mind; this conception wrought through with the ultimate antithesis of all conceivability – had any known from which procession of demons this impossible being had escaped, or to which procession of misfortunes it found itself destined, they may refuse to talk of it out of a fear of all disclosure – for those things set free by truth can never again be restored to silence, and truth, however one envisions its freedoms, may yet give way to the most hostile and witherward of liberations.

Variation #1

The saga of your brokenness remains incomprehensible to whomever it is told, fragments usually murmured from the corner of one mouth to the next, often shared hurriedly on thresholds, sometimes spat. You are only glimpsed on the periphery of life, a fog shifting under a dim and distant light, a shadow dissolving at the edges of vision.

How it was you came to be known as Kintsu, the one who knit calamities together not with gold but sprezzatura; the one who appeared as thoughtform whenever spoken of, who would evaporate when the utterance came uncoiled and incomplete to a breath’s end in the idle air. How it was you came to be bound together by sangfroid and apocrypha – an indestructable and impossible being.

Poem

There was once a poem so long that it stretched from the heart of the interior all the way to the coast. It was an important work, an epic that spun histories of an ancient and mystical people. But being a poem, it had no cash for a fare home, so took up living on some rocks beyond a breakwater. It survived on kelp and mackerel, and shaved with the sharp edge of oyster shells.

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We acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples as the traditional custodians of the land on which we live, learn and create. We acknowledge all Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the first inhabitants of the nation. Sovereignty has never been ceded. It always was and always will be, Aboriginal land. We acknowledge the history of this land and for the stories of resilience and survival which make up Indigenous Australia. We give thanks for Aboriginal Elders and Knowledge Keepers of every generation, including the many Aboriginal families and communities which contribute to the life of our region.