Category: Reading Baca
-
Burn It
Talking about fandom and idol culture can be awkward. Mainstream media either will praise or curse, or call it with anything: a distraction, the spiralling down of parasocial interaction, blablabla. So many things happening within the culture that even when someone look it from inside, they cannot entirely comprehend. But a humane story is not…
-
Brawling
It’s a room full of silence and repressed scream. Lee Soho’s poetry collection, Catcalling, translated dazzingly by So J. Lee pulls me to that room. The book starts with Kyungjin’s room and an origin of sisterhood: “I was born but somehow you were born too. From one to two. We crumple ourselves into the cramped…
-
Diri Yang Terbuka
Kecermatan seorang jurnalis tidak cukup untuk melahirkan kumpulan esai tentang seni dan sastra yang tepat dan berkarisma. Sensibilitas yang terolah, ketajaman menilai, dan keberjarakan. Janet Malcolm memiliki semua itu. Dan ia menghasilkan sekumpulan esai yang merenggut ulang kepercayaan saya soal apa itu tulisan non-fiksi yang cemerlang. Forty-One False Starts adalah kumpulan esai Malcolm yang mengambil…
-
Menepi
Boulder karya Eva Baltasar (tr. Julia Sanches) bercerita tentang konflik batin seorang perempuan yang awalnya bekerja sebagai tukang masak kapal, sebelum kemudian bertemu dengan seorang perempuan bernama Samsa dan memutuskan untuk menetap di Islandia. Tidak ada yang terlalu rumit dan panjang dari novel pendek ini, termasuk konflik rumah tangga yang cukup tipikal: sejauh mana seseorang…
-
Cara Menatap
We only see what we look at. To look is an act of choice. Ways of Seeing adalah buku klasik tentang seni rupa yang membantu saya pelan-pelan belajar melihat objek dan subjek visual. John Berger bersama dengan Sven Blomberg, Chris Fox, Michael Dibb, dan Richard Hollis menerbitkan buku ini dalam rangka pedagogi kritis tentang seni…
-
Dwelling In Words
Narrative was not just a story that flowed, was not just language flowing, but, at its most inventive or reflexive, was also a positioning or mapping of philosophies, a slowing down of that comprehension of one’s having had an experience. I paused reading those lines. I was on my way reading Renee Gladman’s Calamities and…
-
Membicarakan Seni Rupa
Saya membaca kumpulan esai seni Chabib Duta Hapsari ini karena penasaran dan tidak banyak tahu tentang medan pembicaraan seni rupa, meskipun saya memiliki antusiasme terhadap kerja seni rupa (tapi saya makin yakin lukisan bukanlah obsesi saya; saya lebih suka ilustrasi dan sketsa). Judul bukunya mengambil dari salah satu esai Chabib, Alam Terkembang Hilang Berganti yang…
-
Making Room
A will to write, to describe, to paint with words, to engage with art, to make one. Amina Cain’s Indelicacy is a projection of a woman and her impulse and desire to write. Her name is Vitória. She works as a janitor in a gallery, and making a close acquaintance with her working partner, Antoinette.…
-
A Spared Life
When suffering seems unbearable, a poet turns to poems and tales. And chants and prays. They are poems. Sometimes a demanding one. But many times a consolation. A few words doesn’t hurt; sometimes they save souls too. Hiromi Ito’s The Thorn Puller translated by Jeffrey Angles clings on the arrangements and chains of those words:…
-
Piercing
I first encountered Lee Seong-beok’s poem on BTS fandom twitter (*cough* I’m an ARMY myself *cough*) because Kim Namjoon shared a collection of Lee’s poems on his Instagram. Then, it led me to the English translation of “To Whom I Could Give This Pain” published in his collection Ah, Mouthless Things, translated by Eun-Gwi Chung,…
Nik Setiadarma 