The Poetics of Space - Gaston Bachelard

I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.

Rilke wrote: 'These trees are magnificent, but even more magnificent is the sublime and moving space between them, as though with their growth it too increased.

We comfort ourselves by reliving memories of protection. Something closed must retain our memories, while leaving them their original value as images. Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home and, by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.

Sometimes the house of the future is better built, lighter and larger than all the houses of the past, so that the image of the dream house is opposed to that of the childhood home. Late in life, with indomitable courage, we continue to say that we are going to do what we have not yet done: we are going to build a house. This dream house may be merely a dream of ownership, the embodiment of everything that is considered convenient, comfortable, healthy, sound, desirable, by other people. It must therefore satisfy both pride and reason, two irreconcilable terms.

The philosophy of poetry must acknowledge that the poetic act has no past, at least no recent past, in which its preparation and appearance could be followed.

To withdraw into one’s corner is undoubtedly a meager expression. But despite its meagerness, it has numerous images, some, perhaps, of great antiquity, images that are psychologically primitive. At times, the simpler the image, the vaster the dreams.

… by changing space, by leaving the space of one’s usual sensibilities, one enters into communication with a space that is psychically innovating.

A Global Sense of Place – by Doreen Massey

From Space, Place and Gender. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press, 1994.

The Messy Relationship between Feminisms and Globalizations

With some exceptions, feminist scholars have written either about gender and globalizations or about transnational feminisms but rarely examined the relationship between them. In this essay, the author wants to reflect on this relationship to highlight how they have shaped each other. She suggests that feminisms are important force-shaping globalizations. At the same time, the relationship between them is fraught and in some instances has furthered inequalities among feminists. But this does not preclude other possibilities as is evident in the work of feminists around the world.

From the SWS President: The Messy Relationship between Feminisms and Globalizations

Manisha Desai

Gender and Society
Vol. 21, No. 6 (Dec., 2007), pp. 797-803

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Is It Traditional? by Linda M Ballard

Madame Bovary

the description of the viscount`s cigar case embroidered with love reminded me of something i saw at lake balaton. i watched a woman making lace, actually it was a tourist attraction, she was even dresssed in traditional hungarian gear. but the way they make, or made the lace, is insane. its like driving a tractor, except like 4 tractors at a time. using all fingers, in a certain order, much like knitting but with about 8 `needles´ although they are actualy more like... batons, or spools. what great words. like pins, like bowling pins, but small with the thread on the end. and the threads are tied to a sausage dog pin cushion, which the lace is patterned onto, with the template of the lace drawn on the surface of the sausage cushion. i took some photos but its the motion of the fingers that`s mesmerising. not all needlework impresses me like this. its the time and intricacy taken over something that noone would imagine anyone sitting down to make, for hours, such a small thing. obviously now it is easy to make such things using machines. bu before machines, this is how lace was made. such effort, and time, and sweat. surely after the lace mistresses had finished their sewing, lacing, their pieces were bleached or disinfected in whatever way was custom at the time. to sell on, to i dont know who. but i need to know more about the women who made this lace. i will post pictures of the process i saw.

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

http://terpconnect.umd.edu/~mquillig/20050131mulvey.pdf