Double Brush #00: An Introduction

What’s the smallest detail I can swim in? What’s the tiniest moment in a film, or a song, or a photograph that opens up a cave for spelunking? What’s the littlest book I can pull from a shelf that reveals a hidden lair? 

My last writing project, a dissertation, was an attempt to map out the contours of enormous nouns: nation, capital, truth, techniques of subjection. I’ll be perfectly honest and admit that I don’t actually love these things; I’ve read some stuff about nationalism and capitalism and techniques of subjection that really bummed me out. What I remember enjoying of the writing process were the moments where I got to write ekphrastically, where I tried to transform an image or a sound into language, where I tried to communicate what something I saw looked like to someone who had not seen it.

My love for ekphrasis dovetails with my love for unproductive minutiae: a weird chord change in an otherwise normal song, an accidental gesture from a bystander in the corner of a street photograph, an outrageous Dmitar Berbatov first touch that doesn’t lead to a goal or a shot or a forward pass or anything at all. These are moments that are mostly insignificant, incidental to the thing at hand. The song is not about the chord change, the gesture is not the subject of the photograph, Berbatov’s touch has nothing to do with winning that football match. These things don’t matter, but they do make me sit up straighter. They make me pay attention in a new way. 

This is an attempt to pay attention to more things I encounter. It’s also an attempt to write more regularly, and more casually, that I was doing during my academic career. There was almost no space to talk about Dmitar Berbatov or Pavement lyrics in my PhD programme - but most days that’s all I’m thinking about.