January 2012
7 posts
Thoreau's Journal, August 20th, 1851
“The Rhexia Virginica is a showy flower at present.
How copious and precise the botanical language to describe the leaves, as well as the other parts of a plant! Botany is worth studying if only for the precision of its terms,—to learn the value of words and of system. It is wonderful how much pains has been taken to describe a flower’s leaf, compared for instance with the care that...
I have been rereading bits of Laszlo Krasznahorkai’s War & War, mainly the ending passages, but I have also been flipping through the rest, with the intent of excerpting some of the fervidly marked bits (“…we are not obliged to do anything except to comprehend that the appropriateness of the one great universal process of thinking is not predicated on it being correct, for...
invisiblestories:
“What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our table manners, our utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us. We live, true, we breathe, true; we walk, we go downstairs, we sit at a table in order to eat, we lie down on a bed on order to sleep. How? Where? When? Why?
Describe...
“Our unhappiness is by no means something that we have been talked into, like our...”
– Thomas Bernhard, from “Montaigne” tr. Douglas Robertson (via hypocrite-lecteur)
Drake's Diary: Sixteen Stylish Maxims for the New... →
drakes-london:
Sixteen Stylish Maxims for the New Year
Style and taste are a particular sort of intelligence, and vice versa.
Aesthetic judgments rarely transcend the culture of the judge.
The style of studied nonchalance is the psychological triumph of grace over order.
Style is a simple way of saying complicated things. Which is why Fashion is shallow, but taste is deep.
There’s no right...
WatchTuning the Sleeping machine
-David Sherman
(13 mins.)
(Watch in the dark, with headphones.)
December 2011
6 posts
bespokenn asked: Interesting and flamboyant are two different things. If this gentlemen was not posing for maximum exposure, I highly doubt that his "partly undone working cuffs, and polka dots" would be all that noticeable. Also, dull and interesting are relative terms that are subject to the evaluator's perspective - if you were to compare this man with to typical CBD (conservative business...
“Verily I am the creature of circumstances. Here I have swallowed an...”
– H. D. Thoreau, aged 20, Journals, Aug. 27, 1838 (from the NYRB Searls edition)
A Dissertation on Alchemy (1937)
When you search the indexes of art books for the name “Kadish, Reuben,” they usually point you to quotes from interviews with him. The Archives of American Art has two long interviews, one from 1964 and one from 1992, just before his death. They focus on his involvement in the art scenes of the era, mostly in San Francisco, but also briefly in New York, Los Angeles, Mexico, and elsewhere. The...
August 2011
1 post
8 tags
February 2011
2 posts
A House and Its Head by Ivy Compton-Burnett
“Well, Nance, you have condescended to join us?”
“If that is the word you use, Father. I felt simply that I was joining you.” Nance embraced her mother and went to her seat, obeying the unrecognized family law, that the father should not receive a morning salute. “I have never taken my place before such a pile of gifts. Do I fall upon them, or wait for those who...
“In Japan the fear of being led astray by an untrustworthy spirit-fox is so...”
– (via somethingchanged)
November 2010
2 posts
seedy: Samuel Beckett BBC Radio Plays →
c-d:
Download
1. A Piece of Monologue (UK, 1986) BBC Radio Cast: Ronald Pickup 2. Cascando (UK, 1964) BBC Radio Directed by: Donald McWhinnie Cast: Denys Hawthorne, Patrick Magee Music composed by Marcel Mihalovici 3. Cascando (Ireland, 1991) RTE Radio Directed by: William Styles Cast: Bosco…
The Infinite Conversation: As You Begin to Lose... →
theinfiniteconversation:
What was once before you - an exciting, mysterious future - is now behind you. Lived; understood; disappointing. You realize you are not special. You have struggled into existence, and are now slipping silently out of it. This is everyone’s experience. Every single one. The specifics hardly…
October 2010
1 post
A paragraph from William H. Gass's 'Emerson and...
Nature, indeed, is prodigal to the point of embarrassment, filling the air, the deepest reaches of the sea, the whole earth, with seed. Both men and nature select by means of increase and cancel. We take many snaps and hope for a good shot. Burton and Bunyan go on and on in search of virtue and a fine line. The rice we toss at the bride of course resembles the teeming hurray of sperm the groom...
September 2010
5 posts
from Walden
“Not long since I was present at the auction of a deacon’s effects, for his life had not been ineffectual: —
‘The evil that mean do lives after them.’
As usual, a great proportion was trumpery which had begun to accumulate in his father’s day. Among the rest was a dried tapeworm. And now, after lying half a century in his garret and other dust holes, these...
from Bernhard's Amras
Between Walter and myself only a semiconscious state continued to prevail, in that semiconscious state we existed side by side as though in and as though against the misapplied reason of our acquiescence: henceforth we only obeyed … Our mutual relationship was not without enmity … indeed our natural innate mutual aversion was in truth the source of our affection, of our sibling...
August 2010
4 posts
After Greece
Light into the olive entered And was oil. Rain made the huge pale stones Shine from within. The moon turned his hair white Who next stepped from between the columns, Shielding his eyes. All through The countryside were old ideas Found lying open to the elements. Of the gods’ houses only A minor premise here and there Would be balancing the heaven of fixed stars Upon a Doric capital. The...
Prism (a paperweight)
Having lately taken up residence In a suite of chambers Windless, compact and sunny, ideal Lodging for the pituitary gland of Euclid If not for a “single gentleman (references),” You have grown used to the playful inconveniences, The floors that slide from under you helter-skelter, Invisible walls put up in mid- Stride, leaving you warped for the rest of the day, A spoon in water; also...
“In a notice of The English Flower Garden (by William Robertson, Murray, 15 ed....”
– from Wallace Stevens’ Commonplace Book: A Fascimile and Transcription, ed. by Milton J. bates
Fire Poem
How unforgettably the fire that night Danced in its place, on air and timber fed, Built brightness in the eye already bright. Upon our knees, held by a leash of light Each straining shadow quietly laid its head As if such giving and such taking might Make ripe its void for substance. The fire said, If as I am you know me bright and warm, It is while matter bears, which I live by, For very heart...
July 2010
3 posts
Overturned Blue Shoe with Two Heels Under a Black Vault Hans Arp - Painted Wood - 1925 - Guggenheim Venice
Constructive Composition Joaquín Torres-García - Wood - 1932
“Commentary and translation stand in the same relation to the text as style and...”
– from Walter Benjamin’s ‘One-Way Street’
June 2010
3 posts
“I tie my Hat - I crease my Shawl -
Life’s little duties do - precisely...”
– #443, Emily Dickinson (from The Complete Poems, edited by Thomas H. Johnson)
Aedh Tells of the Rose in his Heart
All thing uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old, The cry of a child by the roadway, the creak of a lumbering cart, The heavy steps of the ploughman, splashing the wintry mould, Are wronging your image that blossoms a rose in the deeps of my heart. The wrong of unshapely things is a wrong too great to be told; I hunger to build them anew and sit on a green knoll apart, With the earth and...
“Let us recall that, in modern literature, the preoccupation with a profoundly continuous speech is what first gave rise—with Lautréamont, with Proust, then with surrealism, then with Joyce—to works that were manifestly scandalous. An excess of continuity unsettles the reader, and unsettles the reader’s habits of regular comprehension… the mind, with its measured and methodical...
May 2010
2 posts
“What is happening beneath the earth
at the remote nadir?
Lean over a fountain,...”
– from Translated from the Night by Jean Joseph Rabearivelo (trans. Robert Ziller)
“[My father’s] esteem for Samuel Beckett long preceded the fame of Waiting...”
– from §12 of Jacques Roubaud’s The Loop
April 2010
4 posts
“TWO-HOUSED, ETERNAL ONE, you are, un-
inhabitable. That is why
we build and...”
– By Paul Celan, trans. by Michael Hamburger
Born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. It does seem unlikely, but in American letters the unlikely is not unusual: Hart Crane came from Garretsville, Ohio; Pound was born in Idaho; neither Michigan nor Mississippi has any prima facie promise; Wallace Stevens saw exquisite light in Reading; Katherine Anne Porter in Indian Creek, Texas; Edward Arlington Robinson in Tide Head, Maine; and for T. S. Eliot...
“the bulldozer man picks up a red bottle that
turns purple and green in the...”
– from part 4 of A.R. Ammons’ Garbage
“Man, the straggling bifurcate animal, discovered in Eden that he was really...”
– from “Clothes,” The Gentle Art of Tramping by Stephen Graham
March 2010
1 post
“Perhaps I use [prison] as a metaphor for the dilemma of all men: necessity,...”
– Malamud
October 2009
1 post
“In effect, Roubaud requires us to move beyond the “age of suspicion”...”
– David Bellos, “The Pact of London”
August 2009
1 post
“An emotional attachment to an object, place, or person cannot exist without a...”
– George Fragopoulos on “I’d Like” by Amanda Michalopoulou at The Quarterly Conversation
July 2009
2 posts
“It is useless to appeal to the author’s intention, not because we…...”
– Jacob Russell via Larval Subjects
“If the character has to duck under a low doorway, my own shoulders sidle through...”
– Sam Kean @ 3QD
May 2009
1 post
Karl Blitz devoted himself to devising a logical system of universal symbols that would make it impossible for Hitler-style propaganda to succeed—”inconsistencies and falsehoods would be instantly exposed.” There was no response, and it looked like his life’s work was a failure. Then in the late 1960s Shirley McNaughton, a teacher at the Ontario Crippled Children’s Center...
March 2009
1 post
“…thereafter, various theorist-adventurers would find what they wanted,...”
– Spurious
January 2009
1 post
“Fiction” is free to distort the “real” in whatever way...”
– Dan Green, edited as always
December 2008
4 posts
“[At this point Ginsberg offers to show Lofton how to meditate. Lofton agrees but...”
– John Lofton interviews Allen Ginsberg, Harper’s Magazine. H/t: Daily Dish
“Content is wed to form; with each project the shape has to be reinv- ented; this...”
– Carol Maso, h/t The Existence Machine, edited