“Honesty without talent might be said to be incomplete honesty … The full truth is unattainable to naivety, and the completely honest artist is not pure in heart.”

— Clement Greenberg, Art and Culture

8:41 pm  •  15 March 2013

“It is addressed to another you, not the placeholder self that you that you often mistake yourself for.”

— Mark Fisher, on The Pop Group, Don’t Sell Your Dreams

12:38 am  •  9 March 2013

“Nothing will fit if we assume a place for it. To attempt to classify writing before one has had the experience of its activity will be to misplace it altogether. What can be said is something itself particular—to senses of form, to the literal nature of living in a given place, to a world momently informed by what energies inhabit it.”

— Robert Creeley, Introduction to The New Writing in the USA

10:54 pm  •  8 March 2013  •  3 notes

“There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.”

— Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”

9:41 pm  •  8 March 2013  •  1 note

“…by corrosives, which in Hell are salutory and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and displaying the infinite which was hid.”

— William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

11:50 pm  •  24 February 2013  •  2 notes

Bodenlosigkeit, the total absence of firm ground in reality.

9:32 pm  •  22 February 2013

“…so is the sea the natural element for industry…for the ties of the soil and the limited circles of civil life with its pleasures and desires, it substitutes the element of fluidity, danger and destruction.”

(Hegel, Philosophy of Right)

“Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off- then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can. ”

(Melville, Moby Dick)

“Not long beneath the whelming brine,

Expert to swim, he lay”

(Cowper, “The Castaway”)

12:53 am  •  22 February 2013

“After the first glass of vodka
you can accept just about anything
of life even your own mysteriousness
you think it is nice that a box
of matches is purple and brown and is called
La Petite and comes from Sweden
for they are words that you know and that
is all you know words not their feelings
or what they mean and you write because
you know them not because you understand them
because you don’t you are stupid and lazy
and will never be great but you do
what you know because what else is there?”

— Frank O’Hara, “As Planned”

12:44 am  •  22 February 2013  •  65 notes

“

That funnel web seems to me an apt figure of the world.

It exhibits beauty, ingenuity, intricacy. Imagine it in the early morning jewelled with dewdrops, and each of these at sunny moments a spark of light or a section of rainbow. Woven, too, as no man could weave it, fine and flexible, frail and tenacious.

Yet are its beauties of brilliancy and colour no real part of it. The dew evaporates, the tints and sparkle vanish, the tenacity remains, and at the bottom of all lurks a spider.

”

— Christina Rossetti

1:07 am  •  21 February 2013

“We were once, she says, a great race, we Laments.
Our fathers worked the mines up there in the mountains;
sometimes among men you will find a piece of polished
primeval pain, or a petrified slag from an ancient volcano.
Yes, that came from there. Once we were rich.—”

— Rainer Maria Rilke, tenth Duino Elegy

9:30 pm  •  17 February 2013  •  1 note