Self-Portrait in Bytes

"Honesty without talent might be said to be incomplete honesty … The full truth is unattainable..."

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 20:41:47 -0400

“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

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

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 00:38:42 -0500

“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

"Nothing will fit if we assume a place for it. To attempt to classify writing before one has had the..."

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 22:54:02 -0500

“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

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

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 21:41:07 -0500

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

- Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control”

"…by corrosives, which in Hell are salutory and medicinal, melting apparent surfaces away, and..."

Sun, 24 Feb 2013 23:50:28 -0500

“…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

Bodenlosigkeit, the total absence of firm ground in reality.

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 21:32:33 -0500

Bodenlosigkeit, the total absence of firm ground in reality.

“…so is the sea the natural element for industry…for the ties of the soil and the...

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:53:49 -0500

“…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”)

"After the first glass of vodka you can accept just about anything of life even your own..."

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 00:44:31 -0500

“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”

"That funnel web seems to me an apt figure of the world. It exhibits beauty, ingenuity, intricacy...."

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 01:07:00 -0500

“

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

"We were once, she says, a great race, we Laments. Our fathers worked the mines up there in the..."

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 21:30:49 -0500

“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

magnificentruin: manifesto

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 20:16:09 -0500

magnificentruin:

manifesto

"To discriminate schools, of art, of literature, is, of course, part of the obvious business of..."

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 17:18:47 -0500

“To discriminate schools, of art, of literature, is, of course, part of the obvious business of literary criticism: but, in the work of literary production, it is easy to be overmuch occupied concerning them. For, in truth, the legitimate contention is, not of one age or school of literary art against another, but of all successive schools alike, against the stupidity which is dead to the substance, and the vulgarity which is dead to form”

- Walter Pater, Appreciations

dronecowgirl: Kazimir Malevich’s coffin, May 1935. © State...

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 20:01:38 -0500

dronecowgirl:

Kazimir Malevich’s coffin, May 1935. © State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg.

"The friend of wisdom is the one who appeals to wisdom, but in the way that one appeals to a mask..."

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 02:16:18 -0500

“The friend of wisdom is the one who appeals to wisdom, but in the way that one appeals to a mask without which one would not survive, the one who makes use of wisdom for new, bizarre and dangerous ends—ends which are, in act, hardly wise at all. He wants wisdom to overcome itself and be overcome.”

- Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jan/31/wes-anderson-worlds/

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 15:08:09 -0500

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/jan/31/wes-anderson-worlds/:

Michael Chabon taking look at Wes Anderson’s work.

It’s bizarre to read a writer who’s at least decent (Kavalier and Clay is a solid novel, obviously not one of the greats but worth the time it takes to read it) propounding an aesthetic theory that’s just completely out of date. He wants us to like Wes Anderson for making “models” of the world, right, For making “miniatures,” tiny representations of the world?

One of the few enduring lessons of modernism is that you can’t just model the world as it is. Any depiction necessarily distorts the world. Anderson’s movies aren’t “scale version[s] of the world,” and insofar as they try to be, they’re failures. (Think of how much of the world is annihilated in a Wes Anderson movie, how much of human existence simply doesn’t fit into the “little boxes.”)

And that’s not what Anderson wants. At least I don’t think it is. Because how much do his works actually reflect the world, anyway? The sheer weirdness of his situations, the kid prodigies and plays-within-plays, is something the viewer can’t ever quite forget. The “artifice” Chabon mentions is exactly what keeps the films from being mere models of the world, what forces them to be something different.

Think of the “plays within plays” at the heart of Rushmore. These could be read as miniatures, analogies of what Anderson is doing. Except that one by one they’re revealed as failures, reflections of their creators’ neuroses. The kid in Rushmore makes plays as a way of expressing his neurotic need for control: he makes a tiny world which he can control, just as he tries to control the lives of those around him. (Hence the way he acts in the real world: stilted, artificial, like someone trying to seem like a movie character.) He escapes, in the end, not by making a more perfect depiction of the world but by making an even more outrageous distortion of it, a Vietnam war film staged by children and dominated by over-the-top special effects. If there’s a message in the plays, it’s that they’re different from the world, and that this difference should be embraced.

Wes Anderson’s movies succeed not when they try to achieve control but when they use artifice to reveal their own lack of control, when they reveal that they cannot depict the world because the world is beyond depiction.

(Chabon’s Joseph Cornell example is revealing, because Cornell’s boxes aren’t “models of the world,” they’re collages. They seek not to model the external world but to box it, include it, shift its meaning.)

"The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing..."

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 01:19:15 -0500

“The text you write must prove to me that it desires me. This proof exists: it is writing. Writing is: the science of the various blisses of language, its Kama Sutra (this science has but one treatise: writing itself).”

- Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text (reprinted in A Barthes Reader)

"…The heart, the most exotic place of all"

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 01:17:20 -0500

“…The heart, the most exotic place of all”

- Susan Sontag, “Project from a Trip to China” (I, etcetera)

"the flag should never be displayed with the union down except as a sign of distress the flag..."

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 23:27:17 -0500

“the flag should never be displayed with the union down except as a sign of distress
the flag should never touch anything underneath it
such as the ground the floor or water
it should never be carried laid out flat or horizontally
but always aloft and free
it should not be festooned drawn back or up in folds
but allowed to fall free
the flag should never be used to cover a ceiling
it should never have placed on it or attached to any part of it
any mark insignia letter word figure design picture drawing
of any nature whatsoever
the flag should never be used as a receptacle for
receiving holding carrying or delivering
it should not be used for advertising purposes and
when the flag is in such condition that it is no longer fit for use
as an emblem of display
it should be destroyed
in a dignified way
preferably by burning”

- David Antin, “code of flag behavior” (collected in Selected Poems 1963-1973; originally from code of flag behavior, 1968)

"Jöns: Why all this daubing? Painter: To remind people of death. Jöns: That won’t make them any..."

Sun, 27 Jan 2013 23:19:44 -0500

“Jöns: Why all this daubing?
Painter: To remind people of death.
Jöns: That won’t make them any happier.
Painter: Why make them happy? Why not scare them?
Jöns: Then they won’t look at your picture.
Painter: Yes, they will. A skull is more interesting than a naked woman.
Jöns: If you scare them—
Painter: They think—
Jöns: Then they think.
Painter: And are still more scared.”

- Ingmar Bergman, The Seventh Seal

Ezra Pound. Photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1971, Venice....

Fri, 25 Jan 2013 01:44:00 -0500

Ezra Pound. Photographed by Henri Cartier-Bresson, 1971, Venice. A year before his death at 87. [via]