January 2011
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Forgetting Someone, by Yehuda Amichai
Forgetting someone is like forgetting to turn off the light in the back yard so it stays lit all the next day. But then it’s the light that makes you remember.
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“You shouldn’t write for anyone, only for yourself. And one should never write a...”
– E.M. Cioran, Writing at Risk: Interviews in Paris with Uncommon Writers, August 1983 (via onlyondemairt)
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December 2010
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No. 37
The feeling that you are no more or less than the last thought someone’s had of you.
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“There is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to...”
– Gustave Flaubert
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“Perhaps I am doomed to retrace my steps under the illusion that I am exploring,...”
– André Breton (via bedfellows)
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Danny Norbury, “The Night is for You and...
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“… perhaps I really regard myself as an intelligent man only because...”
– Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground
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“Perhaps fantasy is what you fill up maps with rather than saying that they too...”
– Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (via aperfectcommotion)
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The Problem, by Richard Siken
“The problem (if there was one) was simply a problem with the question. He wants to paint a bird, needs to, and the problem is why. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how, because hows are easy, series or sequence, one foot after the other, but existentially why bother, what does it solve? Be the tree, solve for bird. What does that mean? It’s a problem of focus, it’s a problem of...
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Why (not) to read Thomas Bernhard →
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Some of the books I read this year, part two
An Attempt to Exhaust a Place in Paris, by Georges Perec (Wakefield), in which an author who wrote a novel without a single e sits in a cafe for three days and, well, attempts to document everything he sees.
C, by Tom McCarthy (Knopf), in which we learn about cryptography, cocaine, ciphers, co-pilots, codes, coincidences, communication, and crackpots, all through the point of view of a certain...
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Some of the books I read this year, part one
The Way of the World, by Nicolas Bouvier (NYRB), in which I agree with the author when he writes that
Traveling provides occasions for shaking oneself up but not, as people believe, freedom. Indeed it involves a kind of reduction: deprived of one’s usual setting, the customary routine stripped away like to much wrapping paper, the traveler finds himself reduced to more modest proportion – but...
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On Le Bonheur d'Etre Bien Aimee
Day after day I think of you as soon as I wake up. Someone has put cries of birds on the air like jewels.
from Short Talks by Anne Carson (via)
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“There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair...”
– Daniil Kharms, The Blue Notebook
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“A map of the true part of you, reader, would show every place where you have...”
– Gerald Murnane, Inland
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“The more you refuse life, the more you write. This is writing.”
– Bhanu Kapil, Incubation
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“The deplorable mania of doubt exhausts me. I doubt about everything, even my...”
– Gustave Flaubert (via colettesaintyves)
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“I believe that basically you write for two people; yourself to try to make it...”
– Ernest Hemingway (the epigraph to Gerald Murnane’s Inland)
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No. 35
I’m lost. In a familiar room, lost.
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