January 2012
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“Last night I sought in vain in the brutality of animal pleasure forgetfulness of...”
– from the Goncourt journals, Monday, January 1, 1879
December 2011
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“I am not trying to seem resistant to influences. I merely note that I have...”
– Samuel Beckett on reading Kafka, from The Letters of Samuel Beckett 1941-1956 (via)
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“It’s always the most conventional things that contain the largest measure of...”
– Javier Marías (via mythologyofblue)
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Some of the books I read this year
Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, by Barbara Comyns (Dorothy), in which a flood reveals more than it conceals.
Suicide, by Edouard Leve (Dalkey Archive), in which a novelist who later killed himself writes of/to a friend who previously killed himself.
Pictures and Tears, by James Elkins (Routledge), which is subtitled, “A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings”.
...
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“I find that idea of the essay as self-exploration kind of creepy. Because when...”
– Anne Carson, in conversation with John D’Agata
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“—can sadness be relieved, or can one only pass it by, very slowly?”
– Maria Dermout, The Ten Thousand Things
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“Sight says too many things at one time.”
– Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
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“Writing is a sort of ongoing suicide. The ideal occupation for anyone who...”
– Christopher Spranger, The Effort to Fall
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No. 79
What if the words capable of being exchanged between two people is finite and what if we used them all up, what then? What if we were not imaginative enough to invent new words and instead repeated the same ones so that they lost meaning? What if meaninglessness led to silence and silence led to… what?
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No. 78
And a reminder (to myself): always seeking the hidden meaning in things may be the surest way to miss what’s obvious.
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“The eyes only see what the mind is prepared to comprehend.”
– Henri Bergson (via mythologyofblue)
Cf. “Whoever possesses any originality must begin by extracting it; whoever does not, must acquire it. Talent is a long patience. Look at anything you intend to depict long and attentively enough to discover some aspect which has been seen and expressed by...
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Watch
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“When we read a story, we inhabit it. The covers of the book are like a roof and...”
– John Berger, “Ev’ry Time We Say Goodbye,” in Keeping a Rendezvous
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“What can you reply, in general, to human questions?”
– Houellebecq, The Map and the Territory
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