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brutal matter

05.19.18

"Literature is concerned with plot and character. Its intention is to be “well-written” and “comprehensible.” It’s a very commonplace activity. Then there is the progression towards writing … writing as writing … I mean simple textual writing.… It is that desire to do something new which compels one to move from literature to writing and from writing to matière écrite … brutal matter … no wasted words or wasted time. I also colored in the poem … the manuscript itself is a piece of visual art … There is an oral aspect to it, as well as a visual and a musical architectural aspect … This is no longer “writing,” it’s the process of working with a material that is common to all art. An artist who reaches this point – like Beethoven in music or Cézanne in painting – no longer knows, in the final count, how he does what he does. I am convinced of this. I call this a state of wisdom."
—Pierre Guyotat

Antonio Tapies - Gran X, 1988

to show things for what they are

05.07.18

"To show things for what they are and what else they are."
—Minor White, paraphrased

Eric Rondepierre - Le Voyeur, 1996-98

let the roots dangle

04.19.18

whatever you have to say, leave the roots on,
let them
dangle

And the dirt

       Just to make clear
       where they come from—
—Charles Olson
as quoted in Ralph Maud's What Does Not Change: the Significance of Charles Olson's "The Kingfishers"

Dorothea Lange – "A Sign of the Times—Depression— Mended Stockings, Stenographer, San Francisco, 1934"

everything we call real

03.24.18

“Everything we call real is made of things that cannot be regarded as real.”
—Niels Bohr as cited by Karan Barad
in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

Soap films, from Patterns in Nature by Peter S. Stevens, 1974

a book of spells

03.10.18

“A proper dictionary is a book of spells.”
—Jeanette Winterson
from an interview with the New York Times

a portrait of James Murray, the principal editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, photographer unknown

three levels

02.25.18

“Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.”
—Walter Benjamin
from One Way Street

a page from Proust's manuscript of Le temps retrouvé

questions hidden by answers

02.10.18

“The purpose of art is to lay bare the questions which have been hidden by answers.”
—widely attributed to James Baldwin
original context unclear

attribution unknown

glass of water

01.23.18

“There’s only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that’s a writer sitting down to write.”
—Mignon McLaughlin
original context unclear

Hannah Hoch – Der Kleine P (The Little P)

reality tolerance

12.29.17

“No artist tolerates reality.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche

photographer unknown

a wise reader

12.11.17

“A wise reader reads . . . not with his heart, not so much with his brain, but with his spine.”
—Vladimir Nabokov
from “Good Readers and Good Writers”

Lucien Freud - The Artist's Mother Reading, 1975