all is linked


07.24.18

"When he grew old, Aristotle, who is not generally considered a tightrope dancer, liked to lose himself in the most labyrinthine and subtle of discourses… ‘The more solitary and isolated I become, the more I come to like stories,’ he said."
—Michel de Certeau
from The Practice of Everyday Life

Still from Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville

language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square

07.05.18

"Language is my whore, my mistress, my wife, my pen-friend, my check-out girl. Language is a complimentary moist lemon-scented cleansing square or handy freshen-up wipette. Language is the breath of God, the dew on a fresh apple, it’s the soft rain of dust that falls into a shaft of morning sun when you pull from an old bookshelf a forgotten volume of erotic diaries; language is the faint scent of urine on a pair of boxer shorts, it’s a half-remembered childhood birthday party, a creak on the stair, a spluttering match held to a frosted pane, the warm wet, trusting touch of a leaking nappy, the hulk of a charred Panzer, the underside of a granite boulder, the first downy growth on the upper lip of a Mediterranean girl, cobwebs long since overrun by an old Wellington boot."
—Stephen Fry
from a Fry and Laurie sketch—watch it here

From LIFE magazine, photographer unknown

Perception of an object costs

06.30.18

Perception of an object costs
Precise the Object’s loss—
—Emily Dickinson

Jakob Mohr - Beweisse (Proofs), ca 1910
from "Traces upon the Wonderblock," a collection of drawings
and books made by psychiatric patients btw 1890 and 1920.
More information here

a professional schizophrenic

06.18.18

"A translator is a professional schizophrenic, continuously wandering on the edge, risking his sanity in the crashing zone of two languages and two cultures. He is operating in an elevated state of mind, as if in trance––indeed, it is a creative trance, a state of bipolarity, of being at two places simultaneously, moving parallel in two worlds. In this sense, he is an exotic stranger, an itinerant of the ever-growing literary world. Invisibly, condemned to solitude, he enters this atypical state of awareness, becomes a trance-later."

Source unknown

how delicate

05.31.18

how delicate,
this holding of certain words in the mouth
—Carl Phillips
from “Stray”

Polaroid collage, artist unknown

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