Selvedge

[kenbaumann]

Explain your header image? I have a feeling it's interesting.

It’s a drawing by Pieter Bruegel the Elder from 1556. You can download a scan of the drawing here, and find out more about it in this free pdf. I think the patina on the drawing makes it much more interesting than the later engraving. But here’s why I like it:In the center of the drawing rests a huge dead fish, its vacant eye pointed at the viewer. The big fish barfs up smaller fish, who in turn choke out smaller fish—a man wielding a knife absurdly larger than him cuts open the big fish’s belly and out pour more creatures claiming one another with their mouths. This fractal consumption is repeated all over the drawing—bigger creatures trying to eat their little copies. On the left side of the drawing, a thin man fishes for fish with a fish. In the distance, a hunting party stands around the carcass of another big catch. A faceless man with a pitchfork prepares to stake. In the air above him is a fish with wings, flying forward with its mouth open. Farthest away is a port city, civilization. Near the bottom of the drawing, an old man gestures to a child to look—look at the orgy of flesh in the cavern of the dead thing’s mouth. The child points, however, to the man with whom they both share their boat—and of course, he’s pulling a smaller fish out of the sliced-open belly of another fish. Maybe the child was looking at that man, satisfied with the smaller and simpler spectacle, having just understood that life consumes life, that it must eat in order to even be eaten. Regardless, the older man wants the child—and the drawing’s viewer—to look at the bountiful mouth of the dead behemoth. In the background, dead fish are being strung from trees. And sneaking away from us, trying to leave the scene on light feet, is a plump fish with human legs, its meal surreptitiously held in its jaws.Life is not placid, nor is it a story about a special species—us—gliding over beasts that are little more than vacant objects. Life is breathing, moving, killing, sneaking, shitting, eating, pointing, and dying. Those processes ground everything on the surface of this planet in the same convulsive spirit. The child points to the man who has killed another to eat—the old man points to the fish who has eaten its kind. As long as the man and the child understand that they’re pointing at comic variations on a self-reliant theme, they’re both right.

[dailymarx]

the dwelling of the poor man is a hostile element,. – a dwelling which he cannot regard as his own hearth where he might at last exclaim: “Here I am at home” – but where instead he finds himself in someone else’s house, in the house of a stranger who always watches him and throws him out if he does not pay his rent.

Marx - Human Requirements 1844 (via dailymarx)

[klimbims]

Tank driver Mikhail Smirnov, 1944 by Olga Via Flickr: Tank driver Mikhail Sergeyevich Smirnov, after the fight. During the attack on the German positions, an anti-tank shell hit in the forehead of T-34 and killed all the crew members except Mikhail Smirnov. Smirnov burst with his T-34 into the German positions, crushed three anti-tank guns and destroyed another 30 enemy soldiers and officers from the machine gun. Picture taken January 17, 1944, in the Leningrad region. Mikhail Smirnov was killed in action six months later in Latvia, on July 29, 1944

[sovtime]

Танкист Михаил Смирнов. 1944 год.

[diana-george]

Khyrgil avait déjà, à cette époque… cette physionomie triste de soldat aux yeux jaunes fendus ver le haut, cet air d’homme épuisé, de tankiste sans grade en train de saigner gravement, mais refusant de révéler à son entourage la vérité sur sa blessure, préférant se renfermer dans le silence, dans la lassitude, ayant choisi de se taire et attendant quelque chose qui tarde à venir, peut-être la mort, ou sinon, un réponse claire sur le sens du combat, ou peut-être un ordre de repli et de déshonneur, transmis en ondes courtes par des officiers déjà auréolés de flammes, à l’agonie, et sans doute s’impatientant un peu d’avoir encore toute sa conscience.

---Antoine Volodine, Nuit blanche en Balkhyrie

[diana-george]

Victoria, 2015. The trailer makes use of an untze-untze-untze techno soundtrack, and the trailer’s editing & the review pull-quotes (”heart-racing” “adrenaline-pumped”) give a certain image. 

It’s more like... if the Dardenne brothers had re-made Rififi. 

I mean that in a good way. Imagine the Dardennes’ heroine Rosetta pulled into a heist and its aftermath: not just a gun-moll, not just the whipped and spurned lover in Rififi; an agential, autonomous force. 

[diana-george]

October 2015 issue of Asymptote is out. Among other great things, a translation of part of Thomas Stangl’s novel Der einzige Ort. 

After the destruction one can let the picture return, at a safe distance, on the other side of the border from which the open palm turns one away with the stop signal. Skin that is tightened around the round of the eyeball, visible behind the names, the legends, the cultural garbage, the ghosts of those cave dwellers who are buried under strata of time, with no firm hold, no chains and no outlook, as is the way of things with ghosts. In the imagination of the German Africanist, impostor, lover and madman Leo Frobenius, the Garamantes emerge from the darkness after centuries, now wandered to West Africa, to where they, founding empires, transpose their culture and make sure that nothing legible to the Europeans and, as they think, part of their heritage, has wholly disappeared from reality. Perhaps in somewhat direct fashion we are pursuing a similar objective to that German professor, less gullible than he, more modestly remaining in the world of letters. Yet there is the moment when the sentences close up; any analogy becomes impossible because one searches for connections in vain and the hands grasp after nothing; the ground beneath the feet is one thing, another is the sentences that are passed between writers and readers, the letters on paper, in stone. A sudden last connection, then, a last thought in his severed head (he, the person who emerges at last, feels his way out of the emptiness, indeterminate and always in the wrong time, who sets out on his way and is already at the end of his way), the place is established, scarcely anything besides, it has to be a thought, a sentence, that is appropriate at this border, belongs to a history that is to take form at the border between the real and the illusory, between the own and the alien; a vanishing sentence: here definitions arise and vanish. A hopeless endeavour, trained on what was never experienced, keeps the game in progress; an attempt to get closer that never succeeds because the yearning always revolves and proliferates within itself, almost without a bearer. 

---From: Thomas Stangl, Der einzige Ort. Roman © Literaturverlag Droschl Graz - Wien 2004

translated from the German by Tom Morrison

[diana-george]

The blood drains from my head, the noise of things bursting, merging, avoiding one another, assails me on all sides, my eyes search in vain for two things alike, each pinpoint of skin screams a different message.

Beckett, Molloy.

[semioticapocalypse]

Josef Breitenbach. Ski’s Carnival in the Tyrol. c. 1933

[::SemAp FB || SemAp::]

[diana-george]

for jacobwren

(I like the ghost image in the back.)

[homilius]

Now was there ever any man seen to sleep in the Cart, between New-gate, and Tyborne? between the Prison, and the place of Execution, does any man sleep? And we sleep all the way; from the womb to the grave we are never throughly awake; but passe on with such dreames, and imaginations as these, I may live as well, as another, and why should I dye, rather than another? but awake, and tell me, sayes this Text, Quis homo? who is that other that thou talkest of?

Donne, Sermon of 28 March 1619 (’To the Lords upon Easter Day at the Communion, the King Being Dangerously Sick at New-Market’)

I was just thinking (about something that says less than this from Donne, something that stops short of him, but still) about  by Nagisa Oshima’s film Death by Hanging, in which a man survives one execution and is slated for another, but the botched hanging caused him to forget his crime, and now he cannot be hanged (again) until his amnesia is cured. No one in the story wants to execute a dreamy, inattentive, forgetful man who seems not to compass his death or the reasons for it. (a little like Barnardine in Measure for Measure.)

[diana-george]

J. T. Mahany and Jeffrey Zuckerman interview Antoine Volodine:

The eleventh lesson of Post-Exoticism in Ten Lessons, Lesson Eleven describes Lutz Bassmann as the last member of the first generation of post-exotic novelists. We hear about how, for his final book, “it was necessary to construct a new fiction to … finally balance and close everything: Return to the Tar.” Will we readers in the real world ever have the chance to read Lutz Bassmann’s Return to the Tar?

Return to the Tar will indeed be the last work in our collective edifice, the text with which the post-exotic goal will have been achieved—a work of art in prose, consisting of forty-nine volumes. Forty-nine, that magical number, so often used in our fictive structures, our poems, our declarations or lessons. I make no mystery of the last book’s last sentence—“Je me tais.” It was more than twenty years ago when I first announced this final sentence, and, collectively, with Lutz Bassmann and the others, we have advanced in our literary Bardo, we are moving toward this last phrase, hoping we have enough life left, hoping we have escaped extinction, in order to trace these fateful words and finally nous taire—become silent.

We are quite close to the end, but there are still eight or nine works left to sign and give to publishers before our task is completed. And I do not know who will write these last few works. Fortunately, there are a number of us.

Wait, which one of you are we talking to right now?

Uh-uh-uh!

*

Read the rest at Paris Review blog.

(That last question is nice; I think it’s in Minor Angels that there’s a line like “Of the two of us, which one are you?”)

[diana-george]

Qui prétend commenter cette œuvre [la Trilogie de Samuel Beckett] court le risque de, auquel il a peu de chance d'échapper, de prendre, à son insu, la suite de la parole qui, à la fin de chaque livre, se résout en elle-même et cesse. Il fait sien, malgré lui, le désir forcené du narrateur  qu'il connait depuis si longtemps de ne pas se taire; il cède sans y prendre garde à la tentation de dire d'une mille et second manière ce qui l'a été déjà de mille et une, précisant bien, en toute humilité (mais sans doute avec l'orgueil secret d'avoir à tenir le même propos que le texte qu'il aime), qu'il ne peut qu'échouer là où le sujet qu'il relaie prétend n'avoir pas réussi. Les quelque "pantins" que le narrateur de L'Innommable se propose de forger [... shoot, can't find the verb here...] une autre voix dont il a doué un personnage nouveau, tout aussi imaginaire que les autres, et qu'il manouvre avec autant de facilite: le critique.

---Bruno Clément, L’Œuvre sans qualités, Rhetorique de Samuel Beckett. 

I don’t like this at all; I would very much like Clément to be wrong. And yet I think he has my number, with regard to commenting on Volodine. Especially that there “l'orgueil secret d'avoir à tenir le même propos que le texte qu'il aime.” 

(will translate later) 

[homilius]

The astonishment of life is the absence of any appearance of reconciliation between the theory and practice of life. Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, now and then, for a serene and profound moment amidst the hubbub of cares and works which have no direct bearing on it;–is then lost for months or years, and again found for an interval, to be lost again. If we compute it in time, we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable hours. But what are these cares and works the better? A method in the world we do not see, but this parallelism of great and little, which never react on each other, nor discover the smallest tendency to converge. Experiences, fortunes, governings, readings, writings, are nothing to the purpose; as when a man comes into the room it does not appear whether he has been fed on yams or buffalo,–he has contrived to get so much bone and fibre as he wants, out of rice or out of snow. So vast is the disproportion between the sky of law and the pismire of performance under it, that whether he is a man of worth or a sot is not so great a matter as we say. Shall I add, as one juggle of this enchantment, the stunning non-intercourse law which makes co-operation impossible? The young spirit pants to enter society. But all the ways of culture and greatness lead to solitary imprisonment. He has been often baulked. He did not expect a sympathy, with his thought from the village, but he went with it to the chosen and intelligent, and found no entertainment for it, but mere misapprehension, distaste and scoffing. Men are strangely mistimed and misapplied; and the excellence of each is an inflamed individualism which separates him more.

Emerson, Montaigne; or, the Skeptic (via homilius)

[diana-george]

For forgottenness:

It was not until he had spent more than two hours at the window, admiring this horizon which spoke to his soul, and often also letting his eyes rest on the governor's charming palazzo, that Fabrizio suddenly exclaimed: "But is this really a prison? Is this what I have so greatly dreaded?" Instead of seeing at every turn discomforts and reasons for bitterness, our hero let himself be charmed by the attractions of his prison.

Suddenly his attention was forcibly recalled to reality by a terrifying din: his wooden cell, which was not unlike a cage and moreover was extremely resonant, was violently shaken; the barking of a dog and little shrill cries completed the strangest medley of sounds [...] The dog and the gaoler were to sleep in the interval of three feet left between the stone pavement of the original floor and the wooden planks on which the prisoner could not move a step without being heard.--Stendhal, The Charterhouse of Parma.

[diana-george]

Donate to bring the People’s Community Medics to Seattle.

“The People’s Community Medics was founded in 2011 by Sharena Thomas and Lesley Phillips. As two members of the Oscar Grant Committee and learning of the refusal of the police to call an ambulance for 20 minutes for the fatally wounded Oscar Grant, we decided that our people need to learn basic emergency first aid so that we can help one another until an ambulance arrives. We reached out to a fellow activist who is a health worker and together we developed a curriculum for our training and learned how to treat seizures and bleeding traumas like gunshot wounds.”

[diana-george]

“Those phrases in my article, when I wrote them, were so colourless in comparison with my thought, so complicated and opaque in comparison with my harmonious and transparent vision, so full of gaps which I had not managed to fill, that the reading of them was a torture to me, they had only accentuated in me the sense of my own impotence and of my incurable want of talent.”--Proust, The Sweet Cheat Gone. 

(The narrator goes on to read his colourless article as a reader, not as himself, and finds it brilliant. And: “I decided that I would send Françoise out to buy fresh copies, in order to give them to my friends, I should tell her, in reality so as to touch with my finger the miracle of the multiplication of my thought and to read, as though I were another person who had just opened the Figaro, in another copy the same sentences.” But I won’t quote that, as it doesn’t apply to my current situation.)

[diana-george]

From Jeff Nunokawa’s Note Book:

4420. “as if I, not they, were leaving”

Addio, one or two will say, leb’ wohl, And press my hand as if I, not they, were leaving. Look for us. We have chosen--no--you chose. --James Merrill, “The Opera Company.”

Weeks and months go by where you feel a little lonelier with each passing Act. Is it some higher altitude, or some lowering one, that seems to thin out the atmosphere of love? Have they left you, or you left them? When did you stop believing you could know the difference? How did the Grand Life of show-and-tell and promise come to feel like someone else’s Big Reveal, spoken and sung in some romantic language, now nowhere near your own?

And you know that this feeling forlorn is partly just the season:  the Season of Losses. You’re pretty sure you’ll get some of your old Play back. Maybe even some of the same stars (the ones you’ve not completely failed, the ones not faded from you, forever) will return to play their old roles--or maybe parts of the parents. (It wouldn’t be the first time.)

Meanwhile, though, you pay your respects as best you can to what you’ve lost and what you’ve left. Whatever the cost of its admission, compared to the cost of departure, it was basically free of charge. 

**

Note: “The point will be to close with their exact words” (”The Opera Company”). 

[rubd]

“We ceaselessly gather the honey of the visible, to store it up in the great golden beehive of the invisible” – Rilke, letter 1925

The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973) Roger Raveel, De illusie van de geborgenheid en de verschrikking van de witte leegte, 1987. André Kertész, Martinique, 1972.

[languagefetishist-deactivated20]

But objects of art do not merely interest and absorb, they move us; we are not merely involved with them, but concerned with them, and care about them…They mean something to us, not just the way statements do, but the way people do. People devote their lives, sometimes sacrifice them, to producing such objects just in order that they will have such consequences; and we do not think they are mad for doing so.

Stanley Cavell, “Music Discomposed” (via languagefetishist)