Emanations of the Yellow Sign @emanationsoftheyellowsign - Tumblr Blog

The language of the age is never the language of poetry."

–Thomas Gray

Hugo to Lamartine, re: Les Miserables and Political Ideals

To LAMARTINE HAUTEVILLE HOUSE MY ILLUSTRIOUS FRIEND, If to be an idealist is to be a radical, then I am one. Yes, from every point of view, I understand, I desire, and I hail improvement ; le miie??,* though condemned in the proverb, is not the ennemi du bien, for that would be equivalent to saying that it is the friend of evil.

Yes, a society which tolerates misery, a religion which admits hell, a humanity which admits war, appear to me to be a society, a religion, and a humanity of a lower order and it is towards the society, the humanity, and the religion of a higher world that I aspire : society without kings, humanity without frontiers, religion without sacred books. Yes, I combat the priest who sells lies and the judge who administers injustice.

To universalize property (which is the reverse of abolishing it) by getting rid of parasitism, i. e., to achieve the following object, every man an owner_ol_ property and no man master, that is my idea of true social and political economy. To sum up, as far as a man can will it, I would destroy human fatality, condemn slavery, banish misery, enlighten ignorance, cure disease, illumine darkness, and detest hatred. These are my principles, and that is why I wrote Les Miserables.

In my view Les Miserables is simply a book with fraternity for its starting-point and progress for its goal.

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#Victor Hugo #romanticism #revolution #socialism

theparisreview

A new exhibition at the New York Society Library, “Readers Make Their Mark,”collected annotated books from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, thus continuing the culture’s growing fascination with marginalia.

But this newest play, oh this great thing... It is the thread which has run through Western Civilization itself, an Exquisite Corpse made of many different volumes, redacted and edited and redacted again.

Edward Morris, “The Theatre and its Double” (no, not the Artaud book...)

#yellow sign #weird fiction

amelancholycharm

pilferingapples:

Also if you want to read a (translated) book about Gautier’s cats and other animals (including the Les Mis Cats) , My Private Menagerie is over here, on Gutenberg. Because Gautier wants everyone to know that his pets have always been precious floofs, and also sometimes Romantic heroes, so there’s that.

I had forgotten that the book begins with this sentence:

“I have often been caricatured in Turkish dress seated upon cushions, and surrounded by cats so familiar that they did not hesitate to climb upon my shoulders and even upon my head. The caricature is truth slightly exaggerated…”

love that not only was Gautier aware of this caricature, but was totally willing to admit its accuracy.

pilferingapples

Thank you, Charm!:D

The precocious death, and therefore the mutism of the legatee who can do nothing about it: this is one of the possibilities of that which dictates and causes to write. . . One then gives oneself one's own movement, one inherits from oneself for all time, the provisions are sufficient so that the ghost at least can always step up to the cashier.

Jacques Derrida, “To Speculate–on ‘Freud’ ”

#Tel Quel #yellow sign

The best sort of game does not aim so much at a specific goal but draws its excitement from the thought of its own unforeseeable sequels--as if spurred on by an enticing promise.

Hans Belmer, The Doll (1962)

#surrealism

fables-of-the-reconstruction-de

I confess I do not believe in time. I like to fold my magic carpet, after use, in such a way as to superimpose one part of the pattern upon another. Let visitors trip. And the highest enjoyment of timelessness-in a landscape selected at random-is when I stand among rare butterflies and their food plants. This is ecstasy, and behind the ecstasy is something else, which is hard to explain. It is like a momentary vacuum into which rushes all that I love. A sense of oneness with sun and stone. A thrill of gratitude to whom it may concern-to the contrapuntal genius of human fate or to tender ghosts humoring a lucky mortal.

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory (via petrichour)

He needed order, and a project; he needed habits. In the nakedness of the moments of exfoliation, the intensity of experience had in it a touch of terror--terror that no new meaning would blossom to replace the old ones now lost. Of course there was no such thing as a true repetition of anything; ever since the pre-Socratics that had been clear, Heraclitus and his un-twice-steppable river and so on. So habits were not truly iterative, but pseudo-iterative. The pattern of the day might be the same, in other words, but the individual events fulfilling the pattern were always a bit different. Thus there was both pattern and surprise, and this was Wahram's desired state: to live in a pseudoiterative. But then also to live in a good pseudoiterative, an interesting one, the pattern constructed as a little work of art.

Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312. (2012)

#science fiction

and just as the marvels of silence are eternal births--births of mind--so also the faculties of the word are spiritual emissions.

The Tripartite Tractate (c. late 3rd Century C.E.)

He is turning toward the shelves where--one notices now--books are arranged in great number, in an order perhaps more apparent than rigorous, but which explains no doubt why even someone familiar with the room would not notice them at first sight. He does not touch a single volume, he stays there, his back turned and utters in a low but distinct voice: 'How will we manage to disappear?'

Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation (1969)

His [The Father/Pleroma/All's] offspring, the ones who exist, are without number and limit and at the same time indivisible. They have issued from him, the Son and the Father, in the same way as kisses, when two people abundantly embrace on another in a good insatiable thought--it is a single embrace but consists of many kisses. [ . . . ] For this reason no mind can conceive of them--such is the perfection of that place--nor can words speak of them. For they are ineffable, unnameable, and inconceivable. Only they are able to name themselves in order to conceive of themselves. For they are not rooted here below [in matter]. Those who belong to that place are ineffable and innumerable, in accordance with the special structure that this is. And this is the form and the manner, and this is the kind, the joy, and the delight of the nameless, unnameable, inconceivable, invisible, and ungraspable unborn one.

The Tripartite Tractate (c. late 3rd Century CE)

#gnosticism #theology #Heresy

There is no sweeter pleasure than that of being accepted into the intimacy of a sensitive--which is to say, superior--individual who is dead; it is a very praiseworthy indiscretion to want to be initiated into the secret of the life of a great artist or an unhappy man.

Petrus Borel, "A Biographical Sketch of Champavert" (1833)

#petrus borel #bouzingo #Frenetic Romanticism #romanticism

heroes-get-made-deactivated2022

The Grapes of Wrath was written because Steinbeck stole the notes of a hardworking Dust Bowl-era journalist named Sanora Babb, who was trying to write her own book. When she finally had a chance to pitch it, she found that the market was overpowered by a successful book—based entirely on her notes. When Steinbeck saw the things in person that he later wrote about, he couldn’t stand to look at it for more than a day. Babb spent much of her career working with and chronicling impoverished farmers. Her book wasn’t published until the year before she died. In 2004. She would be a household name if not for the theft.

Fuck you, Steinbeck. (via theangelofbucephalon)

Steinbeck based his book on reports made by Sanora Babb (leaked to him by her boss, Tom Collins, to whom Grapes of Wrath is dedicated). Sanora Babb was planning to write her own book, but Steinbeck published before she did. Babb was told that the market could not bear another on the same subject. Her book, ‘Whose Names are Unknown’, was finally published in 2004. I haven’t read either book yet, but am now definitely going to be reading ‘Whose Names are Unknown’ soon. Babb’s novel is described as showing how by re-creating rudimentary democratic practices the refugees restructure their lives as a unified community, resisting violent discrimination. In ‘Whose Names are Unknown’, we hear the whole powerful story from the point of view of a woman who had actual experience with both the origin and the destination of the migrants.

Sanora Babb was a member of the US Communist Party in the 1930s and 40s, dropped out of the party due to the authoritarian structure and in-fighting.

(via jinerviet)

here are some sources, in case you were looking for them

(via corvus-cornix)

To quote my 5th grade class after we were forced to read The Red Pony: “John Steinbeck is a dipstick.”

(via writing-in-a-daydream)

holy crap I had no idea. Fucking hell.

(via daunt)

I knew there was a reason I never liked that asshole

(via exclamobang)

It is always a difficult task to puncture illusions, always a painful duty to relieve the public of its comforting errors, the lies to which it is devoted and has pledged its faith. Nothing is more dangerous than to create a void in the human heart. I would never risk such a scabrous mission. Believe, believe! Abuse yourselves and be abused! Error is almost always pleasant and consoling.

Petrus Borel, Champavert (1833)

#petrus borel #bouzingo #Frenetic Romanticism #romanticism

how do we persist week to week shifting the order of syllables on the page expecting a different outcome each time and by the next month to discover that red has always been underneath and that the king of Hades imminent with his upturned scepter and echo making both trees and waves to quake how do we come out of this margin into the full display of language?

Ivan Argüelles, Orphic Cantos (2014)

#ivan argüelles #Otherstream #semiotics

Certainly the divorce of history from literature is a process that involves very old events and is too long to be recounted here. Already apparent in the seventeenth century, legalized in the eighteenth century as a result of the split between the 'humanities' and the 'sciences,' the break was institutionalized in the nineteenth century by the academic establishment. At the foundations of this split is the boundary which the positive sciences established between the 'objective' and the imaginary, that is to say between that which they controlled and the 'remainder'.

Michel de Certeau, Heterologies: Discourse on the Other (1986)

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