I First Learnt the Facts From a Lunatic @letscollectallthethings - Tumblr Blog

»micrograms« by robert walser

robert walser was one of the most misunderstood and strangest yet most wonderful poets in german language. he spent 27 years in switzerland asylums, with no visible signs of mental illness - his form of exile…

in order to overcome his writer’s block, namely the fear of pen and white paper, walser filled already labeled, partially crumpled paper with a soft pencil and tiny cursive. in 1985, almost thirty years after robert walser’s death, the first volumes of the decrypted “micrograms” appear.

on the 25th of december 1956 he was found, dead of a heart attack, in a field of snow near the asylum. the photographs of the dead walker in the snow are almost eerily reminiscent of a similar image of a dead man in the snow in walser’s first novel, geschwister tanner. (source wikipedia)

#jane arden #other side of the underneath #1972 #cinema #kino #feminist cinema

#National Theatre #greek theatre #Tony Harrison #Oresteia #Ὀρέστεια

William Gass on William Gaddis

...'because we must always listen to the language; it is our first sign of the presence of a master's hand; and when we do that, when we listen, it is because we have first pronounced the words and performed the text, so when we listen we hear, hear ourselves singing the saying, and now we are real readers, we are participating in the making, we are moving the tune along the line, because no one who loves literature can follow these motions, these sentences, half sentences, of William Gaddis, very far without halting and holding up their arms and outcrying hallelujah there is something good in this gosh awful God empty world.'...

#Gaddis #Gass #literature #lit #Recognitions

From "Agapé Agape" by William Gaddis

...'is it a stew of disease and impairment, madness and suicide that produces the artist, Keats consumptive and Beethoven deaf, Dostoevsky epileptic, Byron's foot and Homer's blindness if he existed at all, Baudelaire and Schiller and enough madness and suicide to please God himself, Schumann and Kleist suicides, Hölderlin insane and the most agonising of them all of course yes, sitting there empty eyed in a white gown on exhibit for his loathsome sister's teatime guests, wasn't that she'd betrayed the man, the artist, sold him out no that's to be expected, he's expendable, just the vehicle or the husk of it for the work that's what she corrupted, worse than murder'...

#William Gaddis #Gaddis #literature quotes #lit quotes #madness #suicide #death

"To produce the eerie noise which preceded the appearance of the ghost Olivier...went to enormous trouble. He made as many as fourteen separate sound tracks. On one he had recorded fifty women shrieking; on another the groans of as many men; a third consisted of a dozen violinists scraping their bows across the strings on a single screeching note. These various tracks had then to be blended in different volumes and intensity until they produced a noise which seemed to him to resemble - on what authority is uncertain - 'the lid of hell being opened'".

#Hamlet #Shakespeare #ghosts #spirits #noise #noise music #musique concrete

On Dullness

“To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting questions is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it’s because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.”

- David Foster Wallace, from “The Pale King”

#dfw #david foster wallace #lit #lit quotes #dullness #pain #literary quotes