Department of Barthes and Leathers

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[rorykillmore]

there’s nothing profound about writing a character who’s near-suicidally devoted to taking down her enemies because she’s lost everything and then taking the last person she loves away from her and ending the show with her in anguish. there’s nothing groundbreaking about writing a character desperately struggling for agency & identity & to break away from the organization that abused her only to have her killed off in the process of destroying them, for shock value. and there’s certainly nothing new or fresh or clever about giving queer characters the tragic ending they were always “destined” to have, yet again. but whatever.

[prousthetics]

At Least Two Types of People

“There are at least two types of people, the first for whom the ordinary wordliness is easy. The regular social routines and material cares are nothing too external to them and easily absorbed. They are not alien from the creation and maintenance of the world, and the world does not treat them as alien. And also, from them, the efforts toward the world, and to them, the fulfillment of the world’s moderate desires, flow. They are effortless at eating, moving, arranging their arms as they sit or stand, being hired, being paid, cleaning up, spending, playing, mating. They are in an ease and comfort. The world is for the world and for them.

Then there are those whom the events and opportunities of the everyday world wash over. There is rarely, in this second type, any kind of absorption. There is only a visible evidence of having been made of a different substance, one that repels. Also, from them, it is almost impossible to give to the world what it will welcome or reward. For how does this second type hold their arms? 

Across their chest? Behind their back? And how do they find food to eat and then prepare this food? And how do they receive a check or endorse it? And what also of the difficulties of love or being loved, its expansiveness, the way it is used for markets and indentured moods? 

And what is this second substance? And how does it come to have as one of its qualities the resistance of the world as it is? And also, what is the person made of the second substance? Is this a human or more or less than one? Where is the true impermeable community of the second human whose arms do not easily arrange themselves and for whom the salaries and weddings and garages do not come?

These are, perhaps, not two sorts of persons, but two kinds of fortune. The first is soft and regular. The second is a baffled kind, and magnetic only to the second substance, and made itself out of a different, second, substance, and having, at its end, a second and almost blank-faced reward.”

- Anne Boyer, “Garments for Women”

[prousthetics]

Poetry was the wrong art for people who love justice. It was not like dance music. Painting is the wrong art for people who love justice. It is not like science fiction. Epics are the dance music of the people who love war. Movies are the justice of the people who love war. Information is the poetry of the people who love war. My favourite arts are the ones that can move your body or make a new world. What at first kept me enthralled wasn't justice, it was justice-like waves, and a set of personal issues, like the aestheticization of politics and the limitations of reading lists before the digital age.

Anne Boyer, “Garments for Women”

[prousthetics]

On the local radio show a man who won a Pulitzer prize in fiction explained that one must write every day because if a person does not write every day a person forgets how to access the subconscious. If one did not write every day then whenever a person comes back to writing she would have to learn to write from the beginning again.

Anne Boyer, “Garments for Women”

[prousthetics]

A novelist must learn to carry on a dialogue with others, but especially with himself; this will help him know who he is. If he fails, instead of a novel, he will build a verbal artifact that attempts to simulate a narrative form, but whose breathing will be wrong. It will, perhaps, pick up something in the atmosphere. The author knows that he will please either Caesar or the masses, it makes no difference; he has written it for one of those two deities. A few years later, it will end up on the scrapheap.

Sergio Pitol, “The Art of Flight”

[prousthetics]

Memory works with the same oblique and rebellious logic as dreams. It rummages in dark holes and extracts visions that, unlike those of dreams, are almost always pleasant. Memory can, at the discretion of whoever possesses it, be colored by nostalgia, and nostalgia produces monsters only by exception. Nostalgia lives off of the trappings of a past that confronts a present devoid of attraction. Its ideal device is the oxymoron: it summons contradictory incidents, intermingles them, causes them to merge, and brings order in a disorderly way to chaos.

Sergio Pitol, “The Art of Flight”

[met-robert-lehman]

“Ewer” in the Form of a Sea Monster Ridden by Bacchus, Robert Lehman Collection

Robert Lehman Collection, 1975 Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY Medium: Rock crystal, cut on the wheel, enameled gold.

http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/460505

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“The rain was trying to compose this morning On what the sun had glossed as marginalia.”

— Howard Moss, from section 5 of “Magic Affinities,” New Selected Poems (Atheneum, 1985)

[bookmania]

“…I preferred books to the world of reality, and something of that has remained with me—a slight taste for eternity.”

— Simone de Beauvoir, The Mandarins

[bookmania]

“We’re so engaged in doing things to achieve purposes of outer value that we forget that the inner value, the rapture that is associated with being alive, is what it’s all about.”

— Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“This is why I have written you in here, hoping to find a way to change the meanings of these words, to say war but mean peace, death but mean life, hate but mean your love, nothing but everything you could possibly mean to be.”

— Richard Jackson, from “Misunderstood,” Out of Place: Poems (The Ashland Poetry Press, 2014)

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

“But being is making: not only large things, a family, a book, a business: but the shape we give this afternoon, a conversation between two friends, a meal.”

— Frank Bidart, from “Advice to the Players,”  Star Dust: Poems (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005)

[prousthetics]

The very profusion of human imagination, together with its correlate in the world (once imagination becomes informed and concrete), cannot possibly be explored and inventoried other than through utopian function; any more than it can be tested without dialectical materialism.

Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope (1954-59)

[prousthetics]

Even in the most sublimated work of art there is a hidden 'it should be otherwise'. When a work is merely itself and no other thing, as in a pure pseudo-scientific construction, it becomes bad art -- literally pre-artistic. The moment of true volition, however, is mediated through nothing other than the form of the work itself, whose crystallization becomes an analogy of that other condition which should be. The content of works of art is never the amount of intellect pumped into them; if anything, it is the opposite.

Theodore Adorno, Commitment (1962)

[prousthetics]

If we are ever to arrive at authentic direct communication, we must bring about the destruction of all the forms of pseudocommunication. The victory will go to those who are capable of creating disorder without loving it.

Guy Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution (1958)

[prousthetics]

Art can cease being a report about sensations and become a direct organization of more advanced sensations. The point is to produce ourselves rather than things that enslave us.

Guy Debord, Theses on Cultural Revolution (1958)

[books-n-quotes]

“Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in” ― Isaac Asimov