1.
A “collaborative poem” found online during the past few weeks. A poem in which the links matter. A poem for those who don’t see how we are, in fact, collaborators.
2.
A Super Mario 3 instruction booklet.
3.
A poem titled “Poem with a Line from an Asterisk on page 15 of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Dark Brain of Piranesi”.
4.
A lie.
5.
An eerie pleasure when reading Derrida's postcards and discovering the rhythm of “Brandt Rhapsodie”—-Benjamin Biolay's epistolary duet with Jeanne Chantal—-in my mind’s margins. The marginalia’s clipped syntax displaying the sort of precision that Derrida mobilizes when shearing his words and phrases; rubbing against the clippers of broken-off statements in Biolay… how meticulous we are in our withholdings. Elsewhere, the scene of the lover passing by in a car, the other in wired by desire and rendered in noir. The hunger that can hardly be deciphered from its own staging— that sort of elegant fiction.
6.
Three excerpts from Richard Howard’s translation of Emil Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born:
7.
An awareness that there is no such thing as “innocence” —- and utter disgust at the endless fetishization and marketing of it.
8.
An interior room in the mind where the homonculus walks back and forth, back and forth, considering Gustav Mahler’s hatred for program music, recalling that Mahler’s words in a letter on May 15th, 1894: "At some point or another, comparisons always limp."
9.
A desire to know the name of the “unknown addressee” to whom Mahler addressed the limping letter. An intellectual limpidness.
10.
A spoiler to Secrets, Lies and Consequences: A Great Scholar's Hidden Past and his Protégé's Unsolved Murder by Bruce Lincoln, namely, that Mircea Eliade’s wife might have conspired with certain disgruntled members of the Romanian diaspora to effect P. Culianu’s murder.
11.
A notebook dump.
Ion Culianu's "Fugue in the Numbers": the narrator wants to forge an art, a method for running out of the world, escaping into pure sounds, an empire of triangles and triangulations outside time. Escapism, for Culianu, is not cynical but mystical; loosely similar to Robert Musil's Man Without Qualities - to be above or outside of specificity that renders us vulnerable and therefore easy to control. Identity is the trap for Culianu. And alternative forms are available in their dreaming, magic, and disruption, as with Grazia Marchianò's "mathemagics,” a combo of math and magic mind games which generate cosmic and cultural values based on an epistemology of the "fourth dimension." A sort of transformative trickery. Culianu wanted to undo the eschatology of metaphysical systems which he felt to be oppressive and overdetermined. Both his novels, Hesperus and Jocul de Smarald, were eschatologically- oriented. Hesperus revolves around a post-apocalyptic plot where scientists aim to eliminate suffering and pain while leading to effortless liberty—a freedom that doesn’t require labor. The ideal eschatology is self-automating.
12.
A PDF excerpt from Noam Zadoff’s book on Gershom Scholem.
And an intriguing sense in which this tracks with Bruce Lincoln’s statements about how Scholem shrugged off Theodor Lavi’s claims about Eliade’s anti-Semitic past.
“Scholem responded politely and promised to send a copy to Eliade for comment,” Lincoln writes. “At the same time, he expressed the view that Lavi's dossier gave no evidence of anti-Semitic activity on Eliade's part and characterized Lavi's suggestion that Eliade knew of the coming Holocaust” as irresponsible.
Source: chapter from Zadoff’s monograph
13.
An inability to stop thinking about how Percy B. Shelly‘s letter to Maria re-uses the ancient literary device that Guy Davenport called "the speculative letter to a friend" intended for others to read.
J'ai passé une nuit délicieuse même si j'ai un peu la migraine
Tu es belle quand tu es odieuse
Je te dis "à dans une semaine"