"I suppose you do love me, in your way," I said to him one night close to dawn when we lay on the narrow bed. "And how else should I love you—in your way?" he asked.
I am still thinking about that.
—Anne Carson, Plainwater
Salvador Dalí carried around a little piece of Spanish driftwood to help him to ward off evil spirits.
The rise in spatial pathology generates a post-agoraphobic prosperity. The culture industry hides its most powerful smokestacks behind the fast-growing pine forests planted by corporations. Your face looks so tender in the green wash. The porn bot inquires you hot? want to see? I'm lonely. One bot pairs up with the spectre of Adorno for the Friday BOGO-a-gogo.
In order to master “the art of becoming an original writer in three days,” Emmanuel Carrere said you must “take a few sheets of paper and for three days on end write down, without fabrication or hypocrisy, everything that comes into your head. Write down what you think of yourself, of your wife, of the Turkish war, of Goethe, of a trial, of the Last Judgment, of your superiors—and when three days have passed you will be quite out of your senses with astonishment at the new and unheard-of thoughts you have had.”
Nervous about poor reception for Ulysses, James Joyce chose his birthday, February 2, 1922, as the day to publish his novel. Two copies of the book arrived in Paris by train on this day, one for Joyce and one for his bookseller, Shakespeare and Company. Somewhere else, a man signed his father's name to his own suicide letter.
This is how Ernst Jünger appears to Martin du Gard, who pays him a visit in Berlin in 1933: "A boy of thirty-five, with ascetic face, full of energy and reserve, sporting, dressed for golf, plus fours, a cigarette between his lips." Jünger's disconsolate exclamation follows: "We have lost everything, even honor! The movement of the masses has gone, he tells me, personal valor is imposed in Russia and in Italy. And it must be imposed in Germany. But the socialist ideal is not dead. Social democracy is no longer capable of being the agent of socialism. It is now the turn of the National Socialists." (Roberto Calasso)
Charles Dickens bumbled about with a navigational compass on his person at all times and always faced north while he slept in order to optimize his creative spirit and affirm his writing practice.
News of continuous suicides greeted Arthur Koestler as he waited in Lisbon in the autumn of 1940: "And more suicides: Otto Pohl, Socialist veteran, Austrian ex-Consul in Moscow, ex-Editor of the 'Moskauer Rundschau.' Walter Benjamin, author and critic, my neighbor in 10, rue Dombasle in Paris, fourth at our Saturday poker parties, and one of the most bizarre and witty persons I have known. Last time I had met him was in Marseilles, together with H., the day before my departure, and he had asked me: 'If anything goes wrong, have you got anything to take?' For in those days we all carried some 'stuff' in our pockets like conspirators in a penny dreadful; only reality was more dreadful. I had none, and he shared what he had with me, sixty-two tablets of a sedative, procured in Berlin during the week which followed the burning of the Reichstag. He did it reluctantly, for he did not know whether the thirty-one tablets left him would be enough. It was enough. A week after my departure he made his way over the Pyrenees to Spain, a man of fifty-five, with heart disease. At Port Bou, the Guardia Civil arrested him. He was told that next morning they would send him back to France. When they came to fetch him for the train, he was dead."
Two men watch the ducks peck at each other near the lake created for the nice park. One of them wonders if the ars rhetorica has replaced the quest as the shape of the artistic journey, since language itself frequently sets the terms of the quest and defers to elected authorities for the epistemological solution. The other lets the fire ants bite him in the hopes of discovering a novel discourse.
The problematic is articulated as a pre-game advertisement for capitalism's solutions.
"Not everything is a text, but a text is a good image for much of what we know, for everything we know that is beyond the reach of our own immediate experience, and for most of what we imagine is our immediate experience too,” said James Wood. “Literature is practice for, the practice of, such knowledge.”
Isabel Allende began writing her first novel on January 8, 1981. What had started as a letter to her grandfather who was dying eventually transformed into her book The House of the Spirits. Allende now begins all of her books on January 8. Initially, it was out of allegiance with her first book, but now she says she does it because she can be in solitude, since everyone knows she is not to be disturbed on that date. (Matt Levin)
"The Zone doesn't exist. It's Stalker himself who invented his Zone," Andrei Tarkovsky said once upon a time in the world—and then, again, in a book written by John Wall Barger.