January 2012
15 posts
“The act of reading ruins and fractured objects needs some deliberately twisted linguistic devices that figuratively resemble the ruined space itself.” Vladislav Todorov, Red Square, Black Square (pg 3)
“There is happiness— such as could arouse envy in us — only in the...”
– Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History’
ars-moriendi:
You appear to me to be melancholia
Depicted by a good master painter,
[…]
Oh how dearly I should love to have news
Of someone who is in the other world,
[…]
text from Decameron, Boccacio
images from Melancholia, von Trier
1 tag
“Chiquitita,” ABBA
WatchI’ve made all my irl friends watch this video because I think, without any irony whatsoever, it may be the best song/video ever made. Like all ABBA songs, “Chiquitita” is exuberantly tragic, a celebration of sadness, a sadness delivered expressly through Agnetha Fältskog’s facial expressions and Benny Andersson’s piano solo. The world is terribly sad, guys, but...
Borges' review of Citizen Kane (1941) →
lecollecteur:
An Overwhelming Film Citizen Kane (called The Citizen in Argentina) has at least two plots. The first, pointlessly banal, attempts to milk applause from dimwits: a vain millionaire collects statues, gardens, palaces, swimming pools, diamonds, cars, libraries, men and women. Like an earlier collector (whose observations are usually ascribed to the Holy Ghost), he discovers that...
Before I read Leaving the Atocha Station, I read something else that mentioned how many characters in Poe’s stories draw the curtains during the day and talk in the dark, only going out into the world at night. Obviously this is a reference to “Murders in the Rue Morgue”, but I read about it second hand in a book I can’t remember anymore. Does anyone have any recollection...
December 2011
14 posts
Pale Saints, “The Sight of You” from...
2 tags
6 tags
necropastoral. murder. nostalgia. symbolism.
Me and a friend once tried to write a book about the Green River killings; we wanted it to be a true-crime book without a criminal (and without heroic policemen). We would focus on the quasi-suburban landscape where the bodies had been found (near a slaughterhouse, near a prison, near an airport). We called the object of our investigation—that landscape—the pastoral abject. Soon...
November 2011
13 posts
4 tags
“My day passes between logic, whistling, going for walks, and being depressed. I...”
– Wittgenstein to Russell, Christmas 1921 (via invisiblestories)
2 tags
“No really, his books are awesome. There’s always some guy—totally damaged by the...”
– Chad Post, “Why Read Antonio Lobo Antunes’ in Quarterly Conversation.
Woodsmoke, The Knots, from The Blistering Sun, The...
5 tags
2047 (2046, 2666)
Three pictures of Rostock hang over my desk: an engraving, an oleograph, and a photo.
The engraving shows the houses clustered near the churches. The word ROSTOCHIUM appears in the clouds…To the left and right, winged lions with eagles’ beaks: “Anno 1620”…Somewhere in the church there is also the skeleton of a whale: over thirty feet long, the object of equal...
3 tags
October 2011
9 posts
“… reading means on the contrary no longer seeing the presence of signs, so that...”
– Gérard Macé, The Last of the Egyptians (via invisiblestories)
I bought this based on your indirect recommendation. The excerpts from the publisher are really amazing:
About Champollion I knew: that he did not go to Egypt with Napoleon, that he never saw the actual Rosetta stone, only more or less...
memorable/synchronous reading moments:
read ‘rings of saturn’ on two flights (two funerals) to and from long beach to seattle. this passage after looking out the window at lakes that reflected clouds like they were holes in the earth leading to another earth or portals to another world, as we approached seatac:
‘No matter whether one is flying over Newfoundland or the sea of...
“Herodotus tells us that in his day the slime of the Nile changed into rats, and that they might be seen in process of formation. Can any one tell us what the brain is? All things can be explained by magnetism. Where is little Arthur Bertrand’s soul? The soul is formed as the body forms. Knock a nail into your head, then you become a madman, and then where is your...
“The only permanence available to us seems to be extinction.”
– Johannes Rand (via nevver)
horse and rider: a movie question
i have a cinema question! a few years ago i was in france and they showed this old soviet (?) silent film about this old man in a village who builds his own coffin and nails himself inside. during the whole process, it shows these black horses approaching, the camera focusing only on their legs, and as he gets closer to finishing his coffin, the horses get closer to the village, and as he climbs...
