O Mundo de Claudia:

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November 30, 2008

At the National Theatre.

Pirandello at the Gielgud.

At the Barbican.

Beckett at the Young Vic.

God of Carnage.png
Reza at the Gielgud.

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It is sometimes useful to remind ourselves of the simpler aspects of things normally regarded as complicated. Take, for instance, the writing of a poem. It consists of three stages: the first is when a man becomes obsessed with an emotional concept to such a degree that he is compelled to do something about it. What he does in the second stage, namely, construct a verbal device that will reproduce this emotional concept in anyone who cares to read it, anywhere, anytime. The third stage is the recurrent situation of people in different times and places setting off the device and re-creating in themselves what the poet felt when he wrote it.

Public taste is 25 years behind, and picks up a style only when it is exploited by the second rate.

Philip Larkin, The Pleasure Principle

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Klee once wrote a poem and filled the spaces between the letters with various colors. the result was that the words revealed themselves to the consciousness in slow motion. The futurists composed their tavole parolibere according to this principle, while poems have also been written with one word in each page. (...) a good designer could set a text with the reading time varying according to meaning and emphasis, just as a person changes speed in speech. To a certain extent, of course, this is already done with punctuation.

Bruno Munari, Design as Art

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Janus words, oxymorons in one word, also known as antagonyms or antiphrasis: clip (to cut a little piece of and to put a little
piece on), dust ( to remove dust and to apply dust), sanction (a punitive action and to endorse).
In portuguese: já (means already but also soon) and in Spanish: huésped (means either guest or host).

Seen in Mikael Parvall, Limits of Language

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Arnold (Schoenberg) taught himself several instruments and played in a string quartet that occupied a room set aside for messenger boys. He learned instrumental forms by subscribing to an encyclopedia, and waited for the S volume to arrive before composing a sonata.

Intellectuals of fin-de-siècle Vienna were much concerned with the limits of language, with the need for a kind of communicative silence. (...) The impulse to go to the brink of nothingness is central to Webern's aesthetic; if the listener is paying insufficient attention, the shorter movements of his work may pass unnoticed. The joke went around that Webern had introduced the marking pensato: Don't play the note, only think it.

Alex Ross, The Rest is Silence.

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Realized how it is so much easier to find these here again than in the notebooks that mysteriously disappear into the black holes - aka my purses which I'm am sure are gateways to other dimensions where all my tiny possessions gather together and make fun of me.

Posted by claudia

Comments

you should really post more often if you can- I love reading your blog. I feel like I learn stuff- It often makes me feel just a little be more informed on the kind of person I want to be. also it just makes me smile- I'm totally with you on the black hole theory.

Posted by Grace at December 2, 2008 06:02 AM

There is a sci-fi book, whose author and title I forgot if I ever knew, about the land where little lost objects go and live out their alternative destinies. Well, that is what I think the book is about-- I never read it, only heard about it.

Posted by matt at December 13, 2008 02:17 PM