January 22, 2009
People who are about to die generally don't regret the parachute jumps they haven't made (unless they're falling from an aircraft without one). Instead, they regret the love they haven't given or haven't expressed. Generally, the reason they haven't done this is because they've been too full of hate, too in love with themselves or simply too crushed by the business of survival.
-Guy Browning, on the Guardian
(I wanted to save this not only because it strikes me as very wise in a pragmatic way but also because it will be a more articulate and compelling reply to anyone who invites me out for an adventure activity than my usual "Not in a million years, are you out of your mind?")
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November 30, 2008
At the National Theatre.
Pirandello at the Gielgud.
At the Barbican.
Beckett at the Young Vic.
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.
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November 02, 2007
I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,—who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering: which word is beautifully derived from “idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and asked charity, under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre,” to the Holy Land, till the children exclaimed, “There goes a Sainte-Terrer,” a Saunterer, a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean.
--Henry David Thoreau, Walking(1862)
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The Last Clown, 2000, is an endless animated loop by the Belgian Francis Alÿs. Set to the music of Charles Mingus, a man strolls along a path, lost in his thoughts. A pratfall and a glance over his shoulder elicit laughter, after which he returns to his private world.
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"There was the pedestrian who wedged himself into the crowd, but there was also the flâneur who demanded elbow room and was unwilling to forego the life of the gentleman of leisure. His leisurely appearance as a personality is his protest against the division of labour which makes people into specialists. it was also his protest against their industriousness. Around 1840 it was briefly fashionable to take turtles for a walk in the arcades. the flâneurs liked to have the turtles set the pace for them."
-- Walter Benjamin
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One of the basic situationist practices is the dérive [literally: “drifting”], a technique of rapid passage through varied ambiances. Dérives involve playful-constructive behavior and awareness of psychogeographical effects, and are thus quite different from the classic notions of journey or stroll.
In a dérive one or more persons during a certain period drop their relations, their work and leisure activities, and all their other usual motives for movement and action, and let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there. Chance is a less important factor in this activity than one might think: from a dérive point of view cities have psychogeographical contours, with constant currents, fixed points and vortexes that strongly discourage entry into or exit from certain zones.
--Guy Debord
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November 01, 2007
To provoke, or sustain, a reverie in a bar, you have to drink English gin, especially in the form of the dry martini. To be frank, given the primordial role played in my life by the dry martini, I think I really ought to give it at least a page. Like all cocktails, the martini, composed essentially of gin and a few drops of Noilly Prat, seems to have been an American invention. Connoisseurs who like their martinis very dry suggest simply allowing a ray of sunlight to shine through a bottle of Noilly Prat before it hits the bottle of gin. At a certain period in America it was said that the making of a dry martini should resemble the Immaculate Conception, for, as Saint Thomas Aquinas once noted, the generative power of the Holy Ghost pierced the Virgin's hymen "like a ray of sunlight through a window — leaving it unbroken."
--Luis Buñuel's autobiography, My Last Sigh
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Erte, Cocktail party
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August 22, 2007
Nectar vina cibus vestis doctrina facultas -- Venantius Fortunatus
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January 22, 2006
"É na diferença entre aquilo que sentimos e aquilo que acontece, entre o que pede o coração e não pode a vida, que muito cedo encontramos o hábito da tristeza."
"It is in the difference between what we feel and what happens, between what the heart asks for and life can't afford, that early we find the habit of sadness."
--Miguel Esteves Cardoso
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October 06, 2005
Meaning
"Either we remember the words but their meaning remains obscure; or we discover their meaning when we forget the words."
loosely translated from Gilles Deleuze's remark on Klossowski's "Le Baphomet".
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Deleuze as created by Toogle (fun, fun, fun)
"Toogle is a Text version of Googles Image Search. Currently it creates images out of the very term that was used to fetch those images, later we will endeavour to create images out of the search terms entered by users past and present. But for now please, go play."
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August 08, 2005
Words of Wisdom #467873
"I want to be with those who know secret things or else alone."
-- Rainer Maria Rilke
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August 02, 2005
Words of Wisdom #564678
Don't worry about avoiding temptation. As you grow older, it will avoid you anyway.
(adapted from I.)
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July 28, 2005
Words of Wisdom #23998
Yesterday is not ours to recover, but tomorrow is ours to win or to lose.
-- Lyndon Johnson
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July 25, 2005
Octavio Paz on my notebook
Time was elastic; space was a spinning wheel. All time, past or future, real or imaginary, was pure presence. Space transformed itself ceaselessly. The beyond was here, all was here: a valley, a mountain, a distant country, the neighbours' patio. Books with pictures, especially history books, eagerly leafed through, supplied images of deserts and jungles, palaces and hovels, warriors and princesses, beggars and kings. We were shipwrecked with Sinbad and with Robinson, we fought with d'Artagnan, we took Valencia with the Cid. How I would have liked to stay forever on the Isle of Calypso! In summer the green branches of the fig tree would sway like the sails of a caravel or a pirate ship. High up on the mast, swept by the wind, I could make out islands and continents, lands that vanished as soon as they became tangible. The world was limitless yet it was always within reach; time was a pliable substance that weaved an unbroken present.
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Al cerrar los ojos
los abro dentro de tus ojos.
(Closing my eyes
I open them inside your eyes.)
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Óyeme como quien oye llover
(Listen to me as one listens to the rain falling)
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Note to self: the blog as an online notebook - instead of pieces of paper everywhere and half-used moleskines; rebuild categories!
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April 29, 2005
Grammar
"But love has its grammar, even though it doesn't recognize tenses but only moods, and only one of those, actually: the present in-fin-it-ive. When you love it's forever and the rest doesn't matter. Any old love, no matter what kind. Because it's not true you get over it - you don't get over anything, which is a bit of a drawback most times; rather, you bring it along with you, like life, which in itself is nothing to shout about, except that you get over love even less than you do life. It's there like the starlight. Who cares if the stars are alive or dead? They shine and that's that, and even though you can't see them in the daytime you know they're there."
Claudio Magris, To Have been
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January 26, 2005
Saber mirar
Saber mirar es un sistema completamente nuevo de agrimensura espiritual. Saber mirar es un modo de inventar. E no existe invención tan pura como aquella que ha creado la mirada anestésica de ojo limpíssimo, ausente de pestañas, del Zeiss: destilado e atento, imposible a la floración rosada de la conjuntivitis.
La fotografia, como pura creación del espíritu (1927), Salvador Dalí
Knowing how to look is a completely new system of spiritual surveying. Knowing how to look is a way of inventing. And there isn’t a purer invention as the one created by the anesthetic glance of the most clean eye, absent of eyelashes, that is the Zeiss: distilled and attentive, impossible to the pink flowering of the conjuntivitis.
Photography, as a pure creation of the spirit (1927), Salvador Dalí
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September 29, 2003
Intelligence
So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence; and in this respect ministers of religion follow gospel authority more closely than in some others.
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