Monthly Archives: February 2006

janouch on kafka on work

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“On my next visit to Kafka I inquired:

‘Do you still go to the carpenter in Karolinenthal?’

‘You know about that?’

‘My father told me.’

‘No, I have not been for a long time. My health does not permit it any more. His Majesty the Body.’

‘I can quite understand. Working in a dusty workshop is not very pleasant.’

‘There you are wrong. I love to work in workshops. The smell of wood shavings, the humming of saws, the hammer-blows, all enchanted me. The afternoon went so quickly I was always astonished when the evening came.’

‘You must certainly have been tired.’

‘Tired by happy. There is nothing more beautiful than some straightforward, concrete, generally useful trade. Apart from carpentry, I have also worked at farming and gardening. It was all much better and worth more than forced labour in the office. There one appears to be something superior, better; but it is only appearance. In reality one is lonelier and therefore unhappier. That is all. Intellectual labour tears a man out of human society. A craft, on the other hand, leads him towards men. What a pity I can no longer work in the workshop or in the garden.’

‘But you would not wish to give up your post?’

‘Why not? I have dreamed of going as a farm labourer or an artisan to Palestine.’

‘You would leave everything behind?’

‘Everything, if I could make a life that had meaning, stability, and beauty. Do you know the writer Paul Adler?’

‘I only know his book The Magic Flute.’

‘He is in Prague. With his wife and the children.’

‘What is his profession?’

‘He has none. He has no profession, only a vocation. He travels with his wife and the children from one friend to another. A free man, and a poet. In his presence I always have pangs of conscience, because I allow my life to be frittered away in an office.’

(Gustav Janouch, Conversations with Kafka, trans. Goronwy Rees, pp. 15–16)

locus solus industries 003

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Despite the failure of our last product at the dread hand of copyright, Locus Solus Industries bravely marches ever onward. Here is Locus Solus 003:

a shirt featuring raymond roussel

Mr. Roussel is, alas, safely dead, and hopefully no one will complain about this one. Also, you can click on that little picture and see a much bigger black-and-white graphic where you can admire the ligatures on the type.

gass on elkin on work

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“Vocation: that is no trade-school word for him. What is your name? Where are you from? What do you do? Among those who survey the habits of Americans, there are many who find these questions, which are likely to be among the first beckoning blanks we fill in on forms, and the first we put to strangers, indicative of our indifference to the essential self. Should men and women, after all, be defined in any important way by their work? The answer is, of course, yes; otherwise, the activities that largely support our lives and consume our time would be unfriendly, foreign, and irrelevant to us. Our occupation should not be something we visit like the seashore in summer or a prisoner in prison, despite the fact that the work may be unpleasant and dangerous and hard, like that in a mill or a foundry or a mine. Even if it is like speaking a foreign language we haven’t mastered, that incapacity itself is totally defining.”

(William Gass, “Open on the Sabbath”, in A Temple of Texts: essays, pp. 246–247)

the trance of travel

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“And the unity of all the views of a train journey is not established on the basis of the circle itself (whose parts remain sealed), nor on the basis of the thing contemplated, but on a transversal that we never cease to follow, moving ‘from one window to the next.’ For travel does not connect places, but affirms only their difference.”

(Gilles Deleuze, Proust & Signs, trans. Richard Howard, pp. 126–127)

(on finishing proust)

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“Disappointment is a fundamental moment of the search or of apprenticeship: in each realm of signs, we are disappointed when the object does not give us the secret we were expecting. And disappointment itself is pluralist, variable according to each line. There are few things that are not disappointing the first time they are seen. For the first time is the time of inexperience; we are not yet capable of distinguishing the sign from the object, and the object interposes and confuses the signs. Disappointment on first hearing Vinteuil, on first meeting Bergotte, on first seeing the Balbec church. And it is not enough to return to things a second time, for voluntary memory and this very return offer disadvantages analogous to those that kept us the first time from freely enjoying the signs (the second stay at Balbec is no less disappointing than the first, from other aspects).

(Gilles Deleuze, Proust & Signs, trans. Richard Howard, p. 34)

the climate

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I myself like the climate of New York
I see it in the air up between the street
You use a worn-down cafeteria fork
But the climate you don’t use stays fresh and neat.
Even we people who walk about in it
We have to submit to wear too, get muddy,
Air keeps changing but the nose ceases to fit
And sleekness is used up, and the end’s shoddy.
Monday, you’re down; Tuesday, dying seems a fuss
An adult looks new in the weather’s motion
The sky is in the streets with the trucks and us,
Stands awhile, then lifts across land and ocean.
We can take it for granted that here we’re home
In our record climate I look pleased and glum.

Edwin Denby, originally published in In Public, in Private, 1948, collected in Dance Writings and Poetry.

Also: MP3 (0:56, 889kb), from Edwin Denby’s page at Pennsound.

(see also: this Jacket feature.)

how to proceed in the arts

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“13. Youth wants to burn the museums. We are in them – now what? Better destroy the odors of the zoo. How can we paint the elephants and hippopotamuses? Embrace the Bourgeoisie. One hundred years of grinding out teeth have made us tired. How are we to fill the large empty canvas and the end of the large empty loft? You do have a loft, don’t you, man?”

(Frank O’Hara & Larry Rivers, “How to Proceed in the Arts” (formatted dreadfully, that link), written 1952, published 1961)