Books
Films
(Susan Howe & David Grubbs performing Souls of the Labadie Tract at the Beinecke Library at Yale, 10 February 2009. Grubbs is playing two different khaens.)
“The Greeks wanted to know everything so that they could think better and the Romans so that they could act better, but the medieval Christians wanted it for the greater glory of God and the remission of their sins. To us today, faced with a knowledge explosion of truly staggering proportions, all three of our ancestor cultures may look thoroughly naive in their hopes. We should be cautious in out conclusions, however; as their descendants, we carry in the strata of our minds all sorts of fossil gifts from them.”
(Tom McArthur, Worlds of Reference, p. 67.)
“Like Thales, Solon and Chilon, Periander of Corinth was considered on of the Seven Sages of Greece. To others, like Aristotle, he was simply a tyrant. However, there is a bizarre story about the lengths to which Periander went in order to conceal his place of burial: he instructed two young men to meet a third man at a predetermined place and kill and bury him. Then he arranged for four men to pursue the first two and kill and bury them. Then he arranged for a larger group of men to hunt down the four. Having made all these preparations, he went out to meet the two young men for he, Periander, was the third man.”
(Simon Critchley, The Book of Dead Philosophers, p. 5.)
Books
Exhibitions
“(‘A book is a box full of words,’ the O’ had said. ‘Some books are boxes full of boxes – Chinese boxes.’ ‘An effect resembling the circus clown car.’ ‘Yes, some books are just one big box with five sides that you put over a trapdoor in the floor of the world – and up comes everything until the box bursts.’ The story within the story within one of Marco Polo’s Chinese boxes – and whether or not he ever went to China, I certainly went to Washington.
Or as my favorite exhibit at the LC, Keith Smith’s ‘string book’ – instead of a written story, the reader follows strings shifting into suggestive patterns as they travel [like the ropes the Norns pass back and forth in Götterdämmerung] through the pages. Not knowing from page to page what form the strings will take creates numerous narrative yarns and multiple variations on the theme of loss.)”
(James McCourt, Delancey’s Way, pp. 206–7.)
“”Waking at dawn, I went out and down to Duval Street for coffee at an all-night stand, then to the southernmost point in the U.S. I sat on a bollard trying to work out the following question – one O’Maurigan had posed on the flight down, quoting an exchange between Hart Crane and one of his critics. Do the compass, the quadrant, and the sextant contrive tides, or do they merely record them? You can see why.”
(James McCourt, Delancey’s Way, p. 157.)
“The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light. To gain such perspectives without velleity or violence, entirely from felt contact with its objects – this alone is the task of thought. It is the simplest of all things, because the situation calls imperatively for such knowledge, indeed because consummate negativity, once squarely faced, delineates the mirror-image of its opposite. But it is also the utterly impossible thing, because it presupposes a standpoint removed, even though by a hair’s breadth, from the scope of existence, whereas we well know that any possible knowledge must not only be first wrested from what is, if it shall hold good, but is also marked, for this very reason, by the same distortion and indigence which it seeks to escape. The more passionately thought denies its conditionality for the sake of the unconditional, the more unconsciously, and so calamitously, it is delivered up to the world. Even its own impossibility it must at last comprehend for the sake of the possible. But beside the demand thus placed on thought, the question of the reality or unreality of redemption itself hardly matters.”
(Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 247.)
“I looked at my image in the window again. I had never had a problem conceiving of myself as in a movie. But suddenly came this deconstructionist vogue for the comic book, and I was more and more experiencing stop-frame and panel memory rather than flow-through.”
(James McCourt, Delancey’s Way, pp. 18–19.)
“MR HILARY: You talk like a Rosicrucian, who will love nothing but a sylph, who does not believe in the existence of a sylph, and who yet quarrels with the whole universe for not containing a sylph.”
(Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey, chapter XI, cited on p. 475 of John Crowley’s Little, Big.)