are these ones from some college: There’s something about the chains of logic evident in these little narratives that I love: the weird defeatism which reminds me so much of the little stories of Robert Walser, like this one: The Robber A pretty woman loved a robber. She was rich, gave parties. Of him it can [...]
(Robert Walser, dead in the snow. Not sure off the top of my head who this photo is by; I found it here, discussed by J. M. Coetzee here.) ((From Maira Kalman’s blog at The New York Times. Times Select only, sorry.) walser in the snow
Two small books this time: the first, an illustrated edition of a short Robert Walser piece, the second, an illustrated edition of a long short story by Franz Kafka. The Kafka came out last year though I only recently found a copy; the Walser is from this year, and it’s a new translation, unlike the [...]
The girl (II) On a bench along an avenue sat a girl. All around her lay gardens with charming houses inside, and the girl, you might say, was lovely to look at. Everyone who saw her sitting quietly on her own had a desire to engage her in conversation. Soon someone stepped up and offered her a [...]
(Peanuts, 26 June 1995. From here.) emotionally bankrupt
(Jonathan Barnbrook’s Priori Acute, from Emigre.) oh emigre
(Frontispiece to Lewis Carroll’s Symbolic Logic, published by MacMillan and Co., Ltd., 1897. Online version here.) a syllogism worked out
(Giotto’s frescoes in the Cappella degli Scrovegni, Padua. Proust: When my father had decided, one year, that we should go for the Easter holidays to Florence and Venice, not finding room to introduce into the name of Florence the elements that ordinarily constitute a town, I was obligated to evolve a supernatural city from the [...]
“Simon was twenty years old when it occurred to him one evening as he lay in the soft, green moss beside the road that, just as he was, he could wander out into the world and become a page boy.” (Robert Walser, from “Simon: a love story”, trans. Susan Bernofsky, p. 15 in Masquerade and Other [...]
“—Music hurts me. I don’t know whether I truly love it. It finds me wherever it happens to. I don’t go looking for it. I let it caress me. But these caresses are injurious. How should I say it? Music is a weeping in melodies, a remembrance in notes, a painting in sounds. I can’t [...]