Published on Saturday 23 August 2008 .
“In his designs for bookbindings and jackets, Duchamp often made user of the continuity between front and back: in the chess book L’Opposition et les cases conjuguées sont reconciliées, 1932; in the designs for Hebdomeros and Ubu, executed by Mary Reynolds, 1935; in the cover made for Anthologie de l’humour noir, 1940; in First Papers of Surrealism, 1942; in VVV Almanac for 1943; in Le Surréalisme en 1947; in Jaquette, the rejected jacket design for Rudi Blesh’s Modern Art USA; and in his own exhibition catalogues for Pasadena, 1963 (Bib. 70), and Cordier & Ekstrom, 1965 (Bib. 72). In 1922, Duchamp and Rrose Sélavy planned an endless book: ‘a round book i.e. without beginning or end . . with the back made of rings around which the pages turn’ (Bib. 24, no. 66). This idea took shape as Some French Moderns Says McBride (Bib. 6)”
(Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Portable Museum, note 22, p. 162.)
Published on Saturday 23 August 2008 .
“With the signing of the agreement concluded between the Arensbergs and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, on 28 December 1950, Duchamp’s work, almost in its entirety, reached the care of a public collection without ever coming into contact with the art market. Duchamp’s comment: ‘I never had such a feeling of complete satisfaction.’ ”
(Ecke Bonk, Marcel Duchamp: The Portable Museum, p. 19.)
Published on Wednesday 20 August 2008 .
“Norbert A’Campo of the University of Basel once asked Grothendieck about something related to the Platonic solids. Grothendieck advised caution. The Platonic solids are so beautiful and so exceptional, he said, that one cannot assume such exceptional beauty will hold in more general situations.”
(Allyn Jackson’s “Comme Appelé du Néant— As If Summoned from the Void: The Life of Alexandre Grothendieck”, Notices of the AMS, vol. 51, no. 10, November 2004, p. 1194.)
“I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.”
(Thoreau, “Economy” in Walden.)
“It is one of the strange facts of experience that when we try to think about the future, our thoughts jump backwards. It may well be that nature has some fundamental metaphysical law by which opening up what we call the future also opens up the past in equal degree.”
(Buckminster Fuller, quoted on p. 90 of Guy Davenport’s “Wo es war, soll ich werden” in The Drummer of the Eleventh North Devonshire Fusiliers.)
Published on Saturday 9 August 2008 .
“It follows from this that tauromachy can be taken for the typical example of an art in which the essential condition of beauty is a difference of phase, a deviation, a dissonance. No aesthetic pleasure would thus be possible without there being violation, transgression, excess and sin in relation to an ideal order serving as a rule; nevertheless absolute license, like absolute order, could only ever be an insipid abstraction devoid of meaning. Just as lurking death gives colour to life, so sin, and dissonance (which contains the seeds of, and suggests, possible destruction) confers beauty on the rule, extricates it from its state of fixed norm and turns it into an active, magnetic pole from which we move away or towards which we tend. Just as regret for lost innocence gives flavour and fragrance to vice, so order, the rule (which acts like a force of compression) is as necessary to the fulgurating blossoming of the left-sided element as is a fulcrum to the action of a lever. And so reappearing here and there in the imaginary tangential point (a limit towards which we tend, but which, like the torero, we finally avoid, a total revelation – a complete tangency to the world and to ourselves, a fusion of our entire being with the whole – only able to transpire at the instant of death) are the two ascending and descending branches of the curve, an image of that continual rocking motion which, when we perceive it clearly, strikes us with ecstasy and dizziness because it is, without doubt, the most fitting symbol of what is in truth the bedrock of our passionate life.”
(Michel Leiris, Mirror of Tauromachy, trans. Antony Melville, pp. 43–44.)
Published on Wednesday 6 August 2008 .
“Fleming did most of the talking. He ended up by asking us if we knew the definition of a gentleman. He waited and then said slowly:
‘A gentleman is a person who uses the butter-knife when he’s alone.’
He looked at us triumphantly and we tried to force a laugh. My growing dislike crystallized. It was degrading to have to laugh at anything so suburban and B.B.C. It wasn’t even improper, and I’d been preparing my face for something dirty!
I turned to Paul, saying it was time to get ready for dinner.”
(Denton Welch, Maiden Voyage, p. 100.)
“Well, I opened the door. The Doberman came at me raging and snarling and generally carrying on in the way he felt was expected of him. I threw him a fifty-five-pound reinforced concrete pork chop which knocked him silly. I spoke to Constanze. We used to walk down the street together bumping our hipbones together in joy, before God and everybody. I wanted to float in the air again some feeling of that. It didn’t work. I’m sorry. But I guess, as the architects say, there’s no use crying over spilt marble. She will undoubtedly move on and up and down and around in the world, New York, Chicago, and Temple, Texas, making everything considerably better than it was, for short periods of time. We adventured. That’s not bad.”
(Donald Barthelme, “The Abduction from the Seraglio”, p. 95 in Great Days.)
Sayings that illuminate
architecture
lapidary inscriptions
saying the writing
writing the architecture
writing architecture writing through
up and down manually
or left-handedly or with an intercession
and a few photons, jolly
“in a sudden feeling of shock, surprise, or disappointment,” that’s not
joyous or a joint resolution exactly
even as festivities jolt a centenary
in reading for the archive that is at once a central nervous system
and a center of intentionalities—what were graphics
designating transitive writing arts
in visual culture that left the logo
and remaindered it to information, each of four
letters vetted a rhetoric
technologies opted for rhinestones to the eye
notwithstanding rhizomes in the brilliance
of mind, of the mind in multiplex.
(Marjorie Welish, from “From Dedicated To”, p. 97 in Isle of the Signatories.)
“The idea which occurs to me is this. Bierstadt has invented a car which opens out into a room 27 feet wide. The Russian & German governments have taken it up; the N.Y. Central people are about to go into it. It is a very practical thing. It goes about like a car, and then can be transofrmed in a few minutes, by lifting the roof and drawing up sides for part of the roof and by letting down inner sides for a floor and other movements, into a chapel, or a theatre, or a picture gallery, or a shop, etc.
I believe a car costs $8000. It is quite cheap. Now let Hegeler pay me $2000 and I will get him the right to build a number of such cars for Sunday or other lectures on the Religion of Science, which being sent about the country & free sermons & lectures given, & would distribute the Open Court and raise that to a satisfactory paying basis. The lecturers (preferably two) would sleep and eat in the car, and their expenses would be light. If it would add to the inducement I will give 100 lectures.”
(Charles Sanders Peirce, letter to Francis C. Russell, 5 November 1896, quoted on p. 256 of Joseph Brent’s Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life.