Exhibitions
Books
“When I write about Ray [Johnson]’s art in relation to his life, at least two massive problems emerge:
1) To look at a part of a collage and trace it to its past causes the wholeness of the collage to disintegrate, and each portion to lose that part of its meaning which is its bearing upon the other parts as Ray arranged them. One can have the work of art, or one can have its sources. In tracing the work to its sources it is lost, because as analysis disintegrates the whole into parts, the parts lose their meaning, which is the bearing of part upon part in the construction of a unified work of art.
2) To look at a part of a work of art by Ray Johnson, and to follow from it toward his drowning, is to subsume the work in a larger whole, a final act of his life. But the images in the collages are hypothetical, and the work of art is more than just material or physical. It exists as it is perceived at a certain focal plane, and its wholeness is an aesthetic illusion, available to none of the sciences, and probably to no animal but humans. But Ray’s drowning is not hypothetical, it is categorical. While as an event it gathers many images which Ray has used in his art, and which he has acted upon in his life – hanging out around water – it is not a work of art or an aesthetic illusion, and it is not hypothetical.”
(William S. Wilson, With Ray: The Art of Friendship, p. 30.)
“In the original complication of having the narrator and the author of Remembrance of Things Past bear the same Christian name, Proust begins the process of merging appearance and reality in order that he may, ultimately, separate them. This doubling of names makes us aware that we are reading a novel that is, in some way, based on fact; it warns us simultaneously that appearances can be deceiving. This strange duality, connecting and yet severing the ‘I’ of the book from the ‘I’ of its creator, suggests its theme: It is nothing less than the rescuing of the self from the oblivion of time. There is an ‘I’ that needs to be rescued; there is an ‘I’ that does the rescuing. Insofar as each successfully acts out his role, the ‘Marcel’ of Proust’s narrator more cleverly disguises himself than any other name possibly could. The fictional Marcel becomes aware of the need of salvation only as he turns into the Marcel who creates him. And it is in the process of that creation that salvation exists. It is a difficult and all-important strategy.”
(Howard Moss, The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust, pp. 2–3.)
Movies
Books
“Thought can’t really encompass the world at all, pace Bruno’s unresting daemon. It can’t limn the world exactly or represent it adequately. Language, thought, conception, can’t even cross the gap between the soul and the world; it may even constitute that unbridgeable gap. All that language can do is to transform.”
(John Crowley, Endless Things, p. 183.)
“There are few differences among filesystems; most closely follow the Unix model. And alas, one of the few innovators in filesystem design is now in prison for murder.”
(Ted Nelson, Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer World Got This Way, p. 62.)
“But there was an abiding and aboriginal fear too, which had kept him from ever being tempted; where cars had been to Joe Boyd and the boys of the Cumberlands heart-filling personifications (even named, often) of freedom and power and heat, to Pierce they had been like the dogs chained to stakes outside Cumberland cabins, or encountered roaming free in the hollers: big beasts, minding their own business but to be dealt with gingerly or not at all. He still sometimes dreamed of such dogs, but filled with mindless malevolence, their chains giving way like twine; and he had dreams too of finding himself inexplicably at the wheel, under way and the pedals useless, the car speeding willfully toward ruin.”
(John Crowley, Love & Sleep, p. 278.)
Movies
Exhibitions
Books
“JESSE PEARSON: It’s disappointing because the internet could have been such a good thing. It could have been like an indestructible Library of Alexandria, but with porn.
HAROLD BLOOM: This goes back to what I said about the saving remnant. You’re part of that saving remnant. As I’ve been saying for years: If, in fact, you have an impulse to become and maintain yourself as a deep reader, then the internet is very good for you. It gives you an endless resource. But if, in fact, you don’t have standards and you don’t know how to read, then the internet is a disaster for you because it’s a great gray ocean of text in which you simply drown.”
(From the Fiction issue. See also new Kenneth Gangemi & Amie Barrodale.)
“It’s the flow of thought that is so beautiful, yes, the flow, and its murmur that travels beyond the world’s clamor. Let yourself attempt to stop thought, to bring its contents to light, and you’d end up with (how could I say, how could I not say rather) trying to preserve the quavering, ungraspable outlines, you’d end up with nothing, water slipping through your fingers, a few graceless drops drying out in the light. It was night now in my mind, I was alone in the semi-darkness of the booth and I was thinking, protected from outer torments. The most favorable conditions for thinking, the moments when thought can let itself naturally follow its course, are precisely moments when, having temporarily given up fighting a seemingly inexhaustible reality, the tension begins to loosen little by little, all the tension accumulated in protecting yourself against the threat of injury – and I had my share of minor injuries – and that, alone in an enclosed space, alone and following the course of your thoughts in a state of growing relief, you move progressively from the struggle of living to the despair of being.”
(Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Camera, trans. Matthew B. Smith, pp. 82–83.)