Monthly Archives: September 2009

the very same culture that had destroyed all reason for going from one place to another

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“That’s an attitude too that you often find in the kinds of artists who are content to call themselves ‘cultural operators’ and who get involved with the idea that art has to be revolutionized and made scientific, but they’re getting it all ass-backwards that way. They’re trapped in an illusion that our whole society agrees upon, jet planes were invented because of the developments of science, all of our technology comes out of science, and we’re all drugged on technology and on the idea that I can take this jet and be in America in six hours. But why should it make a difference to me that I can get to American in six hours, maybe I don’t want to go to America at all, and maybe it’s all the same if I get there in six days, or six weeks, I could take a clipper ship and clipper ships were certainly more pleasant than airplanes and maybe just as safe. A friend once told me about an airplane trip where he began to realize that the culture that had made it possible to get from one place to another on all of these fantastic means of transport was the very same culture that had destroyed all reason for going from one place to another. Travelling doesn’t mean anything any more. One of the things technology does to people is to rob them of motivations, you push buttons and you open cans and life becomes much poorer than it ever was before, it’s enriched only by a greater degree of boredom. It creates these huge empty spaces in our lives and then fills them up with itself again, you wash the dishes in a machine and while you wash them you have to look at the television. People who are most alive when they’re active, people who need the feel of being effective and useful in all of the things that go into their daily living are people for whom technology doesn’t mean anything at all, or at least anything positive.”

Gianfranco Baruchello & Henry Martin, How to Imagine: A Narrative on Art and Agriculture, pp. 151–2.)

the real victims

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“The most notable literary response to last year’s financial crisis was not to turn to the obvious genre – books about Wall Street shenanigans in the 1920s – but to skip several historical stages and to go straight to Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged, in which heroic titans of industry are persecuted by a meddling government. The book’s sales skyrocketed in early 2009, proving that when bankers puff asset bubbles and wreck the world, a large part of the public can be counted on to learn from that experience that bankers are the real victims of society, presumably deserving even more tax cuts and deregulation.”

(Tom Frank, “The Red Scare Returns”.)

roussel / duchamp / cortázar / fassio

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“Serious critics, of course, know that none of this is possible: in the first place, the Lyncée is an imaginary ship; secondly, Duchamp and Roussel never met. (Duchamp relates that he saw Roussel only once, in the Café La Régence, the one in the poem by César Vallejo, and that the author of Locus Solus was playing chess with a friend. ‘I am afraid I neglected to introduce myself,’ adds Duchamp.) But others do not allow these physical difficulties to obscure the truth of a more worthy reality. Not only did Duchamp and Roussel make the journey to [Buenos Aires] but they also met an echo from the future there, linked to them in ways that serious critics would likewise fail to credit. Juan Esteben Fassio prepared the ground by inventing in the heart of Buenos Aires a machine for reading the New Impressions of Africa during the same period when I, without knowing him, wrote Persio’s first monologues in The Winners, using a system of phonetic analogies inspired by Roussel; years later, Fassio attempted to fashion a new machine for reading Hopscotch, unaware that my most obsessive work during those years in Paris was with the obscure texts of Duchamp and the works of Roussel. A double impulse gradually converged upon the austral vertex where Roussel and Duchamp would meet once again in Buenos Aires, when an inventor and a writer – who perhaps years earlier had also watched each other across a cafe in the heart of the city, neglecting to introduce themselves – would meet through a machine conceived by the first to facilitate the reading of the second. If the Lyncée navigated the coasts of Africa, still some of its passengers reached our American shores, and the proof is in what follows, a short of joke designed to lead astray those who search for treasure with solemn faces.”

(Julio Cortázar, from “Of Another Bachelor Machine,” pp. 53–4 in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds.)

recounted lear

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“In the two extremes (insufficient installation in ordinary circumstances and almost total rejection of the), the story sins through impermeability; it works with momentarily justified materials among which there is no osmosis, no convincing formulation. The good reader senses that none of these things had to be there, not the strangling hand, nor the gentleman who determines to spend the night in a desolate dwelling on a bet. This type of story, which deadens anthologies of the genre, recalls Edward Lear’s recipe for a pie whose glorious name I have forgotten: take a hog, tie it to a stake, and beat it violently, while at the same time preparing a gruel of diverse ingredients, interrupting its cooking only to continue beating the hog. If at the end of three days the glop and the hog have not formed a homogeneous substance, the pie must be considered a failure, the hog released, and the glop consigned to the garbage. Which is precisely what we do with stories in which there is no osmosis, where the fantastic and the ordinary are brought together without forming the pie we want to enjoy trembling.”

(Julio Cortázar, from “On the Short Story and Its Environs,” p. 167 in Around the Day in Eighty Worlds, trans. Thomas Christensen. Lear’s recipe is for Gosky Patties.)

the rise of capitalism

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“Smoke, rain, abulia. What can the concerned citizen do to fight the rise of capitalism, in his own community? Study of the tides of conflict and power in a system in which there is structural inequality is an important task. A knowledge of European intellectual history since 1789 provides a useful background. Information theory offers interesting new possibilities. Passion is helpful, especially those types of passion which are non licit. Doubt is a necessary precondition to meaningful action. Fear is the great mover, in the end.”

(Donald Barthelme, “The Rise of Capitalism”.)