Category Archives: commonplace

of near-recognition of reality

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“—Yes but, when I saw it, it was one of those moments of reality, of near-recognition of reality. I’d been . . . I’ve been worn out in this piece of work, and when I finished it I was free, free all of a sudden out in the world. In the street everything was unfamiliar, everything and everyone I saw was unreal, I felt like I was going to lose my balance out there, this feeling was getting all knotted up inside me and I went in there just to stop for a minute. And then I saw this thing. When I saw it all of a sudden everything was freed into one recognition, really freed into reality that we never see, you never see it. You don’t see it in paintings because most of the time you can’t see beyond a painting. Most paintings, the instant you see them they become familiar, and then it’s too late. Listen, do you see what I mean?”

(Gaddis, The Recognitions, pp. 91–92.)

how to describe the years?

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“All too soon, no one cares. We go back to doing little things for each other,
pasting stamps together to form a tiny train track, and other,
less noticeable things. The past is forgotten till next time.
How to describe the years? Some were like blocks of the palest halvah,
careless of being touched. Some took each other’s trash out,
put each other’s eyes out. So many got thrown out
before anyone noticed, it was like a chiaroscuro
                                                                                        of collapsing clouds.
How I longed to visit you again in that old house! But you were deaf,
or dead. Our letters crossed. A motorboat was ferrying me out past
the reef, people on shore looked like dolls fingering stuffs.”

(John Ashbery, from “Chinese Whispers”.)

to fracture the text

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“There’s a way, it seems to me, that reality’s fractured right now, at least the reality that I live in. And the difficulty about . . . writing about that reality is that text is very linear and it’s very unified, and . . . I, anyway, am constantly on the lookout for ways to fracture the text that aren’t totally disorienting – I mean, you can take the lines and jumble them up and that’s nicely fractured, but nobody’s gonna read it.”

(David Foster Wallace, quoted.)

the american college observed

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“But the norm in these matters is rather the campus at the edge of the woods, in conformity with the agrarian mythology of nineteenth-century America, according to which a bucolic setting far from the vices of the city will serve to guarantee probity, force of character, and academic excellence. Many of these campuses have a more or less newly built science building of ‘science center’ and a Gothic-style dormitory, a little valley bright with autumn leaves, and seasonal rites that are off limits to strangers. Student societies – fraternities for boys and sororities for girls – proudly display the Greek letters than name their houses (Kappa Alpha, Sigma Phi) and follow strict internal regulations inherited from the first campus literary salons of the 1820s. In the spring, graduation ceremonies proceed according to unchanging codes, caps and gowns imprinted with the emblem of the campus and the discreet color schemes of the disciplines (navy blue for philosophy, sky blue for education, etc.) The almost systematic internment of the students – this too as a result of English influence – in dormitories that were once under close surveillance is supposed to ensure academic camaraderie and ethical community among the students. But this is a form of commingling to which the campuses also owe the tradition of students’ demands for better living conditions, on the model of the ‘Bad Butter Rebellion’ that shook Harvard in 1766.”

(François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort, pp. 34–35.)

stein/wittgenstein

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“If Gertrude and Ludwig had ever met, apparently they could have talked for hours about the sixth Act IV of An Exercise in Analysis (1917). The act in its entirety is: ‘Now I understand.’ This is the sort of statement that worried Wittgenstein for the last thirty years of his life. It involves the problem of other minds, of certainty, of epistemology, and the language game. We can supply many contexts for such a statement.”

(Guy Davenport, “Late Gertrude”, p. 189 in The Hunter Gracchus.)

the endless book

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“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.)

to bypass the market

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“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.)

beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror

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“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.)

as if they had lost them themselves

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“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.)

synergetics 529.10

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“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.)