“The names of the brothers are a matched pair of opposites. Abel comes from the Hebrew ‘hebel‘, meaning ‘breath’ or ‘vapour’: anything that lives and moves and is transient, including his own life. The root of ‘Cain’ appears to be the verb ‘kanah‘: to ‘acquire’, ‘get’, ‘own property’, and so ‘rule’ or ‘subjugate’.

‘Cain’ also means ‘metal-smith’. And since, in several languages – even Chinese – the words for ‘violence’ and ‘subjugation’ are linked to the discovery of metal, it is perhaps the destiny of Cain and his descendants to practise the black arts of technology.”

(Bruce Chatwin, The Songlines, p. 193.)

“ ‘Well, I’m sure you’re right,’ replied Swann in amazement. ‘But what I think is wrong with the newspapers is that every single day they make you take an interest in tribia. Whereas in a whole lifetime you may only read three or four books which have really essential things to say. The way people eagerly open their paper every morning makes you want to change things a bit and put in something like, say, the . . . Pensées of Pascal!’ This title he pronounced with a special ironic stress, so as to avoid appearing pedantic. He went on, expressing the disdain for fashionable society that fashionable society men sometimes affect. ‘And then, in the leather-bound tome that you read once in ten years you could put that Her Majesty the Queen of the Hellenes is visiting Cannes and that the Princess of Léon has given a fancy-dress ball. That way, people could keep a sense of proportion.’ ”

(Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. James Grieve, p. 18.)

“From the long box that was Palm cord, she drew out a second square of glass and put in in place with the other. The board changed; colors mixed and became other colors; masses changed shape, became newly related to other masses.

‘Do you see?’ she said. ‘The saints are like the slides of the System. Their interpenetration is what reveals, not the slides themselves.’

‘It’s like the saints,’ I said, ‘because they made their lives transparent, like the slides; and their lives can be placed before our own, in our remembering their stories, and reveal things to us about ourselves. Not the stories or the lives themselves, but their—’

‘Interpenetration, yes,’ Painted Red said. ‘They’re saints not because of what they did, especially, but because in the telling of it, what they did became transparent, and your own life could be seen through it, illuminated.’ ”

(John Crowley, Engine Summer, p. 412 in Otherwise.)

Books

• Maureen F. McHugh, Mothers & Other Monsters
• Maureen F. McHugh, After the Apocalypse
• Clancy Martin, Travels in Central America
• John Crowley, The Translator
• Ellen Ullman, Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents
• Ellen Ullman, By Blood
• Pamela Moore, The Horsy Set

Films

• Monsieur Fantômas, directed by Ernst Moerman
• Drive, dir. Nicolas Winding Refn
• Behind the Candelabra, dir. Steven Soderbergh

Exhibits

• “Paul McCarthy: Life Cast,” Hauser & Wirth
• “Mel Bochner: Proposition and Process: A Theory of Sculpture (1968–1973),” Peter Freeman, Inc.

“ ‘We are the disinherited of Art!’ he cried. ‘We are condemned to be superficial! We are excluded from the magic circle. The soil of American perception is a poor little barren artificial deposit. Yes! we are wedded to imperfection. An American, to excel, has just ten times as much to learn as a European. We lack the deeper sense. We have neither taste, nor tact, nor power. How should we have them? Our crude and garish climate, our silent past, our deafening present, the constant pressure about us of unlovely circumstance, are as void of all that nourishes and prompts and inspires the artist, as my sad heart is void of bitterness in saying so! We poor aspirants must live in perpetual exile.’ ”

(Henry James, “The Madonna of the Future”)

“They think that civilization will grow so speedily and triumphantly, and production will become so easy and cheap, that the possessing classes will be able to spare more and more from the great heap of wealth to the producing classes, so that at least these latter will have nothing left to wish for, and all will be peace and prosperity. A futile hope indeed! and one which a mere glance at past history will dispel. For we find as a matter of fact that when we were scarcely emerging from semi-barbarism, when open violence was common, and privilege need put on no mask before the governed classes, the workers were not worse off than now, but better. In short, not all the discoveries of science, not all the tremendous organization of the factory and the market will produce true wealth, so long as the end and aim of it all is the production of profit for the privileged classes.”

(William Morris, from “The Last May Day,” originally published in Justice, 1 May 1896; p. 305 in News from Nowhere and Selected Writings and Designs.)

“. . . Wisdom is whole; the knowledge of how things are piloted in their courses by all other things, is that wonderful Kentucky classics professor’s translation of ‘εν τὸ σοφόν·’επίστασθαι γνωμην ‘οτεη κυβερνησαι ραντα δια παντων. (Of course nobody knows what that ‘οτεη means; we read it as though it were an archaic form of, or even a misprint for, ‘όκη.) Siebert’s translation of Diels, however, gives the fragment as The wise is one thing only, to understand the thoughts that steer everything through everything. Epigraph for “The Mad Man”: παντα δια παντων . . .”

(Samuel R. Delany, The Mad Man, p. 67.)