from “maldoror: tygers”

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“On the stage, we see the story of DOL, a little girl of the zoo. The zoo is populated with the huge silhouettes of countless exotic beast. The bars of the zoo are semi-transparent tyger stripes.

DOL lives with her zookeeper father, DELMAS. Instead of working like a good zookeeper should, DELMAS has receded into a world of his own. His thoughts are so distant as to appear absent.

DOL pleads with her father to return to her world – the world of tending beasts in the here and now.

DELMAS robotically lifts up an old animal collar from some straw. Something black and oily drips from the collar onto his hands. This goo strangely galvanizes the entranced DELMAS; he abandons his daughter to rush off to a meat-lined cottage.”

(Film treatment of Maldoror: Tygers p. 169 in Guy Maddin’s From the Atelier Tovar: Selected Writings.)

memorandum

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Astonishing that I can forget, forget so easily and for so long every time, the only principle according to which interesting works can be written, and written well. This is doubtlessly because I’ve never been able to define it clearly to myself in a conclusively representative or memorable way.

From time to time it comes to my mind, not, to be sure, as an axiom or maxim, but like a sunny day after a thousand which have been cloudy – or, rather, because it is not so much a natural as an artificial event, or, still more precisely, an artificial development – like the sudden illumination of an electric lightbulb in a house hitherto lit by kerosene. . . . But the next day, you’ve forgotten wiring’s been installed and you start again painstakingly filling the lamps, changing wicks, scorching your fingers on the glass, and being badly lit. . . .

“You have first of all to side with your own spirit, and your own taste. Then take the time, and have the courage, to express all your thoughts on the subject at hand (not just keeping the expressions that seem brilliant or distinctive). Finally you have to say everything simply, not striving for charm, but conviction.”

(Francis Ponge, trans. C. K. Williams, Selected Poems, p. 3.)

silence

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     Mariano, 27th June 1916

I know a city
that every day is filled with sunlight
and everything is snatched away in that moment

I left one evening

In my heart lingered the rasp
of the cicadas

From that ship
painted white
I saw
my city disappear
leaving
a glimmer
an embrace of lights in the hazy air
hovering

(Giuseppe Ungaretti, trans. Maggie Evans, r.i.p.)

she admits she is stumped

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“When asked by President Kennedy what she does all day, she admits she is ‘stumped’. A disarmingly simple soul – ‘I now prefer horse shows to lovers & I’ve never liked drink’ – the Duchess is at her best on varieties of gooseberry and rare breeds of cattle.”

(Kate McLoughlin, review of In Tearing Haste: Letters between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor, ed. Charlotte Mosley, p. 26 of the 28 November 2008 edition of the Times Literary Supplement.)

not to frame, but to hide

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“Before Archimboldi left, after they’d had a cup of tea, the man who rented him the typewriter said:

‘Jesus is the masterpiece. The thieves are minor works. Why are they there? Not to frame the crucifixion, as some innocent souls believe, but to hide it.’ ”

(Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer, p. 790.)

jet lag

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“Amalfitano had some rather idiosyncratic ideas about jet lag. They weren’t constant, so it might be an exaggeration to call them ideas. They were feelings. Make-believe ideas. As if he were looking out the window and forcing himself to see an extraterrestrial landscape. He believed (or liked to think he believed) that when a person was in Barcelona, the people living and present in Buenos Aires and Mexico City didn’t exist. The time difference only masked their nonexistence. And so if you suddenly traveled to cities that, according to this theory, didn’t exist or hadn’t yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the people who would still have been asleep if you hadn’t traveled. This was something he’d probably read in some science fiction novel or story and that he’d forgotten having read.”

(Roberto Bolaño, 2666, trans. Natasha Wimmer, p. 189.)

adorno is angry about the market

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“Trivial details illuminate the course of control through the distributing agencies. Forty years ago you could have records sent home to you on approval, in line with the customs of a liberalism which formally, at least, respected the customer’s taste. Today you find the more expensive albums citing copyright laws and the like in order to keep the stores from furnishing them on approval: ‘Sales conditions for Germany: Rerecording our records as well as recording broadcast of our records on tape or wire, even for private use, is forbidden. To avoid rerecordings without permission, dealers are not allowed to loan, rent, or furnish records on approval.’ The possibility of abuses cannot even be denied; the worst can now almost always cite irrefutable reasons – they are the medium in which evil becomes reality. In any case the pig must be bought in a poke, for listening to records in the poorly insulated cells of stores is a farce. Complementing it is the maxim that the customer is king because he can enjoy Bruckner’s entire Seventh Symphony in the privacy of his home. Whether such tendencies will change with market conditions remains to be seen.”

(Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music (1962), p. 201.)