lost originals

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“We have become inured to hearing the echoes of a theory popularized by Walter Benjamin, in respect of which the work of art loses its ‘aura’ in an age of ‘mechanical’ (or, more prescisely, ‘technical’) reproduction. It is worth remembering that Benjamin himself was thinking primarily of media, such as photography and film, where no ‘original’ exists, for hardly would amateur artists have crossed Benjamin’s mind. In the case of Fabiola, we have a prime example of a lost original, complemented by a vast array of heterogeneous reproductions. Instead of lamenting the loss of aura, we can use this particular example to emphasize the essential productivity of the process of reproduction. These multifarious Fabiolas may not, in the last resort, be recuperated by art history, but in testifying to the resilience of a historically grounded image they also enhance our awareness of the dynamics of contemporary visual culture.”

(Stephen Bann, “Beyond Fabiola: Henner in and out of his nineteenth-century context,” p. 40 in Francis Alÿs’s Fabiola: An Investigation.)

progress

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“Well, said Paul, if they didnt want what we got would there be any progress. Perhaps there aint any progress, said Donald Paul, perhaps not. There cant not be progress, said Sam, if there isnt any progress how could we sell goods and we gotta sell goods to get a job. Yes, said Donald Paul, that’s it. And perhaps said Sam, all these over here they’re so poor they live with their chickens and all they’re just so poor. Yes all right, said Jimmie, but they do have chickens to live with. Yes, said Sam, but that aint progress. Well I dunno, said Jimmie, I like chickens, I kind of guess there always will be chickens. And if not, said Willie. Well then there might be progress, said Donald Paul . . . .”

(Gertrude Stein, Brewsie and Willie, p. 97.)

the threat of alaska

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“Her friend Jennifer had moved to Alaska. Jennifer had written that there were lots of jobs and men available in Alaska. A poet, Ed Dorn, had said that Alaska reminded him of Raquel Welch. She wondered what he meant by that. Perhaps one day she would find out.”

(Ishmael Reed, The Terrible Twos, p. 16.)

the president

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“The President looked out of his window. He was not very happy. ‘I worry about Bill, Hubert, Henry, Kevin, Edward, Clem, Dan and their love, Snow White. I sense that all is not well with them. Now, looking out over this green lawn, and these fine rosebushes, and into the night and the yellow buildings, and the falling Dow-Jones index and the screams of the poor, I am concerned. I have many important things to worry about, but I worry about Bill and the boys too. Because I am the President. Finally. The President of the whole fucking country. And they are Americans, Bill, Hubert, Henry, Kevin, Edward, Clem, Dan and Snow White. They are Americans. My Americans.”

(Donald Barthelme, Snow White, p. 87.)

productive changes of sense

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“For treachery is always what occurs when a text, a work of art, or a concept travels to faraway places and becomes something completely different from what it was at its source, within its context of origin. These are felicitous acts of betrayal, productive changes of sense. Misprision, misreading, and misuse are the three virtues of cultural exchange. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Oswald Spengler recognized as much. Behind his pessimism and his debatable partitions, Spengler, the first to diagnose an inexorable “Decline of the West,” also noted the importance of intersections and influences, of this ‘art of deliberate misunderstanding‘ indissociable from each culture’s pure essence: ‘The more enthusiastically we laud the principles of an alien thought, the more fundamentally in truth we have denatured it’ – something he already seemed to celebrate, praising the ‘trace’ of Plato in Goethe’s thought to illustrate his point, as well as ‘the history of the “three Aristotles” – Greek, Arabian and Gothic.’ ”

(François Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort, pp. 336–337.)

the accumulation is too much to bear

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“. . .  Why, all this around us is for people who can keep their balance only in the light, where they move as though nothing were fragile, nothing tempered by possibility, and all of a sudden bang! something breaks. Then you have to stop and put the pieces together again. But you never can put them back together quite the same way. You stop when you can and expose things, and leave them within reach, and others come on by themselves, and they break, and even then you may put the pieces aside just out of reach until you can bring them back and show them, put together slightly different, maybe a little more enduring, until you’ve broken it and picked up the pieces enough times, and you have the whole thing in all its dimensions. But the discipline, the detail, it’s just . . . sometimes the accumulation is too much to bear.”

(Gaddis, The Recognitions, pp. 113–114.)

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.)