Monday, January 29, 2018

Proust

"For there were, in the environs of Combray, two 'ways' which we used to take for our walks, and so diametrically opposed that we would actually leave the house by a different door, according to the way we had chosen: the way towards Méséglise-la-Vineuse, which we called also 'Swann's way,' because, to get there, one had to pass along the boundary of M. Swann's estate, and the 'Guermantes way.'" - Proust

Saturday, April 15, 2017

The Birds

The Birds | Alfred Hitchcock | 1963

Agnes Martin

"The panic of complete helplessness drives us to fantastic extremes...But helplessness when fear and dread have run their course, as all passions do, is the most rewarding state of all.” 

Monday, September 26, 2016

Chaplin's Desires

“We think to much and feel too little…what do you want a meaning for? Life is a desire, not a meaning.”

– Charlie Chaplin

Thursday, March 10, 2016


Bartleby

The thing that fascinates me about Bartleby as deconstructed in Deleuze's "The Formula" is that in his impotence, his silence, his passivity, and his reticence he sparks the world to want to destroy or change him.  It is not that he is unknowing - he knows what the attorney asks of - but all the more it is his knowing that spark a confounded rage.  It is as if evil exists in the world, and what it seeks is characters like Bartleby, who feign weakness, because their strength is virtual, abstract.  They may own nothing, but it is their possession of the knowledge (which is neither an affirmation nor a negation) of the futility of their counterparts that makes them despised.  They could take action supposedly, but they "prefer not to".  And why is that?  "Do I dare to eat a peach?" says Prufrock.  Do they lack the organizational skills to mount an effort, or do they feel doomed to failure, or are they addicted to feeding the ego depressed nihilistic thoughts, or are they simply catatonic due to a head trauma?  Perhaps they feel to disturb the universe is immoral. Evil seeks out Bartleby, just as it seeks out Gregor Samsa, just as it seeks out Prufrock.  Like a sugar ant drawn by the minutest vibrational scent of a cookie crumb from across the room, evil senses an amplitude that lies within Bartleby.  It is not that the attorney is evil per se, but desire is his formula, where Bartleby's is a cloak of indiscernability, a poorly evolved protective mechanism that must be the result of some recessive gene.  It is no wonder that he hides under his desk, wouldn't you if you knew what he did?
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Thursday, December 10, 2015

Ginger is a Tuber

He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian then; but no; he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts. My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts are so called because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the final flavoring one. Now what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none.

-Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Derrida's Tribute to Deleuze

http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/1/derrida.html

"The historian of philosophy who proceeded with a sort of configurational election of his own genealogy,..."

Deleuze on Marxism: "What interests us the most is the analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that constantly pushes back its proper limits, and that always finds them again on a larger scale, because the limit is Capital itself."
http://genius.com/945319

Thursday, October 22, 2015

A Heap See

Check out the enfolded dimension at 0:33:

"That day...everything was possible...Future became present...that is, no more time, a glimpse of eternity." - Michelet

Sunday, August 9, 2015

We looked at each other, for a long strange moment that I’ve never forgotten, actually, like two animals meeting at twilight, during which some clear, personable spark seemed to fly up through his eyes and I saw the creature he really was – and he, I believe, saw me. For an instant we were wired together and humming, like two engines on the same circuit.
- Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Monday, February 9, 2015

“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. … Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.”

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Steeple

"Even in Paris, in one of the ugliest parts of the town, I know a window from which one can see across a first, a second, and even a third layer of jumbled roofs, street beyond street, a violet bell, sometimes ruddy, sometimes too, in the finest 'prints' which the atmosphere makes of it, of an ashy solution of black; which is, in fact, nothing else than the dome of Saint-Augustin, and which imparts to this view of Paris the character of some of the Piranesi views of Rome."

"It was always to the steeple that one must return, always it which dominated everything else, summing up the houses with an unexpected pinnacle, raised before me like the Finger of God, Whose Body might have been concealed below among the crowd of human bodies without fear of my confounding It, for that reason, with them."  
- From Swann's Way, Marcel Proust

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Bacall

"It was quite a terrifying experience for me," Bacall told Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 1994. "I was this kid and I was scared to death of all these pros around me. ... My head would shake and my hands would shake, and I discovered if I kept my head down and looked up, my head would not shake, so I started to do that when I could, when it was appropriate in a scene."

http://www.npr.org/2014/08/15/340632455/in-acting-and-in-life-lauren-bacall-loved-the-idea-of-adventure

Friday, June 6, 2014

"I think Kafka was right when he said that for a modern, secular, non-religious man, bureaucracy, state bureaucracy is the only remaining contact with the dimension of the divine."  -- Zizek