minor philosopher

King of Kong

About a month ago, I watched King of Kong with my then 11-yo son. I think we both really enjoyed it. Billy Mitchell, the villain, is the teeth in the ass of the bear, Steve Wiebe, who is even too shy to correct the referee Walter Day on the pronunciation of his own name. Somehow, in some weird way, Steve needed Billy to motivate him on to break the records. They were connected like an assemblage, the crystalline and the organic.

Follow the curve

Twenty-one years ago today, W.G. Sebald was driving to Norwich, the city explored in his internationally acclaimed novel The Rings of Saturn. He had just pulled on to the A-146 when his car “failed to follow the curve and drove straight into the opposite lane.” 

https://www.towntopics.com/wordpress/2022/12/14/thoughts-on-the-fine-art-of-vertigo-with-w-g-sebald-and-franz-kafka/

Unfold, enfold

 (encapsulate)

maths, theorems, precepts

break/flow

What does it mean to be able to breathe?

-AO, p.99

Does the bee understand it will die before it stings?

Literature

"For literature is like schizophrenia; a process and not a goal, a production and not an expression."

- Anti-Oedipus, p.133

Ross Gay on Joy

Being of and without at once and the same time.

Anti-Oedipus

"In the literary machine that Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” constitutes, we are struck by the fact that all the parts are produced as asymmetrical sections, paths that suddenly come to an end, hermetically sealed boxes, noncommunicating vessels, watertight compartments, in which there are gaps even between things that are contiguous, gaps that are affirmations, pieces of a puzzle belonging not to any one puzzle but to many, pieces assembled by forcing them into a certain place where they may or may not belong, their unmatched edges violently forced out of shape, forcibly made to fit together, to interlock, with a number of pieces always left over.”

 

AlphaGo

"AlphaGo look like the real mirror. When you play with AlphaGo, you feel very strange. You look like you're all the time naked. The first time you see this, you don't want to see, because, "This is me? Real me?" And more and more you need to accept. "Oh, this is the real me. So now, how can I do it?""

 - Fan Hui, 1:05

From Letters and Other Texts (2015)

 From Letters and Other Texts (2015):

p.201: In any case, fluxes flow.

p.216: Delirium is the peasant missing the furrow with the plow. And all sexuality is that.

p.223: It's simple, when you are fucking, when you are having an orgasm...the is no image.

p.225: Intensities drain images.

p.226: The image is the extension than an intensity takes when it dies.

p.239:  Schizo-analysis can be done anywhere, anytime, with anyone, without a contract, without transference.

p.254: I do not invent anything, I do not project anything, I do not bring anything into the world, I am nothing, not even a nothing, especially not: nothing more than an expression.

p. 257: Softness of the belly, as Giono wrote: consciousness is softness.

 

The narrow place

 https://twitter.com/NYT_first_said/status/1626539561080717312?lang=en

Our world is a cracked bell that no longer sounds

- Goethe

Circled with a bright edge

 'And yet it is true it is true. In the destructive element immerse.'... He spoke in a subdued tone, without looking at me, one hand on each side of his face. 'That was the way. To follow the dream, and again to follow the dream- and so- ewig- usque ad finem....' The whisper of his conviction seemed to open before me a vast and uncertain expanse, as of a crepuscular horizon on a plain at dawn- or was it, perchance, at the coming of the night? One had not the courage to decide; but it was a charming and deceptive light, throwing the impalpable poesy of its dimness over pitfalls- over graves. His life had begun in sacrifice, in enthusiasm for generous ideas; he had travelled very far, on various ways, on strange paths, and whatever he followed it had been without faltering, and therefore without shame and without regret. In so far he was right. That was the way, no doubt. Yet for all that the great plain on which men wander amongst graves and pitfalls remained very desolate under the impalpable poesy of its crepuscular light, overshadowed in the centre, circled with a bright edge as if surrounded by an abyss full of flames. When at last I broke the silence it was to express the opinion that no one could be more romantic than himself.

Conrad, Lord Jim

Zeroes, infinities

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKmGVE85GUU

On Love

From "The Shortest Shadow", by Alenka Zupancic, p.174-175.

minima/anima