Comments closedIf we crave truth unmediated by art we are chasing a phantom. We need the commentator’s craft, even to make sense of the news. We need historians, not to collect facts, but to help us pick a path through the facts, to meaning. We need fiction to remind us that the unknown and unknowable is real, and exerts its force. Some writers and adaptors disclaim responsibility. They say the public wants escapism – so let’s give them what they want. They cheat their audience as politicians cheat when they make uncosted pledges: the bill comes later, when we lose a grip on our own story, and fall into individual distress and political incoherence.
Hilary Mantel, in Remarkable Minds: A Celebration of the Reith Lectures (BBC Radio 4)
Category: quotes
“We saw ourselves, Kraftwerk, in the Kling Klang studio, to be a kind of radio station of our own.”
Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany
Uwe Schütte
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Comments closedWhen I was fourteen, I invited a friend, a boy from school, to my apartment to play Russian roulette. No one was at home. We did it in the library, sitting opposite each other at the table. I took my father’s revolver from his nightstand, took all the bullets out but one, spun the chamber, and gave the gun to my friend. He pressed the muzzle against his temple and pulled the trigger. We just heard it click. He passed the pistol to me. I put it to my temple and pulled the trigger. Again, we just heard a click. Then I pointed the gun at the bookshelf and pulled the trigger. A huge explosion, and the bullet flew across the room and straight into the spine of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot.
WALK THROUGH WALLS, Marina Abramovic
Comments closedKojève’s most striking argument against the sheltered, contemplative philosophical life is that it cannot successfully differentiate itself from madness. Kojève maintains that the philosopher’s isolated judgment that his knowledge is superior—that he or she knows something more—is invalidated by the fact that there is madness, “which, insofar as it is a correct deduction from subjectively evident premises, can be ‘systematic’ or ‘logical.’ ” The philosopher who claims to know is simply not that distant from “the madman who believes that he is made of glass.
The philosopher appears to the uninitiated, after all, as having lost his bearings.
It is but a short step to the conclusion that the bearer of truth is a madman, for in the eyes of those who cannot conceive of any reality other than the one before them, such a figure may only be mad.
Madness is thus a decidedly uncritical affair. To be stung by the gods is to be intoxicated with lies, stories, possibilities that may never be realized. But, as Socrates says, “Madness that comes from a god is superior to sanity, which is of human origin”
THE BLACK CIRCLE, Jeff Love (UK) (US+)
One CommentIn 1946, University of Chicago researchers Anton Carlson and Frederick Hoelzel subjected rats to periodic food restriction and found, when they did, that those that went hungry every third day lived 15 to 20 percent longer than their cousins on a regular diet.
It’s not clear whether the pair applied what they’d learned to their own lives, but both lived relatively long lives for their time. Carlson died at the age of 81. Hoelzel made it to 74, despite having subjected himself over the years to experiments that included swallowing gravel, glass beads, and ball bearings to study how long it would take for such objects to pass through his system. And people say I’m crazy.
LIFESPAN, David Sinclair (UK) (US+)
Comments closedI formulated the real recipe for writing a computer-made bestseller:
First of all you need a computer, obviously, which is an intelligent machine that thinks for you. This would be a definite advantage for many people. All you need is a program of a few lines; even a child could do it. Then one feeds into the computer the content of a hundred or so novels, scientific works, the Bible, the Koran, and a bunch of telephone directories (very useful for characters’ names). Say, something like 120,000 pages. After this, using another program, you randomize; in other words, you mix all those texts together, making some adjustments – for instance, eliminating all the e’s – in order to have not only a novel but a Perec-like lipogram. At this point, you click on “Print,” and, since you have eliminated all the e’s, what comes out is something less than 120,000 pages.
After you have read them carefully several times, underlining the most significant passages, you take them to an incinerator.
Then you simply sit under a tree, with a piece of charcoal and good-quality drawing paper in hand, and, allowing your mind to wander, you write down two lines – for instance: “The moon is high in the sky /The wood rustles.” Maybe what emerges initially is not a novel, but rather a Japanese haiku.
Nevertheless, the important thing is to get started.
CONFESSIONS OF A YOUNG NOVELIST, Umberto Eco (Amazon)
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Comments closed…time is always short despite the unvarying task of burying mortal remains or consigning them to the flames; the long-faced gravediggers chatted as they got drunk, they talked about the Banquet, which would take place soon, in three months, in the spring, as it had been every year since the creation of the world, where they would have a few laughs, drink dry and eat hard, and for three days there would be no corpses, because, as is well known, no-one ever dies during the Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild, for this is the Grim Reaper’s gift to the Guild, these three days’ repose, these revelries far from death are the Christmas of the baleful, the feast of Saint Nicholas for the men with long faces.
THE ANNUAL BANQUET OF THE GRAVEDIGGGER’S GUILD, Mathias Enard
Comments closedComments closedThere’s a species of ant that will sit humbly before an anthill. Begging for small gifts. When an ant steps out to hand over just such a gift, the apparently supplicant one—in reality, willing to conquer—tears off its head. The heads of foreign ants are its food. In zoology, it is called FORMICA DECAPITANS, the ant which decapitates.
RUSSIA CONTAINER, Alexander Kluge
Comments closedthe pen goes on the attack against the innocent paper:
THE BOOKS OF JACOB, Olga Tokarczuk trans. Jennifer Croft
Once swallowed, the piece of paper lodges in her oesophagus near her heart. Saliva-soaked. The specially prepared black ink dissolves slowly now, the letters losing their shapes. Within the human body, the word splits in two: substance and essence. When the former goes, the latter, formlessly abiding, may be absorbed into the body’s tissues, since essences always seek carriers in matter – even if this is to be the cause of many misfortunes.
THE BOOKS OF JACOB, Olga Tokarczuk trans. Jennifer Croft. And this is the first paragraph of the book. An utterly astonishing way to start a novel. Put the bar waaaaay up high there right at the start of a thousand-page novel. Damn.
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