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"Everything you can imagine is real."— Pablo Picasso

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Archive

Feb
20th

Wed

“Flaubert did not write a novel. He merely connected one sentence after another. The eros between sentences, that is the essence of Flaubert’s novel.”

— Roland Barthes, French literary theorist, philosopher, linguist, critic, and semiotician (1915-1980), on Flaubert’s novels cited in Young-ha Kim: Be an artist, right now!, TEDx Seoul [3:25-3:35], Filmed Jul 2010, Posted Feb 2013.

Aug
25th

Sat

“When I was a young man I was always hunting for new metaphors. Then I found out that really good metaphors are always the same. I mean you compare time to a road, death to sleeping, life to dreaming, and those are the great metaphors in literature because they correspond to something essential. If you invent metaphors, they are apt to be surprising during the fraction of a second, but they strike no deep emotion whatever. If you think of life as a dream, that is a thought, a thought that is real, or at least that most men are bound to have, no? “What oft was thought, but ne’er so well expressed.”

I think that’s better than the idea of shocking people, than finding connections between things that have never been connected before, because there is no real connection, so the whole thing is a kind of juggling.”

— Jorge Luis Borges, Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translato (1899-1986), interviewed by Ronald Christ in July 1966, Jorge Luis Borges, The Art of Fiction No. 39, The Paris Review. (Photo source)

Jul
19th

Thu

“Writing is not like painting where you add. It is not what you put on the canvas that the reader sees. Writing is more like a sculpture where you remove, you eliminate in order to make the work visible. Even those pages you remove somehow remain. There is a difference between a book of two hundred pages from the very beginning, and a book of two hundred pages, which is the result of an original eight hundred pages. The six hundred pages are there. Only you don’t see them.”

— Elie Wiesel, Romanian-born Jewish-American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel Laureate, and Holocaust survivor (b. 1928), Elie Wiesel: Conversations, Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2002, p.72. (Photo: Elie Wiesel by Eddie Adams)

Apr
25th

Wed

Theodor W. Adorno: ‘There is no element in which language resembles music more than in the punctuation marks’

“The less punctuation marks, taken in isolation, convey meaning or expression and the more they constitute the opposite pole in language names, the more each of them acquires a definitive physiognomic status of its own, an expression of its own, which cannot be separated from its syntactic function but is by no means exhaused by it. (…)

Even text, even the most densely woven, cites them of its own accord — friendly spirits whose bodiless presence nourishes the body of language. There is no element in which language resembles music more than in the punctuation marks. The comma and the period correspond to the half-cadence and the authentic cadence. Exclamation points are like silent cymbal clashes, question marks like musical upbeats, colons dominant seventh chords; and only a person who can perceive the different weights of strong and weak phrasings in musical form can really feel the distinction between the comma and the semicolon. (…)

Literary dilettantes can be recognized by their desire to connect everything. Their products hook sentences together with logical connectives even though the logical relationship asserted by those connectives does not hold. To the person who cannot truly conceive anything as a unit, anything that suggests disintegration or discontinuity is unbearable; only a person who can grasp totality can understand caesuras.

But the dash provides instruction in them. In the dash, thought becomes aware of its fragmentary character. It is no accident that in the era of the progressive degeneration of language, this mark of punctuation is neglected precisely insofar as it fulfills its function: when it separates things that feign a connection. All the dash claims to do now is to prepare us in a foolish way for surprises that by that very token are no longer surprising. (…) The test of a writer’s sensitivity in punctuating is the way he handles parenthetical material.”

— Theodor W. Adorno, German sociologist, philosopher and musicologist known for his critical theory of society (1903-1969), Punctuation marks (pdf) (Illustration)

Mar
8th

Thu

“We should not write so that it is possible for the reader to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.”

— Quintilian (Marcus Fabius Quintilianus), Roman rhetorician from Hispania, widely referred to in medieval schools of rhetoric and in Renaissance writing (c. 35-100) (tnx fast-t-feasts)

Jan
11th

Wed

Nicholas Carr on Books That Are Never Done Being Written

“Digital text is ushering in an era of perpetual revision and updating, for better and for worse. (…) What the historian Elizabeth Eisenstein calls “typographical fixity” served as a cultural preservative. It helped to protect original documents from corruption, providing a more solid foundation for the writing of history. It established a reliable record of knowledge, aiding the spread of science. It accelerated the standardization of everything from language to law. The preservative qualities of printed books, Ms. Eisenstein argues, may be the most important legacy of Gutenberg ’s invention.

Once digitized, a page of words loses its fixity. It can change every time it’s refreshed on a screen. (…) Movable text makes a lousy preservative. (…)

What will be lost, or at least diminished, is the sense of a book as a finished and complete object, a self-contained work of art.

Not long before he died, John Updike spoke eloquently of a book’s “edges,” the boundaries that give shape and integrity to a literary work and that for centuries have found their outward expression in the indelibility of printed pages. It’s those edges that give a book its solidity, allowing it to stand up to the vagaries of fashion and the erosions of time. And it’s those edges that seem fated to blur as the words of books go from being stamped permanently on sheets of paper to being rendered temporarily on flickering screens.”

— Nicholas Carr, American writer, Books That Are Never Done Being Written , WSJ.com, Dec 31, 2011.

Jan
7th

Sat

“It [writing] has enormous meta-cognitive implications. The power is this: That you cannot only think in ways that you could not possibly think if you did not have the written word, but you can now think about the thinking that you do with the written word. There is danger in this, and the danger is that the enormous expressive and self-referential capacities of the written word, that is, the capacities to keep referring to referring to referring, will reach a point where you lose contact with the real world.

And this, believe me, is very common in universities. There’s a technical name for it, I don’t know if we can use it on television, it’s called “bullshit.” But this is very common in academic life, where people just get a form of self-referentiality of the language, where the language is talking about the language, which is talking about the language, and in the end, it’s hot air. That’s another name for the same phenomenon.”

— John Rogers Searle, American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Language, Mind and Consciousness (interviews) (Illustration: Univers Font Study on the Behance Network)

Nov
19th

Sat

“No pen, no ink, no table, no room, no time, no quiet, no inclination.”

— James Joyce, Irish novelist and poet, considered to be one of the most influential writers in the modernist avant-garde of the early 20th century (1882-1941) in a letter to his brother, cited in Peter Hartshorn, James Joyce and Trieste, Greenwood Press, 1997, p.43.

Nov
17th

Thu

“There are a thousand thoughts lying within a man that he does not know till he takes up a pen to write.”

— William Makepeace Thackeray, English novelist (1811-1863) (tnx fast-t-feasts)

Oct
22nd

Sat

“Thoughts are real’, he said. ‘Words are real. Everything human is real, and sometimes we know things before they happen, even if we aren’t aware of it. We live in the present, but the future is inside us at every moment. Maybe that’s what writing is all about, Sid. Not recording events from the past, but making things happen in the future’.”

— Paul Auster, American author known for works blending absurdism, existentialism, crime fiction and the search for identity and personal meaning, Oracle Night, Henry Holt, 2003

Oct
4th

Tue

“The result of the struggle between the thought and the ability to express it, between dream and reality, is seldom more than a compromise or an approximation. Thus there is little chance that we will succeed in getting through to a large audience, and on the whole we are quite satisfied if we are understood and appreciated by a small number of sensitive, receptive people.”

— M. C. Escher, Dutch graphic artist. He is known for his often mathematically inspired woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints (1898-1972), On Being a Graphic Artis (Illustration: M C Escher at Work)

Sep
29th

Thu

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.”

— Edwin Schlossberg, American designer, author and artist, cited in Tim O’Reilly, Birth of the global mind, Financial Times, Sept 23, 2011

Jun
1st

Wed

“All over the world people are taking notes as a way of postponing, putting off and standing in for.”

— Geoff Dyer, British author and novelist, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence, Picador, 2009

Apr
2nd

Sat

“A belief that meaning (or meanings) lies in the work of art, embodied, incarnate, a real presence… It is a faith in meaning incarnate in the work of art that captures the ‘immensity of the commonplace’, that changes our very construction of reality: ‘poplars are on fire after Van Gogh’… The literary artist, it would follow from this argument, becomes an agent in the evolution of mind - but not without the co-option of the reader as his fellow author.”

— George Steiner, European-born American literary critic, essayist, philosopher, novelist, translator, and educator, ‘A new meaning of meaning,’ in TLS, 8th Nov, 1985 cited in John Shotter, Towards at third revolution in psychology: From inner mental representation to dialogical social practices