October 2010
61 posts
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amare-habeo:
Medieval Iberian Music - Ondas Do...
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Watchkateoplis:
Jonathan Franzen talks about Freedom; the complexity of his friendship with David Foster Wallace, whose suicide partly triggered the book; and the ‘dull, throbbing anxiety’ of America’s liberal left: “America is almost a rogue state.”
via/@DaveAtNorth
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David Simon on 'Treme' and Why Journalism Might... →
rubenfeld:
Your morning optimism, via David Simon.
“For HBO, I’m working with Ed Burns and Dan Fesperman on a history of the CIA from 1945 on. It’s also a depiction of American foreign policy after the war. We’re also working on a series about the Lincoln assassination, which has remarkable parallels with the post-911 era and the hysteria of a terrorist attack in wartime.” —...
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Alberto Manguel :: The Muse of Impossibility →
petitchou:
Once named, a thing is no longer itself, in the Platonic sense that Borges delighted in elaborating: the thing is assumed by the word that names it, contaminated or enriched by all the ancestry and connotations and prejudices that the word drags along in its wake. In 1958, Borges wrote: If as the Greek explains in the Cratylus, The name is archetypal of the thing, In the...
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“Language, be it remember’d, is not an abstract construction of the learn’d, or...”
– Walt Whitman, “Slang in America” in The North American Review, v.141, 1885. (via superfluidity)
I’ve always believed Whitman’s grand trick was to believe in words as passionately as he did life; and then to create a new mythology of life in words. It’s one of the worthier tricks...
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“El amor es una atracción hacia una persona única: a un cuerpo y a un alma. El...”
– Octavio Paz (via blackred)
This quotation is from Octavio Paz’s book La Llama doble: amor y erotismo [The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism], Editorial Seix Barral, 1997, p. 33.
Here is it is English:
“Love is an attraction to a single person: a body and a soul. Love is choice,...
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“The feeling is hard to express…it searches, but then stammers, or from...”
– Denis Diderot, Sur la peinture, from his Oeuvres, Vol. 15, my translation.
Actually, this is an update on what very well might be an apocryphal quotation I posted yesterday. The unbelievable Ms. Odradek, who enjoys almost Borgesian omniscience, tracked down the following from Diderot’s...
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“It is terrible to destroy a person’s picture of himself in the interests...”
– Doris Lessing (b. October 22, 1919), The Grass is Singing
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“Les idées générales et abstraites sont la source des plus grandes erreurs des...”
– Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile ou de l’éducation.
“Generalized and abstract idas are the source of man’s greatest errors.” (my transl.)
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“Un mot n’est pas la chose, mais un éclair à la lueur duquel on...”
– Denis Diderot
“A word is not a thing, but a flash in whose light we perceive the thing.”
(Confession: the word on the street is that this is a quotation by Diderot. But I can only find it quoted by Roland Barthes in Fragments d’un discourse amoureux. If anyone happens to know or...
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“Feelings in opera are, ultimately, like axioms in mathematics, which cannot be...”
– Wernor Herzog, explaining the Absolute, the Sublime, in a speech he gave in Milan, Italy, after a screening of his movie, Lessons in Darkness. The entire speech, titled “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth,” is translate here in Arion by Moira Weigel.
Herzog begins by...
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“Might the ideal of ‘creativity’, taken as a supremely valuable,...”
– From “Get a Real Degree” by Elif Batuman, in the September 23, 2010 volume of the London Review of Books
Normally, my eyes glaze over when I see an article ponder the death or viability of an art form or educational practice. Batuman asks and largely answers the question: what damage...
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Mashups of the Third Kind
About an hour ago, I was taking a brief run under a peaking moon, listening to Kid Cudi and my breath, when the muezzin, the Muslim call to prayer, started to blare from the minaret of a nearby mosque.
Somehow the strains of music worked their way into each other, and I began to appreciate the accidental nature of sound in a way I never had before.
The muezzin ended before Kid Cudi was done...
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“Good and evill we know in the field of this World grow up together almost...”
– John Milton (via superfluidity)
From his Areopagitica, in which Milton, despite his parliamentarian instincts, argued against censorship. The title of this essay references the Areopagus (the Rock of Ares), the site of appeals and jurisprudence in ancient Athens, which the Athenian orator Isocrates...
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peterfeld:
Tom Waits, “San Diego Serenade”
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“So all hail Vargas Llosa, whom even his noisier left-wing critics have to regard...”
– Adam Gropnik, in the New Yorker (via thebronzemedal)
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“Look what a springy man, a nimble, flashy tumbler!”
– The Iliad, Book 16, ln. 868, translation Robert Fagles
Homer! On our Tumblr universe!
OK. To be honest, he actually uses the verb κυβιστάω, which means “to tumble,” though more in the somersaulting than in the blogging sense.
But: if any of you ever find the need to describe your...
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The Rat Police
For those of you who have been following Mrs. Tragos and my continuing adventures with our Turkish rat, we have an important update.
This morning, Mrs. Tragos picked up the phone, and was asked whether we had purchased cleaning equipment from the local supermarket yesterday. When pressed to identify herself, the woman on the phone indicated in broken English that she was from the local housing...
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Does Delaware Really Exist?
Mrs. Tragos and I had two friends over for dinner tonight to discuss all matters under the moon. But it was this question, posed by our friend Margaret, that I felt compelled to direct your way.
Because think about it: what evidence do we really have that Delaware exists? Our high school texts books tell us that Delaware was vaguely involved in the Revolutionary War. And it’s often...
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“El nacionalismo, lo mismo el centralista que los periféricos, es una catástrofe...”
– Mario Vargas Llosa in an interview with the Spanish newspaper ABC
“Nationalism, among centrists or at the extremes, is a catastrophe in all its manifestations.” (my transl.)
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