A collection of writings about place space writing and art …
Pour être grand, sois entier : rien En toi n’exagère ou n’exclus. Sois tout en chaque chose. Mets tout ce que tu es Dans le plus petit de tes actes. Ainsi en chaque lac brille la lune entière Pour la raison qu’elle vit haut. * Para ser grande, sê inteiro: nada Para ser grande, sê […]
via Fernando Pessoa – Pour être grand, sois entier… — BEAUTY WILL SAVE THE WORLD
“How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.”
–William S. Burroughs, Writer
via “How I hate those who are dedicated to producing conformity.“ — Art of Quotation
Cendrars was, beyond all questions, the pioneer of poetic modernism.
via Blaise Cendrars: A Poet for the Twenty-First Century — Hyperallergic
… I’m thinking structures. I’ve always taken it for granted that in literary writing content and form are intertwined, one. Now I’m examining my belief. Iain says that the writer is a person who finds, rather than makes, structures. “I began to see the pattern of the living city in myth,” he tells me. “If you look, you can see the structures that lie underneath.”
“Is this how we write? By seeing? By finding?” “I think so.”
“Then, to write an epic is to see the structure of one’s city or of one’s life as epic?” …
Extracted from: Ian Sinclair an Interview with Kathy Acker in – ‘Writing as Magic in London in Its Summer: Iain Sinclair and the Crafting of Place.’
Read the full interview at: https://www.closeupfilmcentre.com/vertigo_magazine/volume-4-issue-3-summer-2009/writing-as-magic-in-london-in-its-summer/
In my last blog I discussed the act of walking and in particular the figure of the flâneuse in Ruth Orkin’s famous 1951 photograph of a woman walking in Florence. I also briefly touched on the ambulant subjects in Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and I want to […]
via The Flaneur in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde — Mr Hanson’s English
“Louis Aragon guides us through the Passage de L’Opéra, imaginatively exploring the allure of various establishments found in the covered arcades, including seedy lodging houses, cafés, hairdressing salons, public baths, theatres, washrooms and quaint specialist shops selling such items as handkerchiefs, walking sticks, and exotic stamps. He evokes the ambiguity of these places, their pleasures and secrets: ‘the ephemeral, the ghostly landscape of damnable pleasures and professions’. Aragon playfully opens up the arcades as diverse laboratories of sensations against what he sees as respectable, inoffensive bourgeoisie sensibilities. The passageway becomes a ‘method’ for loosening inhibitions, revealing both the shadowy and bright secrets that can be found behind its doors. In his stroll through Passage de L’Opéra the public baths and brothel are described in terms of ‘other places’, different worlds secreted in the heart of Paris, and when he moves out to the district of Butts-Chaumont, Aragon’s description and celebration of gardens and parks likewise become zones of mystery and enchantment. Gardens become places of, and for, dreams and mad invention. Parks, particularly at night, become places of sensual delight and lurking danger.”
Review of Peter Aragon’s Paris Peasant by Peter Johnson (12 February 2014) via http://www.heterotopiastudies.com/paris-peasant-aragon/
Page Images from A Rare Hardcover Edition of Paris Peasant. Photography by Marcus D. Niski © 2004-2017
Destiny never consists in step-by-step deterministic relations between presents which succeed one another according to the order of a represented time. Rather, it implies between successive presents non-localisable connections, actions at a distance, systems of replay, resonance and echoes, objective chances, signs, signals, and roles which transcend spatial locations and temporal successions. — Gilles Deleuze, […]
Find meaning. Distinguish melancholy from sadness. Go out for a walk. It doesn’t have to be a romantic walk in the park, spring at its most spectacular moment, flowers and smells and outstanding poetical imagery smoothly transferring you into another world. It doesn’t have to be a walk during which you’ll have multiple life epiphanies […]
Albert Camus on the therapeutic joys and benefits of walking via Albert Camus — The Vale of Soul-Making
Marcel Krueger discusses the creative potential of the city, the flâneuse and identity politics.
I write, I extend my hand; without my knowing it, this is already a prayer, I extend my hand to you so that you will exist because you do exist, beyond my fingers, your fingers, without my knowing it this is already a response, already I draw to my side the site for you, with […]
Naked Cities Journal 
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