A collection of writings about place space writing and art …
Jason Wirth’s Commiserating with Devastated Things is a wonderful book tracing themes in the novels of Milan Kundera—not to mention the resonances of these themes with Virgil, Cervantes, and Hermann Broch (among others). I’ve learned about St. Francis joyously embracing a leper, about Holy Fools in Russian Orthodoxy and in Dostoevsky (in the person of […]
Seeing the city as a work of art is a curious way to view a city, I found it an interesting exercise. This book represents quite a masterful look at London, Paris and Vienna, with a splendid raft of photographs, illustrations and quotations. To the greater or lesser extent that I know them, they are…
Words are like boards when projected over some abyss spanned by human intellect. We are allowed a swift passage but not a deliberate stop. A quick one passes safely, but the moment we linger, the time-sensitive tissue rips and everything collapses to meet a bottomless chasm. Les mots sont des planches jetées sur un abîme […]
…je vous écris de la Cité du Temps interrompu. La catastrophe lente ne s’achève pas. Notre vie s’écoule, notre vie s’amenuise et nous attendons encore « le moment qui repasse le mur ». Le vieux différend unit le frère au frère. Dans l’enceinte du froid tout le monde enfermé. Ceux qui possédaient possèdent sans plus […]
via Henri Michaux – La lettre dit encore… — BEAUTY WILL SAVE THE WORLD
Almost Out Of The Sky Almost out of the sky, half of the moon anchors between two mountains. Turning, wandering night, the digger of eyes. Let’s see how many stars are smashed in the pool. It makes a cross of mourning between my eyes, and runs away. Forge of blue metals, nights of stilled combats, […]
Every journey conceals another journey within its lines: the path not taken and the forgotten angle.
– Jeanette Winterson, Sexing the Cherry
I feel, almost physically, the current of time slowing down in the gravitational field of oblivion. It seems to me then as if all the moments of our life occupy the same space, as if future events already existed and were only waiting for us to find our way to them at last, just as […]
Think of how the desert gets turned into metaphor in postmodern rhetoric where it functions as the place of origins, endings and hard truths: the place at the end of the world where all meanings and values blow away; the place without landmarks that can never be mapped; the place where nothing grows and nobody…
To walk is to lack a place. It is the indefinite process of being absent and in search of a proper. The moving about that the city mutliplies and concentrates makes the city itself an immense social experience of lacking a place – an experience that is, to be sure, broken up into countless tiny […]
In deep sadness there is no place for sentimentality. It is as final as the mountains: a fact. There it is. When you realize it you cannot complain.
― William S. Burroughs, Queer. (Viking Press November 1985)
Naked Cities Journal 
You must be logged in to post a comment.