Tag: Writers

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The past lives of the “bunker” on the Bowery — Ephemeral New York

The first people to hang out at the red brick, Queen Anne–style building that opened in 1885 at 222 Bowery were working-class men. At the time, the Bowery was a cacophonous circus of vaudeville theaters, beer gardens, pawnbrokers, rowdies, and streetcars all under the screeching rails of the Third Avenue elevated train. Much of New […]

The past lives of the “bunker” on the Bowery — Ephemeral New York

See also my related post on ‘The Bunker’:

The Bunker: John Giorno and The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs by Marcus D. Niski

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Passivity ( a text of Maurice Blanchot translated by Vadim Bystritski) — Before and After Francis Ponge

Passivity is not just acceptance, not like amorphous, inert matter ready to fit into a form, but passive as under pressure of death — death whose silent intensity does not resemble a welcome reception, leaving its imprint without a word, a body being delegated to the past, a body seen as an interval, a being in suspension, whose syncope is produced by snipping of time and which we can only see as some unarticulated savage history that presently makes no sense. Passive here is a complete absence of narrative, leaving us with an event that cannot be cited and is impossible as a recollection of a forgotten thought, because it was never forgotten, always remaining outside the field of memory.

Passivité n’est pas simple réception, pas plus qu’elle ne serait l’informe et inerte matière prête à toute forme — passives, les poussées de mourir (le mourir, silencieuse intensité ; ce qui ne se laisse pas accueillir ; ce qui s’inscrit sans parole, le corps au passé, corps de personne, le corps de l’intervalle :

[…]

Passivity ( a text of Maurice Blanchot translated by Vadim Bystritski) — Before and After Francis Ponge
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Jorge Luis Borges — The Vale of Soul-Making

Two English Poems

I

The useless dawn finds me in a deserted street-
   corner; I have outlived the night.
Nights are proud waves; darkblue topheavy waves
   laden with all the hues of deep spoil, laden with
   things unlikely and desirable.
Nights have a habit of mysterious gifts and refusals,
   of things half given away, half withheld,
   of joys with a dark hemisphere. Nights act
   that way, I tell you.

[…]

Jorge Luis Borges — The Vale of Soul-Making

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Death As an Imposter (a text of Georges Bataille translated by Vadim Bystritski) — Before and After Francis Ponge

I exist, around me extends the void, the real world’s darkness. I exist and continue blind, anxious, because people next to me are so obviously other beings, feeling nothing of what I feel. As I imagine my arrival in this world from the union of a man and a woman, and at the very moment of that conjunction, a unique opportunity is a decision taken about this me that I am, and without which for me, ultimately, there would not be anything. Of this small difference, I am the consequence. As far as I am concerned, without that there wouldn’t be anything, the same as in case of my death.

This tiny chance of my arrival suspended over void, seems to challenge the void, this infinite painful impossibility facing the unique being that I am.

The others’ presence near me matters little, given my unsubstentiabiliity in the midst of negligence, my awareness of my loneliness. The notion of unique chance follows me in the world where I abide, and where we both, the world and myself, are total strangers to it all.

And if the world fails to grasp this consciousness of mine, trembling, I give up all hope of logical cohesion, vowing myself to immobility, first my own, then to take it to another level, of everything else, which is a situation of some staggering drunk, who mistaking his life for a candle that he has blown out, is left screaming in the dark…

J’existe — autour de moi, s’étend le vide, l’obscurité du monde réel — j’existe, je demeure aveugle, dans l’angoisse : chacun des autres est tout autre que moi, je ne sens rien de ce qu’il sent. Si j’envisage ma venue au monde liée à la naissance puis à la conjonction d’un homme et une femme, et même, à l’instant de la conjonction — une chance unique décida de la possibilité de ce moi que je suis : en dernier ressort l’impossibilité folle du seul être sans lequel, pour moi, rien ne serait. La plus petite différence dans la suite dont je suis le terme : au lieu de moi avide d’être moi, il n’y aurait quant à moi que le néant, comme si j’étais mort.

…

Death As an Imposter (a text of Georges Bataille translated by Vadim Bystritski) — Before and After Francis Ponge

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#1956Club – a great French artist considers his life and work… — Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings

Journals of Jean Cocteau – edited and introduced by Wallace Fowlie Today’s time travelling trip to 1956 sees me considering another great French artist – the most wonderful Jean Cocteau. I first encountered his works back in the mid-1980s, when friends dragged me off to a screening in London of two of his films, “Orphee” […]

#1956Club – a great French artist considers his life and work… — Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings
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What I Believe by J.G Ballard — cakeordeathsite

The incantatory prose poem What I Believe from 1984 is a crystallised distillation of Ballard’s artistic credo. Here are all the signature trade-marks and obsessions: car crashes, deserted beaches and abandoned hotels as well as his extraordinarily odd musings on the real appeal of celebrities. It is, as always with Ballard, idiosyncratic, bizarre and strangely beautiful. The […]

What I Believe by J.G Ballard — cakeordeathsite