A collection of writings about place space writing and art …
As writers, we often find ourselves collecting notebooks in an attempt to fill them. Just as often, the ratio of empty notebooks to full starts to lean heavy on the “empty” side, but our compulsion to surround ourselves with empty pages is real. Curious that, for many of us, the empty page is a source […]
Six notebooks that guarantee you will get some writing done today, probably — B.W. McDermott
The idea most of us have about poetry is so hazy that we take this impression of haziness for our definition of poetry. La plupart des hommes ont de la poésie une idée si vague que ce vague même de leur idée est pour eux la définition de la poésie.
Poetry (a text of Paul Valéry translated by Vadim Bystritski) — Before and After Francis Ponge
Le plaisir littéraire n’est pas d’exprimer sa pensée tant que de trouver ce qu’on n’attendait pas de soi.
Literary pleasure is not to express one’s thought as long as to find what was not expected of oneself.
– Paul Valéry, Cahiers (Poétique, 1917-1918)
Barthes’ “The Death of the Author” is comprised of several short self-contained arguments explaining why the author is no longer an important part of literature. Quite possibly the weakest of his arguments is the one that states that the author is not important because he or she does not write him or herself into the […]
I don’t feel guilt at being unsociable, though I may sometimes regret it because my loneliness is painful. But when I move into the world, it feels like a moral fall–like seeking love in a whorehouse.
— Susan Sontag, As Consciousness Is Harnessed To Flesh: Journals & Notebooks, 1964 – 1980 (FSG, 2012)
This selection of letters (1945-1947) from Artaud’s consummate work, Suppôts et Suppliciations [Henchmen and Torturings] translated into English for the first time, provides readers with a vivid, uniquely intimate view of Artaud’s final years. They show Artaud at his most exposed, and they are perhaps his most explosive, tragic, sad, even humorous. Each of the correspondents that came into contact with Artaud during this time were in their own way deeply affected since his project was essentially an “attack / on the mind of the public.”
Commenting on and elaborating key themes from his earlier writing, while venturing into new territory, Artaud recounts his torture and violation in asylums, his crucifixion two thousand years ago in Golgotha, his deception by occult initiates and doubles, and his intended journey to Tibet, where, aided by his “daughters of the heart,” he will finally put an end to these “maneuvers of obscene bewitchment.” Artaud also speaks of his plan to create a “body without organs” and extends this idea to the visual arts, where he argues that painting and drawing must wage a ceaseless battle against the limits of representation.
The apocalyptic vision for mankind that led Artaud on a journey, beginning in Mexico in 1936 and ending, tragically, in Ireland in 1937, with a mental breakdown, silence, and long internment in asylums, concluded with the extremely prolific late period from which these letters were drawn. There is an unmistakable unity of vision that permeates the letters: the vision of an unceasing, ubiquitous, and malignant plot “to close the mouth of lucidity” by any means, and which must be resisted at all costs.
Translated by Peter Valente & Cole Heinowitz
With an introduction by Jay Murphy
Illustrated by Martin Bladh and Karolina Urbaniak
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 […]
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 […]
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)
” Sometimes people ask me what it takes to be a writer. The only things you have to do, I tell them, are read constantly; write for thousands of hours; and have the masochistic ability to absorb a great deal of rejection and isolation. As it turns out, these qualities have prepared me well to deal […]
via “Our real enemy is not the virus but our response to the virus.” — Art of Quotation
Naked Cities Journal 
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