Thursday, September 26, 2013
A few years ago, while visiting a friend, I saw a poster on which the following sentence had been translated into English and diagrammed. Sans honneur que précaire, sans liberté que provisoire, jusqu’à la découverte du crime; sans situation qu’instable, comme pour le poète la veille fêté dans tous les salons, applaudi dans tous les […]
Wednesday, September 25, 2013
Measures against power […] And Mr. Keuner told the following story: One day, during the period of illegality, an agent entered the apartment of Mr. Eggers, a man who had learned to say no. The agent showed a document, which was made out in the name of those who ruled the city, and which stated […]
In Severo Sarduy’s Cobra, the alternation is that of two pleasures in a state of competition; the other edge is the other delight: more, more, still more! one more word, one more celebration. Language reconstructs itself elsewhere under the teeming flux of every kind of linguistic pleasure. Where is this elsewhere? In the paradise of […]
Always more slowly ahead. — Running on the street has the expression of terror. The fall of the victim is imitated in the very attempt to escape the fall. The posture of the head, which would like to remained raised, is that of someone who is drowning, the tense face resembles the grimace of torture. […]
Slumped there in your favorite chair, with your nine drinks lined up on the side table in soldierly array, and your hand never far from them, and your other hand holding on to the plump belly of the overfed child, and perhaps rocking a bit, if the chair is a rocking chair as mine was […]
Forþon nu min hyge hweorfeð ofer hreþerlocan, min modsefa mid mereflode, ofer hwæles eþel hweorfeð wide, eorþan sceatas—cymeð eft to me gifre ond grædig; gielleð anfloga, hweteð on hwælweg hreþer unwearnum ofer holma gelagu. And now my spirit twists out of my breast, my spirit out in the waterways, over the whale’s path it soars […]
From the exhibition at the Setagaya Literary Museum in Tokyo in honor of the 60th anniversary of the Iwanami boys’ books series. Le Petit Prince (The Little Prince) — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943) Il Romanzo di Cipollino (The Adventures of Little Onion) — Gianni Rodari (1956) The Rose and the Ring — William Makepeace Thackeray […]
Melville has the strange, uncanny magic of sea-creatures, and some of their repulsiveness. He isn’t quite a land animal. There is something slithery about him. Something always half-seas-over. In his life they said he was mad—or crazy. He was neither mad nor crazy. But he was over the border. He was half a water animal, […]
Monday, February 18, 2013
The difference is not a simple difference of degree between poets. It is something which had happened to the mind of England between the time of Donne or Lord Herbert of Cherbury and the time of Tennyson and Browning; it is the difference between the intellectual poet and the reflective poet. Tennyson and Browning are […]
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Monday, December 10, 2012
Some sensibilities require the illusion of objectivity in order to get their version of the truth spoken: if the metaphysician realized he was only talking about himself, not about reality, he would be unable to say what he needs to say. and later: Â Eventually the main road can no longer be seen, but one keeps […]