Why Read?
- I just can't look outside of what it might be like to have an intellect and sensibility formed by interaction with texts. Or can I? After all, I sympathized heavily with Alvarenga (an illiterate man, lost at sea) - so perhaps, after all, this is the answer to the vexed question of why we should read: so as to anticipate, understand, and so connect with the non-literate realms that surround us - whether we be separated from them by reason of space or time or technology.
- So why read? Read because short of meeting and communing with them (and perhaps, because of this, writing about them), reading about diverse modes of being and consciousness is the best way we have of entering into them and abiding.
Kafka's Wound
- Kafka at 19: "The most important or charming was the wish to achieve a view of life (and - this was necessarily bound up with it - to convince other people of it in writing), in which life maintained its natural heavy rise and fall, but at the same time would be recognized, no less clearly, as a void, a dream, a floating."
- The adult Kafka reached a mystical appreciation of his youthful velleity, characterising it as a desire both to expertly hammer together a table and at the same tim "do nothing". The inanition would validate the craftsmanship involved, freeing it to become "even bolder, even more resolute, even more real and, if you like, even more insane".
- Borges: "The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. In this correlation the identity or plurality of the men involved is unimportant."
- Kafka: "Concealment has been my life's vocation."
- Once bitten by a mania for associative thinking, you can't tell where you might end up.
- The capability words have when arranged sequentially to both mimic the free flow of human thought and investigate the physical expressions and interactions of thinking subjects; the way they may be shaped into a believable simulacrum of either the commonplace world, or any number of invented ones; the capacity words have to move between the imagistic and the concretized, expressing all shades in between; and the diacritical capability of the extended prose form itself, which unlike any other art form is able to enact self-analysis.
- The hallmark of our contemporary culture is an active resistance to difficulty in all its aesthetic manifestations, accompanied by a sense of grievance which conflates it with political elitism.
- Debord: "The perfect democracy fabricates its own inconceivable enemy; it wants to be judged by its enemies rather than its results."
- In postmodernism (we claimed erroneously), we weren't overtaken by new technologies, we simply took what we wanted from them and collaged these fragments together, using the styles and modes of the past as a framework of ironic distancing, and hence reasserted the primacy of the message over the medium.
- McLuhan: "The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or concepts, but alter sense rations or patterns of perception steadily and without any resistance." And surely here too he's right: all the opinions and conceptions of the new media amount to nothing set beside the way they're actually used. McLuhan also states: "The serious artist is the only person able to encounter technology with impunity, just because he is an expert aware of the changes in sense perception."
The Last Typewriter Engineer
- Rasmus Malling-Hansen's proto-typewriter of the 1860s, the so-called "Writing Ball", was used by Nietzsche, among others.
