In French translation.
“Sa poésie était aussi simple et franche que la prose des autres.”
[…]
“Comme le feu ou la mer il était trop simple pour inspirer confiance.”
(The Wisdom of Father Brown, second short story. / La Sagesse du Père Brown; II, Le Paradis des Voleurs
***
// J’avais posté cet extrait sur Ello il y a + de 3 ans apparemment. FWIW
“Starting slowly, quietly, I began to extemporise on what I called the time of stupor, the time of drifting. I spoke about Tarkovsky’s Stalker, about Tarr’s Damnation. I spoke about untensed time, about time out of phase, about temporal puddles and temporal ox-bow lakes…
I spoke of night buses and eternal rain. I spoke of five hundred different kinds of boredom. I spoke of the wisdom of the long-term sick and the unemployed. I spoke of kebab wrappers blowing in the wind.
I spoke of empty hours and empty days. I spoke of wave-froth on the deep body of the sea. I spoke of misty thoughts yet to coalesce. I spoke of hazy skies and clouds of midges.
I spoke of being lost in time, buried in time. I spoke of time piling up like a great snowdrift. I spoke of time as an ache, as a wound, as a sigh.”
— Lars Iyer, Exodus, New York: Melville House, 2012, pp.176-7.
Warren Ellis on the future as weather.
// “It’s a text companion piece to the How The Light Gets In festival, and was sent in [an] edition of his newsletter, Orbital Operations.” (2016)
/via #newdarkage
// En faisant du ménage dans de vieilles notes/fichiers/etc…
// Une partie d’une ITW de Mark Fisher de 2015.
“[…] There is this frenzied activity of promotion and of self-promotion— and Baudrillard was really a prophet of this— which I think is a final and decadent stage of capitalism and so I titled a chapter in Capitalist Realism, “All that’s solid melts into PR.”
I really liked that title…
Of course it’s a play on Marx and Engels but this seems to me what’s happening with the social media obsession and it’s something Baudrillard would have anticipated. If you listen to the radio or watch TV now, it seems they are endlessly promoting Twitter feeds rather than the other way around. Wasn’t the point of the social media feed to promote the radio or TV show? It’s sheer promotion for its own sake now and everything gets sucked into this vortex without any possible end. I use the word “frenzied” because it’s producing this constant sense of overwhelming urgency that there is no time to settle on anything— “there’s no time to read this book properly, there’s no time for me to listen to this record. Maybe I’ll be able to snatch a few fragments of it. What I want is a quick summary because I’m under pressure at all times from multiple platforms and even on those platforms my attention will be dispersed across multiple windows.” And this is not some strange or marginal condition for those straining themselves to the limit but becoming required of practically everybody. And the final deadly element is that this is not just some duty imposed on us by work or our employers but that this requirement has become libidinized as something we will enjoy. So I think along with Baudrillard, Burroughs is also a key prophet of the current moment. We are seeing addiction and compulsion— not the kind of lyrical addictions of heroin but precisely the Baudrillardian kind— addictions to the banal and the boring. I mean, is there anything more boring than being addicted to smartphones?!”
— http://www.highwaymagazine.info/mark-fisher-full-interview/
(The source article linked here is not “full”, but contains “redacted” words…)
“Some day the load we’re carrying with us may help someone. But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn’t use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We’re going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we’re doing, you can say, ‘We’re remembering’. That’s where we’ll win out in the long run. And some day we’ll remember so much that we’ll build the biggest goddamn steam-shovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up. Come on now, we’re going to go build a mirror-factory first and put out nothing but mirrors for the next year and take a long look in them.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
/via someone some time ago.
“Through neglect, ignorance, or inability, the new intellectual Borgias cram hairballs down our throats and refuse us the convulsion that could make us well. They have forgotten, if they ever knew, the ancient knowledge that only by being truly sick can one regain health. Even beasts know when it is good and proper to throw up. Teach me how to be sick then, in the right time and place, so that I may again walk in the fields and with the wise and smiling dogs know enough to chew sweet grass.”
― Ray Bradbury, Zen in the Art of Writing: Essays on Creativity
// J’ai commencé à lire il y a pas si longtemps la récente traduction des essais mais repoussé ma lecture à plus tard…
via kavan.land — “a semantic and fictional archive designed out of a collection of data related to the British novelist Anna Kavan (1901–1968).”
Partial ‘reblog’ from everythingisnice (text & quotes by them / only the pointless/boring pics are mine):
I had come back to investigate rumours of a mysterious impending emergency in this part of the world. But as soon as I got here she became an obsession, I could think only of her, felt I must she her immediately, nothing else mattered. Of course I knew it was utterly irrational. And so was my present uneasiness: no harm was likely to come to me in my own country; and yet I was becoming more and more anxious as I drove. (p. 6)
From the outset it is obvious that Ice is a novel about obsession but it rapidly becomes clear that it is overwhelmingly about illness. Our nameless narrator has returned to this country from business overseas and is involved with this brewing civil emergency but it is not clear what this is or what his role in it is. Government? Military? He is somehow an insider yet he seems to fear the police. It is a defining feature of the novel that the narrator is both victim and agent of authority.
It is unseasonably cold and the man at the petrol station warns him of ice as he sets off up the country lanes to visit the girl. Ethereal, blonde to the point of translucency, she is never named either. They knew each other when they were younger but she married another man:
This was past history. But the consequences of the traumatic experience were still evident in the insomnia and headaches from which I suffered. The drugs prescribed for me produced horrible dreams, in which she always appeared as a helpless victim, her fragile body broken and bruised. These dreams were not confined to sleep only, and a deplorable side effect was the way I had come to enjoy them. (p. 8-9)
So he is traumatised, hallucinating and addicted. The waking dream occurs again and again; it is always the same: she becomes trapped, entombed, in ice. “Motionless, she kept her eyes fixed on the walls moving slowly towards her, a glassy, glittering circle of solid ice, of which she was the centre.” (p. 7) Early on, the imagery recurs again and again – “Great ice-cliffs were closing in on all sides.” (p. 13); “The masses of dense foliage all round became prison walls, impassable circular green ice-walls, surging towards her.” (p. 19) – culminate in an extraordinarily intense evocation:
“Despairingly she looked all round. She was completely encircled by the tremendous ice walls, which were made fluid by explosions of blinding light, so that they moved and changed with a continuous liquid motion, advancing in torrents of ice, avalanches as big as oceans, flooding everywhere over the doomed world. Wherever she looked, she saw the same fearful encirclement, soaring battlements of ice, an over-hanging ring of frigid, fiery, colossal waves about to collapse upon her. Frozen by the deathly cold emanating from the ice, dazzled by the blaze of crystalline ice-light, she felt herself becoming part of the polar vision, her structure becoming one with the ice and snow. As her fate, she accepted the world of ice, shining, shimmering, dead; she resigned herself to the triumph of glaciers and the death of her world.” (p. 21)
[…]
In his introduction, Priest says: “To work as allegory there has to be an exactness that the reader can grasp. In Ice the symbols are elusive, mysterious, captivating. It ends as it begins, with nothing that is practical or concluded.” If it is not an allegory, perhaps Ice is simply a wound; a raw insight into Kavan’s illness.
…