 | The better I got to know him, the more his productivity awed me. I have always been a plodder, a person who anguishes and struggles over each sentence, and even on my best days I do no more than inch along, crawling on my belly like a man lost in the desert. The smallest word is surrounded by acres of silence for me, and even after I manage to get that word down on the page, it seems to sit there like a mirage, a speck of doubt glimmering in the sand. Language has never been accessible to me in the way that it was for Sachs. I’m shut off from my own thoughts, trapped in a no-man’s-land between feeling and articulation, and no matter how hard I try to express myself, I can rarely come up with more than a confused stammer. Sachs never had any of these difficulties. Words and things matched up for him, whereas for me they are constantly breaking apart, flying off in a hundred different directions. I spent most of my time picking up the pieces and gluing them back together, but Sachs never had to stumble around like that, hunting through garbage dumps and trash bins, wondering if he hadn’t fit the wrong pieces next to each other. |
✖ Via Leviathan by Paul Auster, New York: Penguin, 1992, p. 55 |
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Jul 27 link notes
art
author
novel
writing
word
thing
creation
creativity
composition
relation
fragment
destruction
Paul Auster
Leviathan
 | There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe’s Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm. |
✖ Via Theses on the Philosophy in History (also On the Concept of History, from German: Über den Begriff der Geschichte) by Walter Benjamin, tr. Dennis Redmond, [1940]2001, §IX Here’s a French translation:
Il existe un tableau de Klee qui s’intitule Angelus Novus. Il représente un ange qui semble avoir dessein de s’éloigner de ce à quoi son regard semble rivé. Ses yeux sont écarquillés, sa bouche ouverte, ses ailes déployées. Tel est l’aspect que doit avoir nécessairement l’ange de l’histoire. Il a le visage tourné vers le passé. Où paraît devant nous une suite d’événements, il ne voit qu’une seule et unique catastrophe, qui ne cesse d’amonceler ruines sur ruines et les jette à ses pieds. Il voudrait bien s’attarder, réveiller les morts et rassembler les vaincus. Mais du paradis souffle une tempête qui s’est prise dans ses ailes, si forte que l’ange ne peut plus les refermer. Cette tempête le pousse incessamment vers l’avenir auquel il tourne le dos, cependant que jusqu’au ciel devant lui s’accumulent les ruines. Cette tempête est ce que nous appelons le progrès. (Source) |
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Jul 23 link notes reblogged from Christopher Butler
art
progress
philosophy
Benjamin
history
man
angel
past
present
future
destruction
catastrophe
order
chaos
tempest
 | Mais l’accusation a buté sur le pourquoi des actes de celui qui, comme l’avait indiqué à l’audience le témoin Jean-Pierre Mustier, « vivra et mourra comme étant le trader au monde ayant fait perdre le plus d’argent à sa banque ». « Fou ou incompétent?” a demandé Jean-Michel Aldebert. Philippe Bourion avait évoqué une autre hypothèse: celle d’une « variante financière du bovarysme, qui consiste à se voir autrement que l’on est, à se donner des sensations fortes”. “Il y aura un avant et un après Kerviel dans les banques”, a affirmé le procureur, tout en s’interrogeant sur la capacité du système à lutter contre un nouveau « génie dévastateur ». |
✖ Via Le Monde: “Me Metzner: “Qui a fabriqué Jérôme Kerviel”?”, Chroniques Judiciaires, by Pascale Robert Diard, June 25th, 2010 |
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Jul 21 link notes
art
novel
author
pathology
fantasy
knowledge
reality
economy
lost
loser
representation
anxiety
critic
desire
Kerviel
destruction
money
bank
capitalism
 | One day the expelled brothers joined forces, slew and ate the father, and thus put an end to the father horde. Together they dared and accomplished what would have remained impossible for them singly. Perhaps some advance in culture, like the use of a new weapon, had given them the feeling of superiority. Of course these cannibalistic savages ate their victim. This violent primal father had surely been the envied and feared model for each of the brothers. Now they accomplished their identification with him by devouring him and each acquired a part of his strength. The totem feast, which is perhaps mankind’s first celebration, would be the repetition and commemoration of this memorable, criminal act with which so many things began, social organization, moral restrictions and religion. |
✖ Via Totem and Taboo by Sigmund Freud, tr. Abraham Arden Brill, New York, Moffat, Yard and company, [1913]1919. Previously on Skandalon: Freud |
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Jul 09 link notes
communication
community
hord
father
son
parricide
murder
sacrifice
death
destruction
life
sacred
violence
society
Freud
psychoanalysis
book
author
moral
religion
art
totem
taboo
 | In June, Afghanistan officially outpaced Vietnam as the longest war in American history – and Obama has quietly begun to back away from the deadline he set for withdrawing U.S. troops in July of next year. The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it’s precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn’t want. |
✖ Via Rolling Stone: “The Runaway General” by Michael Hastings, June 25th, 2010
“The horror….the horror”
A well-worth reading article by 30 years old journalist Michael Hastings. For me, it’s less about taking side (either for the Obama administration of for McChrystal strategy and ideas) than about the complex difficulties surrounding any large scale war operations. It’s somehow reminescent of McNamara’ account of what he called “The Fog of War” in Errol Morris’ documentary of the same name (2003). Anybody who ever saw Coppola’s Apocalypse Now will likely remember the extensive use of smoke and fog and the effect it has on the rendition of the story.
Newsweek as an short interview with Michael Hastings explaining how the Rolling Stone’s piece was written. |
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Jun 28 link notes
Afghanistan
Apocalypse
United-States
art
communication
confusion
destruction
fog
history
horror
journalism
war
McChrystal