skandalon

Noise proves nothing. Often a hen who has merely laid an egg cackles as if she had laid an asteroid.

✖ Via Following the Equator by Mark Twain, Wildside Press LLC, [1897]2003, chap. V, p. 56

In Following the Equator, this quote is attributed to the Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar. Those quote serves in part as a promotional tool for Mark Twain’s previous novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, published in 1894.

Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar — MT came back to Pudd’nhead and his homespun ironies a few years later, when he used more of these maxims as chapter epigraphs in Following the Equator (1897). He came back to Pudd’nhead in this way in part, obviously, because he hoped to continue to promote the novel, and in part because of the popular attention the first batch of Pudd’nhead’s sayings had received. But whatever boundary had separated Sam Clemens’ experience from Pudd’nhead’s voice is even more permeable now: it is harder than ever to attribute what Wilson says in these “new” aphorisms with his character as it is developed in the novel. So it makes sense to think of the “Pudd’nhead” role as another of the disguises (like “Mark Twain” itself) Clemens found useful as a rhetorical resource. (Mark Twain in His Time)

The whole “new” Wilson’s calendar is available over at the Mark Twain in His Time website.

• Sep 15, 2010 link notes reblogged from chasingthales [via] tagged: art communication representation metaphore author novel maxim noise animal exageration claim

Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction’s job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still “are” human beings, now. Or can be. This isn’t that it’s fiction’s duty to edify or teach, or to make us good little Christians or Republicans; I’m not trying to line up behind Tolstoy or Gardner. I just think that fiction that isn’t exploring what it means to be human today isn’t art.

✖ Via “An Interview With David Foster Wallace” by Larry McCaffery, Review of Contemporary Fiction, 13.2, Summer 1993, 127–150. [PDF]

• Sep 13, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel book author Foster Wallace contemporary modernity United-States America human becoming interview suicide

Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain, because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from.

✖ Via The Pale King by David Foster Wallace, Little Brown [to be published]

The above quote can be find D.T. Max short essay “The Unfinished. David Foster Wallace’s struggle to surpass “Infinite Jest.”” which was published in The New Yorker, March 9, 2009.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide on September 12, 2008.

• Sep 12, 2010 link notes tagged: art author novel book posthumous dullness pain dull stimulation shock distraction lost entertainment modernity 21st century America Foster Wallace creation depression drug suicide death

art story storytelling narrative novel author science_fiction vonnegut humor kafka reblog

✖ Via

Lapham’s Quarterly: Kurt Vonnegut at the Blackboard, New York City, 2005

I want to share with you something I’ve learned. I’ll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune. Death and terrible poverty, sickness down here—great prosperity, wonderful health up there. Your average state of affairs here in the middle [points to bottom, top, and middle of line respectively]. This is the B-E axis. B for beginning, E for entropy. Okay. Not every story has that very simple, very pretty shape that even a computer can understand [draws horizontal line extending from middle of G-I axis]. Now let me give you a marketing tip. The people who can afford to buy books and magazines and go to the movies don’t like to hear about people who are poor or sick, so start your story up here [indicates top of the G-I axis]. Read on

• Aug 16, 2010 link notes reblogged from leugenio [via] tagged: art story storytelling narrative novel author science-fiction Vonnegut humor Kafka

― Or, as my grandmother once put it to my mother: ‘Your father would be a wonderful man, if only he were different.
― Ha
― Yes, ha. A whole epic of pain and suffering reduced to a single sentence.
― Matrimony as a swamp, as a lifelong exercise in self-delusion.

✖ Via Leviathan by Paul Auster, New York: Penguin, 1992, p. 91

• Aug 08, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel author Paul Auster couple love pain father mother delusion self-delusion together

America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can’t ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can’t lose what you lacked at conception.

✖ Via American Tabloid by James Ellroy, New York: Ivy Books, 1995, p. 1

• Aug 05, 2010 link notes tagged: communication art novel author America history community lost lack missing origin Eden innocence fall grace Bible mythology foundation nation politic Leviathan Ellroy representation

We never know anything about anyone. I used to think the same think about your marriage, and look what happened to you and Delia. It’s hard enough keeping track of ourselves. Once it comes to other people, we don’t have a clue.

✖ Via Leviathan by Paul Auster, New York: Penguin Books, 1992, p. 107

It reminds me of a line of dialogue in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) (I’ll quote from memory):

On croit savoir, et puis non, jamais.

Previously on Skandalon: Paul Auster’s Leviathan

• Aug 02, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel book Auster couple life knowledge other ignorance understanding stand

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

• Jul 27, 2010 link notes tagged: art author novel writing word thing creation creativity composition relation fragment destruction Paul Auster Leviathan

I thought all these other people. I thought how did they get to be who they are. It’s banks and car parks. It’s airline tickets in their computers. It’s restaurants filled with people talking. It’s people signing the merchant copy. It’s people taking the merchant copy out of the leather folder and then signing it and separating the merchant copy from the customer copy and putting their credit card in their wallet. This alone could do it.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 195

Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

• Jul 25, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel book author DeLillo Cosmopolis consumption customer money economy credit debt identity existence reality being

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

• Jul 21, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel author pathology fantasy knowledge reality economy lost loser representation anxiety critic desire Kerviel destruction money bank capitalism

No one can say where a book comes from, least of all the person who writes it. Books are born out of ignorance, and if they go on living after they are written, it’s only to the degree that they cannot be understood.

✖ Via Leviathan by Paul Auster, New York: Penguin, 1992, p. 40

• Jul 19, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel author Paul Auster book creation representation ignorance knwoledge

art poem poet history united_states statue_of_liberty liberty representation immigration lost loser land hope community hobbes leviathan monster politic novel author communication

✖ Via Library of Congress ― From Haven to Home: “The New Colossus” [titled “Sonnet” in notebook] by Emma Lazarus, 1883, manuscript poem, bound in journal.

Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The Statue of Liberty as a female counterpart of Hobbes’ Leviathan (Lazarus’ poem is mentioned in Auster’s novel Leviathan); the United-States as the land of the “wretched refuse”. Is this the “community of those who are without community” (“all of us, from now on” writes Jean-Luc Nancy) ? Read more about Lazarus’ poem on wikipedia.

About the exhibition From Haven to Home:

From Haven to Home is a Library of Congress exhibition marking 350 years of Jewish life in America. The exhibition features more than two hundred treasures of American Judaica from the collections of the Library of Congress, augmented by a selection of important loans from other cooperating cultural institutions. (more)

• Jul 12, 2010 link notes tagged: art poem poet history United-States Statue of Liberty liberty representation immigration lost loser land hope community Hobbes Leviathan monster politic novel author communication

art communication illustration illustrator design poster cover book author novel state power politic community hobbes violence auster freedom terror terrorism loser united_states

✖ Via

David Vivó photostream on Flickr: personal project, Paul Auster’s “Leviathan” book cover / 120x185 mm

• Jul 11, 2010 link notes tagged: art communication illustration illustrator design poster cover book author novel state power politic community Hobbes violence Auster freedom terror terrorism loser United-States

The stupidities of the world appalled him, and underneath his jauntiness and good humor, you sometimes felt a deep reservoir of intolerance and scorn.

✖ Via Leviathan by Paul Auster, New York: Penguin Books, 1992, p. 20

• Jul 11, 2010 link notes tagged: art author novel Leviathan Auster world perspective character intolerance stupidity

He stood in the street. There was nothing to do. He hadn’t realized this could happen to him. The moment was empty of urgency and purpose. He hadn’t planned on this. Where was the life he’d always led? There was nowhere he wanted to go, nothing to think about, no one waiting. How could he take a step in any direction if all direction were the same?

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 180

Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

• Jun 25, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel book author DeLillo Cosmopolis lost space gnomon direction sense orientation lost loser life