et cetera

One of my favourite urban images is the light from a flickering television emerging from an apartment building late at night. The artist Todd Hido has created a wonderful series of photographs which capture the mood of these scenes perfectly—go to photographs and then homes at night. Via Vvork.

[...] once you have been in an academic career for twenty years certain chores are given you and your range of freedom becomes restricted. Demands of all kinds are made at the same time as family pressures begin to mount and you feel that at that midway point in your life your personality is being eroded and you must think of measures of self-defence. One of the best means of self-defence, as one knows, is to go into the potting shed and build something that no one understands or no one knows what it is meant to be.

That is how the writing of literary texts began for me. It was an eccentric pastime that no one knew about; not even people in my own house knew what I was doing exactly. I just pottered away and produced these bits [...]

W. G. Sebald, in Christopher Bigsby, Writers in Conversation, The Arthur Miller Centre for American Studies, Norwich, 2000 and 2001, Vol. 2. Via Vertigo: Collecting W.G. Sebald.

Women compete in a high-heel sprint in St. Petersburg on 21 July 2007. Approximately 100 women took part in the race wearing high-heeled shoes with a required minimum height of 9 centimetres to compete for a shopping voucher worth 50,000 roubles (approximately 2,000 US dollars). Via Feminist Philosophers.

Presently he heard a note which he called that of the night-warbler, a bird he had never identified, had been in search of twelve years, which always, when he saw it, was in the act of diving down into a tree or bush, and which it was vain to seek; the only bird that sings indifferently by night and by day. I told him he must beware of finding and booking it, lest life should have nothing more to show him. He said, “What you seek in vain for, half your life, one day you come full upon all the family at dinner. You seek it like a dream, and as soon as you find it you become its prey.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Thoreau“, in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August 1862, pp. 239–249.

The final reported remark by Thoreau appears in The Recognitions (p. 265), and was later used by Gaddis as the epigraph for A Frolic of His Own (there’s an essay on this lineage—J. M. Tyree, “Henry Thoreau, William Gaddis, and the Buried History of an Epigraph”, New England Review, Vol. 25, No. 4, Fall 2004, pp. 148-162). It isn’t hard to see why Gaddis was obsessed with this remark, which itself seems to immediately make you its prey.

On some accounts, the creative activity of God is mobilized by an entirely inexhaustible and uninhibited love. This love, which is understood as being totally without limit and condition, moves God to desire a plenum of existence in which everything that can conceivably be an object of love is included. God wants to love as much as it is possible to love. He naturally has no fear of loving unwisely or too well. What God desires to create and to love, accordingly, is just Being–of any and every kind whatsoever, and as much as there can be.

Harry Frankfurt, The Reasons of Love, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2004, pp. 62-63.

In general, it would begin to appear that as a higher diversity of entities come into existence—entities that are then necessarily more complex–their modes of being in nonequilibrium conditions increase in diversity and subtlety. In turn, the very existence of sets of these increasingly diverse and complex entities gives them an increased number of ways, and so an increased probability, to couple with one another such that one may measure a displacement from equilibrium of the other; thence, these entities happen upon a source of energy that can be and is extracted to do work. In turn, that work may drive nonspontaneous processes to create still more complex molecular species or other entities in the adjacent possible.

Stuart Kaufmann, Investigations, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000, p. 95.

Some writers are so incomparably great that even critics cannot dull them. A recent review by Charles Simic of Elizabeth Bishop’s Edgar Allan Poe and The Juke-Box: Uncollected Poems, Drafts, and Fragments provides a perfect example. The more Bishop he quotes, the less you want to read Simic; in the end, the natural reaction is to drop the review where you stand and seek out the reviewed work itself. As a gift for finishing my dissertation, N bought me Bishop’s Complete Poems, from which I have copied out the following. This is a wonderful, wonderful poem.

Wading at Wellfleet

In one of the Assyrian wars
a chariot first saw the light
that bore sharp blades around its wheels.

That chariot from Assyria
went rolling down mechanically
to take the warriors by the heels.

A thousand warriors in the sea
could not consider such a war
as that the sea itself contrives

but hasn’t put in action yet.
This morning’s glitterings reveal
the sea is “all a case of knives.”

Lying so close, they catch the sun,
the spokes directed at the shin.
The chariot front is blue and great.

The war rests wholly with the waves:
they try revolving, but the wheels
give way; they will not bear the weight.

Listening to Steve Reich’s wonderful Six Pianos it struck me—Ulrich Mühe and Steve Reich look very similar.

The scapegoat by means of which the accumulated ills of a whole year are publicly expelled is sometimes an animal. For example, among the Garos of Assam, “besides the sacrifices for individual cases of illness, there are certain ceremonies which are observed once a year by a whole community or village, and are intended to safeguard its members from dangers of the forest, and from sickness and mishap during the coming twelve months. The principal of these is the Asongtata ceremony. Close to the outskirts of every big village a number of stones may be noticed stuck into the ground, apparently without order or method. These are known by the name of asong, and on them is offered the sacrifice which the Asongtata demands. The sacrifice of a goat takes place, and a month later, that of a langur (Entellus monkey) or a bamboo-rat is considered necessary. The animal chosen has a rope fastened round its neck and is led by two men, one on each side of it, to every house in the village. It is taken inside each house in turn, the assembled villagers, meanwhile, beating the walls from the outside, to frighten and drive out any evil spirits which may have taken up their residence within. The round of the village having been made in this manner, the monkey or rat is led to the outskirts of the village, killed by a blow of a dao, which disembowels it, and then crucified on bamboos set up in the ground. Round the crucified animal long, sharp bamboo stakes are placed, which form chevaux de frise round about it. These commemorate the days when such defences surrounded the villages on all sides to keep off human enemies, and they are now a symbol to ward off sickness and dangers to life from the wild animals of the forest. The langur required for the purpose is hunted down some days before, but should it be found impossible to catch one, a brown monkey may take its place; a hulock may not be used.” Here the crucified ape or rat is the public scapegoat, which by its vicarious sufferings and death relieves the people from all sickness and mishap in the coming year.

Sir James George Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Macmillan, New York, 1922, Ch. 57, “Public Scapegoats”, §3, “The Periodic Expulsion of Evils in a Material Vehicle“. Via William Gaddis, The Recognitions, Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, 1955, p. 49.

The method revealed expected preferences in tamarins for soft over loud white noise, and for positive-over negatively valenced conspecific vocalizations, suggesting its appropriateness as a measure of preference. When subsequently tested for other acoustic preferences found in humans, however, tamarins were indifferent. Specifically, tamarins failed to demonstrate a preference for consonant over dissonant musical intervals. In contrast, human adults showed the expected preference for consonance when measured with an analogous method.

Josh McDermott and Marc D. Hauser, “Nonhuman primates prefer slow tempos but dislike music overall“, in Cognition, Vol. 104, No. 3, September 2007, pp. 654-668, at p. 655.

His [Alban Berg's] music is without force, tangible and fatal like a wine; that comprises its true modernity, modernity of a kind that finds a genuine counterpoint only in the properties of some exuberantly abstract creations of contemporary art and sculpture with a profound predisposition for the chaotic.

Theodor Adorno, Alban Berg, Juliane Brand and Chris Hailey (Trans), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p. 29.

Franz Marc, The Fate of The Animals, 1913.

And God saw every thing that he had made, and, behold, it was very good. And the evening and the morning were the sixth day.

and look at this prepronominal funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and puddenpadded, very like a whale’s egg farced with pemmican, as were it sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering from an ideal insomnia: all those red raddled obeli cayennepeppercast over the text, calling unnecessary attention to errors, omissions, repetitions and misalignments

(Genesis 1:31; Portrait of James Joyce by Constantin Brancusi from Three Fragments from Work in Progress, The Black Sun Press, Paris, 1929; Finnegans Wake III:120:9-16).