Tuesday, July 6, 2010

why is it better to last than to burn?


it's a year to the day since i posted anything on this blog. so much has come full circle and as 'they' say "the more things change, the more they stay the same," so i am just about certain i write this for myself alone, and perhaps for the internet vagabond who makes a stop here while traveling a google search.


funny thing (but perhaps not so surprising), i find myself reading a henry miller book at the moment. a book about books, "the books in my life," and already have more than a handful of quotes to deposit here. however, i will save them for some other day, or some other year, or some other place, like the bookshelf where i can readily retrieve them without the help of a url.


instead i'll share this, from the author who lent me the title for this blog:


"The world subjects every enterprise to an alternative; that of success or failure, of victory or defeat. I protest by another logic: I am simultaneously and contradictorily happy and wretched; "to succeed" or "to fail" have for me only contingent, provisional meanings (which doesn't keep my sufferings and my desires from being violent); what inspires me, secretly and stubbornly, is not a tactic: I accept and I affirm, beyond truth and falsehood, beyond success and failure; I have withdrawn from all finality, I live according to chance (as is evidenced by the fact that the figures of my discourse occur to me like so many dice casts). Flouted in my enterprise (as it happens), I emerge from it neither victor nor vanquished: I am tragic.

(Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn?)
-Roland Barthes
A Lover's Discourse: Fragments

Monday, July 6, 2009

the art of writing

"There is no mystery in the art of writing, but the miracle by which a living emotion is captured without dying in the process is a mystery unless one accepts that to translate a living emotion into words, the emotion must be strong enough to survive the transplantation, and this means strong roots in the base of our emotional nature. Only then is writing effective and contagious.

- Anaïs Nin
The Novel of the Future

Tuesday, June 30, 2009

manhattan mardi matin

...and the city

the kids are all fine but mom is still vigilant

eastside the black-crowned night heron
Nycticorax nycticorax
hf country lane
"a wise man never ignores the simplicity of a child"
- fortune cookie

all photos by blackberry

Monday, June 29, 2009

the realm of the marvelous

"He who wishes to attain the profoundly marvelous must free images from their conventional associations, associations always dominated by utilitarian judgment: must learn to see the man behind the social function, break the scale of so-called normal values, replacing it by that of sensitive values, surmount taboos, the weight of ancestral prohibitions, cease to connect the object with the profit one can get out of it, with the price it has in society, with the action it commands. This liberation begins when by some means the voluntary censorship of the bad conscience is lifted, when the mechanism of the dream is no longer impeded. Magic ceremonies, psychic exercises leading to concentration and ecstasy, the liberation of psychic automatism, are so many means capable of refining vision through the tensions they induce. It is a means to enlarge faculties: they are ways of approach to the realm of the marvelous."

- Pierre Mabille
Mirror of the Marvelous
currently residing in central park

the practice of leaving

mammatus over brooklyn

stopped in for a budweiser with the regulars at the Liffy II Bar all photos by blackberry

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

academia

Nervously, and without any real need whatever, Franny pushed back her hair with one hand. "I don't think it would have all got me quite so down if just once in a while - just once in a while - there was at least some polite little perfunctory implication that knowledge should lead to wisdom, and that if it doesn't, it's just a disgusting waste of time! But there never is! You never even hear any hints dropped on campus that wisdom is supposed to be the goal of knowledge. You hardly ever even hear the word 'wisdom' mentioned!"

- J.D. Salinger
Franny and Zooey