February 2012
50 posts
“He would look over the edge of the sofa down into the sea.”
– Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway
Estonian socks, a chicken sexer, the Holy... →
“One cannot be nothingness all week and then suddenly expect to exist on Sunday.”
– Witold Gombrowicz
Why everything is connected to everything else, in... →
“Sie aber — schöner als jemals — streckten und drehten sich, ließen das schaurige...”
– Kafka, “Das Schweigen der Sirenen”
“But only those who leave for leaving’s sake
are travelers; hearts tugging...”
– Baudelaire, trans. Richard Howard
What it's like to be president of the United... →
What it's like to be president of the United... →
1 tag
Someone has been posting dramatic signs on the...
Up until about a week ago, when Paris managed to crawl out from under its little ice age, there was a sign on the door that read:
THANK YOU FOR KEEPING THE DOOR CLOSED DURING THIS GREAT PERIOD OF COLD
That is, not “this period of great cold,” but “this great period of cold.” I don’t know who wrote it, but it struck me as a bit theatrical, albeit charmingly so.
...
1 tag
“Well, do you think I believe in ghosts? But how can my not believing help me?”
– Kafka, “Unhappiness”
1 tag
1 tag
“Without you I’ve not slept, not once in the garden
nor cared much whether...”
– Shahnameh (as related in Bunting’s Persia)
4 tags
“There is an incessant blurring together of various things, and this is good,...”
– Robert Walser, “Berlin and the Artist”
5 tags
“Why does everybody think that women are debasing... →
More Mayakovsky
I have married the moon and she combs the water,
the beaches of uncharted seas.
She’s my lunar lady, she has long red hair
and she drives a herd of horses
through a screaming streak of stars
— “A Few Words About My Wife”, trans. Paul Schmidt
Book Maps (!) →
3 tags
“To show by one’s gaze and gestures that one is finding things a bit...”
– Robert Walser, “In the Electric Tram”
2 tags
“How could a body like this have a big love?
It should be teeny-weeny,
humble,...”
– Vladimir Mayakovsky, “A Cloud in Trousers”
“When ‘The Stoker’ was all he had read of Kafka, [Walter Benjamin] had already...”
– Hannah Arendt, Introduction to Illuminations by Walter Benjamin
2 tags
More fabulous Hungarian things to read: Ádám... →
A line from the lovely poem [of Chinese exile]... →
3 tags
“Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone,
Let maps to other, worlds on...”
– John Donne, “The Good-Morrow”
2 tags
