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There are paintings that depict Horses and Carriages (by Monet or Pissaro, say) but few or no paintings of cars. The distinctive idea of romance in the contemporary is missing. Why is that? Why is the car not picturesque? Romantic? Here what I mean by “romantic” has to do with the sense of the adventure of the individual imagination as […]
July 23, 2008
What we understand as ‘the thing that it is’, with modern music, the ‘recording’, the artifact or record, can be described as a kind of platonic ideal; it takes on an objectivity that makes it the ‘thing in itself’, the ding an sich, which all live performances are but the pale imitation of; often this is an accurate summation: it is in the nature of […]
July 8, 2008
Suppose. The world that common sense acquaints us with is not very real … such that what is more real … is what is not the case according to common sense: the more real is to be found elsewhere: in the impossible … Which is the only permissable. This is the world’s unleavened ground: what is not the case. Impossibility. […]
June 24, 2008
The phrase “… in the world”. Is this a product of the early talking movies? We say: “This is the most cut book in the world.” “This is the most difficult job in the world.” This, that or something “… in the world.” But why does it seem especially a movie phrase? Does it seem […]
June 16, 2008
You have to learn to like what you write: but you also have to learn to hate it. It isn’t one way. Self-argument is needed. This is because the human mind is not a true functional unit in its conception of human values … and so intellectually one has to keep working – until the thing one can […]
June 15, 2008
I imagine it is like one of those cricket scoreboards; in fact just like one; beyond a screen with a half-hidden figure moving behind it, untidying it so to say, shrunk across a field of short scorched grass, periodically slotting numbers in, the cumulative show of runs edging up throughout the day, and the process somehow convincing despite the clear evidence […]
June 7, 2008
To be able to write a poem one must be a poem – the physical form of a poem is of the body; and so its silences are likewise corporeal. An example would be Thom Gunn. Gunn’s passion for Ben Jonson’s poetry created a kind of absolute from which his exacting sense of the unique impossible drew breath. He who would not […]
June 7, 2008
Poetry’s sense ‘cannot be articulated’. Its achievement is silence. In the moment of impossibility, of the experience that cannot be articulated, so, thus it begins. Then how does one write it, experiencing this, in which the impulse to express gets crushed by virtue of the simple reality into which it is born? Well, life is fatally predictable here of course; it […]
March 25, 2008
Early period Pink Floyd is better than middle or late Pink Floyd. The Adventures of Odysseus are better than The Adventures of Bilbo Baggins. Flat cartoons are better than three dimensional … Why is it more interesting to say “There you will find the desert” – the void – than “There you will find djinns”? […]
November 23, 2008
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