January 2011
44 posts
4 tags
Time's tightrope
Somewhere below is the credo that Christopher Isherwood borrowed from E.M. Foster: “Work as if you’re immortal.” In an essay I’m working on, I contrast this with George Gurdjieff’s “terror of the situation,” that life is unpredictably finite. The reality of our situation is like tightrope walking: over-awareness of the abyss works against us, but...
Translating
We’re all translators, trying to make sense of what we and others say and do. Even our own actions can bewilder us, as if they were done by others. We think we understand, but do we? And do others understand what they’re saying or doing, or is this also provisional? Words and acts between us fall into time’s slipstream, so we are translating between languages that are themselves...
2 tags
“Ford Madox Ford thought ‘the noise of English conversation’...”
– Kate McLoughlin in a review of a new edition of Ford Madox Ford’s Parades End, Carcanet, 2010, TLS, 10 December 2010, page 27.
3 tags
“The work of translating is first a process of close reading - ‘we have to...”
– Daniel Hahn quoting Edith Grossman in a review of her Why Translation Matters, Yale, 2010, TLS, 10 December 2010, page 26.
2 tags
“Is Kierkegaard still a “living” author? The signs are good. One...”
– Pattison, TLS, 10 December 2010, page 25.
2 tags
“When a small academic environment suddenly erupts in a bitter public debate, we...”
– George Pattison, “All he wrote,” a review of volumes 12 and 26 of a new Danish standard edition of Kierkegaard, TLS, 10 December 2010, page 24. The quote is condensed.
2 tags
“I write out of pure voluptuousness, I confess. I write for myself and for...”
– Viscount Lascano Tegui, prologue to On Elegance While Sleeping, translated from the Spanish by Idra Novey, Dalkey Archive, after page xiv. The quote is condensed. Along with the wonderful last sentence, I love the fact that he immediately repeats himself, without a hint of regret.
1 tag
“Among Walter Benjamin’s axioms: that it is the witness of the defeated, of...”
– George Steiner, “Salvaged from Silence,” a review of Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem, Der Briefwechsel, 1939-1964, edited by Marie Luise Knott, Judischer Verlag/Suhrkamp, 2010, Times Literary Supplement, 10 December 2010, page 11. The quote is modified.
3 tags
“Shakespeare’s imagination was drawn consistently and across the multiple...”
– Stephen Greenblatt, quoted by Stanley Wells in “Indelibly singular,” Wells’ review of Greenblatt’s Shakespeare’s Freedom, Chicago, 2010, Times Literary Supplement, 10 December 2010, page 8. The quote is slightly modified.
1 tag
A list
Definite:
A contribution to a book on the university and the city, focused on the Bay Area and Tokyo. The first draft is due in May. Need to do an outline right away.
Helping to launch Trace. (Agreed to post to it.)
Indefinite:
Another sonnet cycle, the theme of which is forming.
Common Place 5 (but still unsure of the content).
Extending Caucasia, Dogman Chronicles.
Books: the Nabokov...
3 tags
“Freud quotes George Bernard Shaw as saying that to be in love is considerably to...”
– Ernesto Laclau, “The ‘People’ and the Discursive Production of Emptiness,” On Populist Reason, Verso, 2007, page 119. While I don’t agree, this was too outrageous to pass up. (It reminds me of Schopenhauer’s equally outrageous essay on women.) A quick look down...
2 tags
“Art is not an attempt to escape reality but the opposite, an attempt to animate...”
– Brodsky, quoted by Aron, WSJ, 15-16 January 2011, page C7.
2 tags
“One is changed by what one loves.”
– Brodsky, quoted by Leon Aron, WSJ, 15-16 January 2011, page C7. Swedenborg argues that one is what one loves. This is not quite the same thing.
2 tags
“One is what one reads.”
– Brodsky, quoted by Leon Aron, WSJ, 15-16 January 2011, page C7.
2 tags
“In the country where I spent thirty-two years, adultery and moviegoing are the...”
– Brodsky, quoted by Leon Aron, WSJ, 15-16 January, page C7. He was referring to the former Soviet Union.
2 tags
“There is a great deal of mental comfort in the incoherence of aspiration.”
– Joseph Brodsky, quoted by Leon Aron, “A World Fiercely Observed,” a review of Lev Loseff, Joseph Brodsky: A Literary Life, Yale, 2011, in the Wall Street Journal, “Books,” 15-16 January 2011, page C7.
3 tags
“The belittling of the belle lettrist, the person who writes as he pleases, is at...”
– John Gross (a former editor of the Times Literary Supplement, who died last week, age 75), quoted by Roger Kimball, “A Tonic, Humane and Civilizing Force: In Memorium: John Gross, 1935-2011, Wall Street Journal, “Books,” 15-16 January 2011, page C-5. One could also say “as...
1 tag
2 tags
“Koolhaas talks of the contemporary city being caught between ‘simultaneous...”
– Heathcote on Koolhaas, FT, 8-9 January 2011, L&A page 3.
1 tag
“We’d always thought that preservation was somehow anti-modernist, an...”
– Koolhaas, FT, 8-9 January 2011, L&A page 3.
2 tags
“When I started, the suggestion was that the architect would work for the public...”
– Rem Koolhaas, interviewed by Edwin Heathcote in the Financial Times, 8-9 January 2011, Life & Arts page 3 (US edition).
1 tag
3 tags
1 tag
2 tags
1 tag
“As analytical philosophers from Wittgenstein to Brandon have shown, when we make...”
– N.J. Enfield, “Burnt banknotes,” a review in the TLS (3 September 2010, page 3) of John P. Searle, Making the Social World, Oxford, 2010, and W.G. Runciman, The Theory of Social and Cultural Selection, Cambridge, 2010. It’s amusing that Enfield concludes his name-dropping with a...
3 tags
“One ballgame does not a season make.”
– Midwestern koan.
2 tags
Here and there
Making my way through Gary Snyder’s The Practice of the Wild and, through him and directly, through a few of the voluminous writings of Dogen Eihei, I thought how far I am from where they point, and yet sometimes I’m there. I read (citation to come) that Dogen argued that delusion and enlightenment are part of the same spectrum, which is why there’s practice. Hence his comment,...
1 tag
“The other kind of knowledge comes from straying outside. It breaks taboo, it...”
– Snyder, “Survival and Sacrament,” The Practice of the Wild, pages 179-180. The quote is condensed.
1 tag
“All of us are apprenticed to the same teacher that the religious institutions...”
– Snyder, “On the Path, Off the Trail,” The Practice of the Wild, page 152.
2 tags
“The ‘Mountains and Waters Sutra’ is called a sutra not to assert...”
– Snyder, “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking,” The Practice of the Wild, page 113.
2 tags
“You should know that even though all things are liberated and not tied to...”
– Dogen, “Mountain and Waters Sutra,” quoted by Snyder, “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking,” The Practice of the Wild, page 113.
1 tag
“Narratives are one sort of trace that we leave in the world; all our literatures...”
– Snyder, “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking,” The Practice of the Wild, page 112.
1 tag
“Shame, grief, embarrassment, and fear are the anaerobic fuels of the dark...”
– Snyder, “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking,” The Practice of the Wild, page 111.
2 tags
“Your judgment…is true, but not all of it. That is, all of it is true, but...”
– Tolstoy, replying to a critic of Anna Karenina, quoted by Elif Batuman in “From the Critical Impulse, the Growth of Literature,” a contribution to “Why Criticism Matters,” New York Times Book Review, 2 January 2011, page 11.
1 tag
“When your understanding is shallow, you doubt the phrase, ‘Green mountains...”
– Dogen, “Mountains and Water Sutra,” Moon in a Dewdrop: Writings of Zen Master Dogen, North Point, 1985, page 99.
3 tags
“Self-determining people who have not lost the wholeness of their place can see...”
– Snyder, “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking,” The Practice of the Wild, page 104-105. The quote is condensed and reordered. Snyder is quoting from Dogen’s “Mountains and Waters Sutra.”
1 tag
“For those who would see directly into essential nature, the idea of the sacred...”
– Snyder, “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking,” The Practice of the Wild, page 103.
2 tags
“To carry yourself forward and experience myriad things is delusion. But myriad...”
– Dogen, quoted by Snyder, “Tawny Grammar, The Practice of the Wild, page 76.
2 tags
“It’s not enough to be shown in school that we are kin to all the rest: we...”
– Snyder, “Tawny Grammar,” The Practice of the Wild, page 69.
3 tags
“To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you are part of a part and that...”
– Snyder, “The Place, the Region, and the Commons,” The Practice of the Wild, page 38.
3 tags
“When you find your place where you are, practice occurs.”
– Dogen, quoted by Snyder, “The Place, the Region, and the Commons,” The Practice of the Wild, page 25.
2 tags
“For those who would seek the experience of emptiness directly, by entering the...”
– Snyder, “The Etiquette of Freedom,” The Practice of the Wild, page 23
2 tags
“To be truly free one must take on the basic conditions as they are - painful,...”
– Gary Snyder, “The Etiquette of Freedom,” The Practice of the Wild, North Point, 1990, page 5.