Friday, May 30, 2003

 
Maurice Blanchot quotes Simone Weil? I can too:



"It is not my business to think about myself. My business is to think about God. It is for God to think about me."



"For human intelligence, the addition of two infinites is not an addition."



Both are from excerpts of her 1942 letters, essays, and journal entries, as excerpted in Waiting for God.


posted by Open Mouth 3:34 PM

Thursday, May 29, 2003

 
There is a scary woman out there, who tells you exactly how to store your cups (not stacked on top of each other because the rims are the most delicate parts) and how to retrieve books from shelves (not with the top of the spine but with fingers on both sides) and why three meals a day are crucial for physical and social health. Her name? Cheryl Mendelson. Her weapon? Home Comforts: The Art and Science of Keeping House.



She makes me anxious because, with her, my to-do list expands exponentially.
posted by Open Mouth 5:57 PM

 
"The disaster takes care of everything" (3, italics in translated original), a very gentle disaster.



"If quotations, in their fragmenting force, destroy in advance the texts from which they are not only severed but which they exalt till these texts become nothing but severence, then the fragment without a text, or any context, is radically unquotable" (37).



--Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. by Ann Smock (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).



posted by Open Mouth 12:38 PM

Sunday, May 25, 2003

 
Unfinished thoughts from Rem Koolhaas, via Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan:



"Luna Park is the first manifestation of a currse that is to haunt the architectural profession for the rest of its life, the formula: technology + cardboard (or any other filmsy material) = reality" (42). Nowadays, technology = what reality wants to be.



Writing of carnival outposts of Coney Island in rural America, the middle of nowhere: "The first high-rise building they ever see is a burning block, their first sculpture is an alphabet about to collapse" (62). Date?



And of the poor: "The beach itself has become a last resort fro the most hopeless victims of metropolitan life, who buy tickets to Coney with their last few cents and huddle together with the wreckage of their families to wait for the end...staring out over the impassive ocean to the sound of waves crashing on the sand. ... each morning Coney's police collect the corpses" (67). Date? Citation?



To be continued from p. 138.
posted by Open Mouth 8:50 PM