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tags:literature
related: Misc
NOTE
“The oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence”
Unless for some perverts the sentence is a body?
- Roland Barthes
You can never know enough, never work enough, never use the infinite and participles oddly enough, never impede the movement harshly enough, never leave the mind quickly enough.
- Anne Carson
Sensibility As Structure
here already the sentence swerves and although you are sure you’ve caught the sense the shape has begun to elude you, as if it were an animal squirming or shaking itself loose of your grip, or turning to bite you and then take off, against all entreaties into a mist of metaphor where you follow, closing the gate of this punctuation behind you
In aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impression as it really is.
- Walter Pater
Of course the justness of a word sometimes resides in the precise degree of discomfort it inflicts. -Tim Robinson
A single sentence as a duchampian readymade, plucked from its context and made enigmatic, if not abstract.
What, Gone without a Word?
“O, o, o, o” - Shakespeare
Hamlet:
“the rest is silence”
What are they telling us, the four diminishing o’s - perhaps five with the period. O is the tragic apotheosis of zero.
Fair Hopes of Ending All
Wee have a winding sheete in our Mothers wombe, which growes with us from our conception, and wee come into the world, wound up in that winding sheet, for wee come to seeke a grave; And as prisoners discharg’d of actions may lye for fees; so when the wombe hath discharg’d us, yet we are bound to it by cordes of flesh, by such a string as that wee cannot goe thence, nor stay there. -John Donne
The world “is but an universal church-yard, but our common grave; and the life and motion that the greatest persons have in it, is but as the shaking of buried bodies in their graves, by an earthquake”
Daguerreotypes
Sentences that live on, deathless - for every sentence written is a kind of Ghost - in the face of universal forgetting.
“Faces begin soon, to ‘dislimn’: features fluctuate: combinations of feature unsettle. Even the expression becomes a mere idea that you can describe to another, but not an image that you can reproduce for yourself.” - SUSPIRIA DE PROFUNDIS: BEING A SEQUEL TO THE CONFESSIONS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER.
‘the brain is haunted as if by some jealousy of ghostly beings moving amongst us’ meaning, technology, whether in transport, printing, or photography has suddenly as we near the middle of the 19th century, surrounded us with apparitions: teeming urban travellers, the multiplied voices of the periodical press, the miraculous faces of and figures in new Daguerreotypes. “Modernity breeds phantoms”
A History of the Lights and Shadows
Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St. Peter’s, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.
- George Eliot
In Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke is weeping alone in Rome. She has married a clergyman and scholar and discovered too late that her much older husband’s intellectual inwardness, so attractive at first, disallows the learned and literary union she had anticipated. (He is also likely impotent, and incapable of completing his life’s work “A Key to All Mythologies”).
We all live according to guiding (and misguiding) metaphors, but we do not fully know it, let alone understand where they may take us.
Tertius Lydgate devotes himself “to a quest for the fundamental matter of which human organs are made of.”
Suppose A Sentence
Supposing a certain time selected is assured, suppose it is even necessary, suppose no other extract is permitted and no more handling is needed, suppose the rest of the message is mixed with a very long slender needle and even if it could be any black border, supposing all this altogether made a dress and suppose it was actual, suppose the mean way to state it was occasional, if you suppose this in August and even more melodiously, if you suppose this even in the necessary incident of there certainly being no middle in summer and winter, suppose this and an elegant settlement a very elegant settlement is more than of consequence, it is not final and sufficient and substituted.
- Gertrude Stein
At Harvard, her teachers complained of her cavalier attitude to grammar but Gertrude Stein had always take pleasure, she said, in learning and testing the rules “I really do not know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences”
ambiguity in “suppose” - assume, presume, presuppose - but also imagine, posit, believe - but also imply, represent, require to exist.
“when we this of this, and infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature -Virginia Woolf
The arrangement of the words matters; and the arrangement you want can be found in the picture in your mind. The picture dictates the arrangement. The picture dictates whether this will be a sentence with or without clauses, a sentence that ends hard or a dying-fall sentence, long or short, active or passive.
- Joan Didion
A Tour of the Monuments
Noon-day sun cinema-ized the site, turning the bridge and the river into an over-exposed picture. -Robert Smithson
continued
photographing it with my Instamatic 400 was like photographing a photograph. The sun became a monstrous light-bulb that projected a detached series of “stills” through my Instamatic into my eye. When I walked on the bridge it was as though I was walking on an enormous photograph that was made of wood and steel, underneath the river existed as an enormous movie film that showed nothing but a continuous blank. Transmutation and Transformationtransmutation
Sontag
I took a trip to see the beautiful things. Change of scenery. Change of heart. And do you know? What? They’re still there. Ah, but they won’t be for long. I know. That’s why I went. To say goodbye. Whenever I travel, it’s always to say goodbye.
Thought
I have this sense when traveling. I must see as much as possible, because it is the last time. I have a finite time to experience things as I am. I could will myself there again, and it could and does happen that I do return - but still there is finality in distant travel. I’m split by the pull of home, the need to return and the difficulty to stay.