“Writing aloud is not expressive; it leaves expression to the pheno-text, to the regular code of communication; it belongs to the geno-text, to significance; it is caried not by dramatic inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language, and can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of an art: the art of guiding one’s body….

"Due allowance being made for the sounds of the language, writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.

"A certain art of singing can give an idea of this vocal writing; but since melody is dead, we may find it more easily today at the cinema. In fact, it suffices that the cinema capture the sound of speech close up… and make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal’s muzzle), to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss”

Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text

"For a piece of criticism, many magazines want you to have a thesis statement in neon lights, and that is something I’ve been trying to actively avoid doing. I think it’s just really unrealistic—both in terms of the craft of writing and in terms of how unwieldy the world actually is—and often not very fun to read. A good essay will have many arguments in it. The arguments in the essays I write accrue—they’re almost narrative, in that you start in one place and end up somewhere else. With a thesis statement, you have nowhere to go, or you start at the end and go in a circle. "                                                  

 - Lauren Oyler, interviewed for The Paris Review by Sheila Heti

Getting savaged in reviews for her new collection No Judgment ( a freakily forensic going-over here - breaking down the Wiki sources, including Wiki footnotes, behind one essay).... still, Oyler's observation above struck me as interesting thinkige.... the best blogging operates according to this logic... it has no obligation to pick up the thread, return to its starting point. Its starting point may not even be at the start. 

 The preservation of music in records reminds one of canned food. —Theodor W. Adorno

“The Daemonic is that which cannot be accounted for by understanding and reason.... In Poetry there is from first to last something daemonic, and especially in its unconscious appeal, for which all intellect and reason is insufficient, and which, therefore, has an efficacy beyond all concepts. Such is the effect in Music to the highest degree, for Music stands too high for any understanding to reach, and an all-mastering efficacy goes forth from it, of which, however, no man is able to give an account. Religious worship therefore cannot do without music. It is one the foremost means to work upon men with an effect of marvel.” 

Goethe in dialogue with Eckermann  - Gesprache mit Goethe

- Luis Bunuel

 

 

Oh, to be in England Now that April's there, And whoever wakes in England Sees, some morning, unaware, That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf, While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough In England now! And after April, when May follows, And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows! Hark, where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge Leans to the field and scatters on the clover Blossoms and dewdrops at the bent spray's edge. That's the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over, Lest you should think he never could recapture The first fine careless rapture! And though the fields look rough with hoary dew, All will be gay when noontide wakes anew The buttercups, the little children's dower Far brighter than this gaudy melon-flower! Robert Browning, Home-Thoughts, from Abroad

future thinkige

 "Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches" 

- Italo Calvino

"He, still unvanquished, eternally directed toward the future, whose own restless energies never leave him in peace, so that his future digs like a spur into the flesh of every present" 

- Friedrich Nietzsche 

“Nothing dates faster than people’s fantasies about the future” 

-  Robert Hughes

“There’s no such thing as the future. There is always now. I can’t be anywhere else but now" 

- Nona Hendryx