Art as conjuror of the dead.— Art also fulfils the task of preservation and even of brightening up extinguished and faded memories; when it accomplishes this task it weaves a rope round the ages and causes their spirits to return. It is, certainly, only a phantom-life that results therefrom, as out of graves, or like the return in dreams of our beloved dead, but for some moments, at least, the old sensation lives again and the heart beats to an almost forgotten time. Hence, for the sake of the general usefulness of art, the artist himself must be excused if he does not stand in the front rank of the enlightenment and progressive civilisation of humanity; all his life long he has remained a child or a youth, and has stood still at the point where he was overcome by his artistic impulse; the feelings of the first years of life, however, are acknowledged to be nearer to those of earlier times than to those of the present century. Unconsciously it becomes his mission to make mankind more childlike; this is his glory and his limitation.

- Friedrich Nietzsche, from Human, All Too Human

(via Stylo) 

 "During the 60s people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don't think they've ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again." 

- Andy Warhol

“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