Quote 29 May 16 notes
The fantastic is no longer a property of the heart, nor is it found among the incongruities of nature; it evolves from the accuracy of the knowledge, and its treasures lie dormant in documents. Dreams are no longer summoned with closed eyes, but in reading; and a true image is now a product of learning: it derives from words spoken in the past, exact recensions, the amassing of minute facts, monuments reduced to infinitesimal fragments, and the reproductions of reproductions. In the modern experience, these elements contain the power of the impossible. Only the assiduous clamor created by repetition can transmit to us what only happened once. The imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books. It is a phenomenon of the library.
— 

THE TEMPTATIONS OF SAINT LIBRARY - Michael Foucault, writing about Flaubert’s doomed novel The Temptation of Saint Anthony. 

The Temptation, as it turns out, was Flaubert in full geek mode: essentially a bestiary, a compendium of creatures meticulously taxonimized and sourced out of documents, paintings, and poems. He considered it a work of the imagination, but it is, apparently, a catalogue of the creations of other creatives. 

Which? Wow. I love this notion: Gustave Flaubert in a fervor, making lists of monsters, unable to control himself and just, totally, losing his way. This has happened, after all, to every writer, at one point or another. Lists! If one lists the contents of a universe, does that count as world-building? Surely, if one diagrams everything a world contains, there must be a story there, right? 

Alas, no. Oh, shit, the story became a sidebar to the monsters. 

I’ve not read The Temptation, but apparently it’s quite bad - over several days in 1849 Flaubert read it aloud to a group of friends, who frantically urged him to throw it in the fire. He’d been working on it feverishly for 4 years. Flaubert subsequently wrote Madame Bovary. However, he kept coming back to The Temptation (it was, after all, a Temptation), and finally, in 1874, he published it. 

I’m sympathetic and charmed by the notion of Flaubert worriedly cataloguing creatures as though he was an ecologist, trapping things between pages before they got away. The same impulse haunts me, every time I search vainly for something arcane that isn’t digitized, (as I am a hopeful hunter, I regularly assume everything I’m seeking has been added to the internet, SOMEWHERE, but no. Wrong.) or think frantic thoughts about the notion of technological obscurity, the demise of discs for clouds, the nervous child in me longing for the physical comforts of a library. 

Ultimately, Flaubert’s Temptation was translated into English by Lafcadio Hearn as well as being the basis shortly after its publication, for a series of magnificent lithographs by Odilon Redon. Not too shabby. The Redon illustrations are exquisite.

As for the book itself, I’m with Foucault here, in my tenderness for the tempted:

 ”Henceforth, the visionary experience arises from the black and white surface of printed signs, from the closed and dusty volume that opens with a flight of forgotten words; fantasies are carefully deployed in the hushed library with its columns of books, with its titles aligned on shelves to form a tight enclosure, but within confines that also liberate impossible worlds.” - Foucault. 

More reading: Colin Dickey’s terrific article about same, The Redemption of Saint Anthony. 

(via mariadahvanaheadley)

Quote 25 May
The cucumber is bitter? Put it down. There are brambles in the path? Step to one side. That is enough, without also asking: How did these things come into the world at all?
— Marcus Aurelius, quoted in Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote
Quote 24 May
Inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is…like planting false proof at a crime scene where the floor is already strewn with incriminating evidence.
— Laurent Binet, HHhH
Quote 16 May
There have happened, though rarely, in geographical space, journeys taken northward on very blue, fire-blue seas, chilled, crowded by floes, to the final walls of ice. Our judgement lapsed, fatally: we paid more attention to the Pearys and Nansens who returned—and worse, we named what they did “success,” though they failed. We only wept for Sir John Franklin and Salomon Andrée: mourned their cairns and bones, and missed among the poor frozen rubbish the announcements of their victory. By the time we had the technology to make such voyages easy, we had long worded over all ability to know victory or defeat.
What did Andrée find in the polar silence: what should we have heard?
— Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Text 29 Apr Books Read/Reread March/April

Dante, Inferno*
Anne Carson, Red Doc>
Louise Gluck, Averno*
Maggie Nelson, Bluets*
Fuminori Nakamura, The Thief
Yoko Ogawa, Revenge
Richard Lloyd Parry, People Who Eat Darkness
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein*
Salomon Kroonenberg, Why Hell Stinks of Sulfur
Lafcadio Hearn, Shadowings
Lafcadio Hearn, Some Chinese Ghosts
Isabelle Eberhardt, The Oblivion Seekers
Brian P. Levack, The Devil Within
Caspar Henderson, The Book of Barely Imagined Beings
John Glassie, A Man of Misconceptions
Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
Shoson Nagahara, Lament in the Night
Lars Iyer, Spurious
Robert Kloss, The Alligators of Abraham
Renata Adler, Speedboat
Melanie Rae Thon, The Voice of the River
Charles Lamb, Essays of Elia
Joni Tevis, The Wet Collection
Domenica Ruta, With or Without You
Dan Beachy-Quick, A Whaler’s Dictionary
Thomas de Quincy, The English Mail-Coach and Other Essays
Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky*

* = reread

Quote 8 Apr
It’s strange,” he said with a deprecatory smile, “how, ever since I discovered that my passport was gone, I’ve felt only half alive. But it’s a very depressing thing in a place like this yo have no proof of who you are, you know.
— Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
Quote 7 Apr
…there was the certitude of an infinite sadness at the core of his consciousness, but the sadness was reassuring, because it alone was familiar.
— Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
Quote 3 Apr
He calls once more, and this time the wakened owl hisses back in fury. What does he care for human sorrow? These woods are full of bones. When he takes flight, the dead rise up in his spectacular body.
— Melanie Rae Thon, The Voice of the River
Quote 24 Mar 2 notes
We are nothing; less than nothing, and dreams. We are only what might have been, and must wait upon the tedious shores of Lethe millions of ages before we have existence, and a name.
— Charles Lamb
Quote 18 Mar
Above all, messianism’s got nothing to do with mysticism, says W. He can’t abide mysticism.—‘It’s maths, it’s all about maths!’ He can’t do maths, W. says. This is the great flaw which prevents him really understanding messianism.
— Lars Iyer, Spurious

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