on selection

He knew that a daily newspaper was a weapon that should be wielded in an entirely different way than a monthly architectural magazine. A daily newspaper isn't suppose to practice criticism by omission, ignoring what it doesn't like. It's supposed to take on everything and connect with everyone.

- Blair Kemin, on Alan Temko

on the nature of fonts

Athenaeum is a type of peculiar calligraphic character. It embodies remarkable incongruities and instances of daring wantonness, yet it is not altogether unattractive. It is therefore safe to assume that it is precisely this rather exclusive character of its design which may contribute to a successful use of the face in the field of jobbing composition. Similarly, the bold version might well prove successful as a display type in promotional and advertising prints.

- Oldrich Hlavsa, A Book of Type and Design, 84

on the claustrophobia of the known

Sometimes you hear, fifth-hand,
As epitaph:

He chucked up everything
And just cleared off,
And always the voice will sound
Certain you approve
This audacious, purifying,
Elemental move.

And they are right, I think,
We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
Its specially chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or take that you bastard;
And that helps me stay
Sober and industrious.
But I'd go today,

Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo'c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren't so artificial,
Such a deliberate step backwards
To create an object;
Books; china; a life
Reprehensibly perfect.

- Philip Larkin, "Poetry of Departures"

on making a self from selves

In each one of us, in differing degrees, is contained the person we were yesterday, and indeed, in the nature of things it is even true that our past personae predominate in us, since the present is neceesarily insignificant when compared with the long period of the past because of which we have emerged in the form we have today. It is just that we don't directly feel the influence of these past selves precisely because they are so deeply rooted within us. They constitute the unconscious part of ourselves. Consequently we have a strong tendency not to recognize their existence and to ignore their legitimate demands. By contrast, with the most recent acquisitions of civilization we are vividly aware of them just because they are recent and consequently have not had time to be assimilated into our collective unconscious.
- Emile Durkheim, 1977:11

on continuity of the self

Nothing is more misleading than the illusion created by hindsight in which all the traces of a life, such as the works of an artist or the events at a biography, appear as the realization of an essence that seems to preexist them. Just as a mature artistic style is not contained, like a seed, in an original inspiration but is continuously defined and redefined in the dialectic between the objectifying intention and the already objectified intention, so too the unity of meaning which, after the event, may seem to have preceded the acts and works announcing the final significance, retrospectively transforming the various stages of the temporal series into mere preparatory sketches, is constituted through the confrontation between questions that only exist in and for a mind armed with a particular type of schemes and the solutions obtained through application of the same schemes.
Pierre Bourdieu, pg. 55, "Structures, habitus, practices," The Logic of Practice

seldom what they seem

My love, my saving grace
your eyes are awfully blue.
I kiss your funny face,
your coffee-flavored mouth.
Last night I slept with you.
Today I love you so
how can I bear to go
(as soon I must, I know)
to bed with ugly death
in that cold, filthy place,
to sleep there without you,
without the easy breath
and nightlong, limblong warmth
I've grown accustomed to?
-- Nobody wants to die;
tell me it is a lie
But no, I know it's true.
It's just the common case;
there's nothing one can do.
My love, my saving grace,
your eyes are awfully blue
early and instant blue.

-- Elizabeth Bishop, Breakfast Song

straight & narrow, quiet desperation

I will be good; I will be good.
I have set my small jaw for the ages
and nothing can distract me from
solving the appointed emergencies
even with my small brain
-- witness the diameter of my hat band
and the depth of the crown of my hat.

I will be correct; I know what it is to be a man.
I will be correct or bust.
I will love but not impose my feelings.
I will serve and serve
with lute or I will not say anything.

If the machinery goes, I will repair it.
If it goes again I will repair it again.
My backbone

through these endless etceteras painful.

No, it is not the way to be, they say.
Go with the skid, turn always to the leeward,
and see what happens, I ask you, now.

I lost a lovely smile somewhere,
and many colors dropped out.
The rigid spine will break, they say--
Bend, bend.

I was made at right angles to the world
and I see it so. I can only see it so.
I do not find all this absurdity people talk about.
Perhaps a paradise, a serious paradise where lovers hold hands
and everything works.
I am not sentimental.

- Elizabeth Bishop, Keaton

Caught Inside

It is marvellous to wake up together
At the same minute: marvellous to hear
The rain begin suddenly all over the roof,
To feel the air suddenly clear
As if electricity had passed through it
From a black mesh of wires in the sky.
All over the roof the rain hisses,
And below, the light falling of kisses.

An electrical storm is coming or moving away;
It is the prickling air that wakes us up.
If lightning struck the house now, it would run
From the four blue china balls on top
Down the roof and down the rods all around us,
And we imagine dreamily
How the whole house caught in a bird-cage of lightning
Would be quite delightful rather than frightening;

And from the same simplified point of view
Of night and lying flat on one's back
All things might change equally easily,
Since always to warn us there must be these black
Electrical wires dangling. Without surprise
The world might change to something quite different,
As the air changes or the lightning comes without our blinking,
Change as our kisses are changing without our thinking.

- Elizabeth Bishop, Untitled

wishful thinking

Dream --
I see a postman everywhere
Vanishing in thin blue air;
A mammoth letter in his hand,
Postmarked from a foreign land.

The postman's uniform is blue.
The letter is of course from you
And I'd be able to read, I hope,
My own name on the envelope

But he has trouble with this letter
Which constantly grows bigger & bigger
And over and over with a stare,
He vanishes in blue, blue air.

- Elizabeth Bishop, Dream--

patterns and passions (kundera)

Men who pursue a multitude of women fit neatly into two categories. Some seek their own subjective and unchanging dream of a woman in all women. Others are prompted by a desire to posses the endless variety of the objective female world.

The obsession of the former is lyrical: what they seek in women is themselves, their ideal, and since an ideal is by definition something that can never be found, they are disappointed again and again. The disappointment that propels them from woman to woman gives their inconstancy a kind of romantic excuse, so that many sentimental women are touched by their unbridled philandering.

The obsession of the latter is epic, and women see nothing the least bit touching in it: the man projects no subjective ideal on women, and since everything interests him, nothing can disappoint him. This inability to be disappointed has something scandalous about it. The obsession of the epic womanizer strikes people as lacking in redemption (and redemption by disappointment).

Because the lyrical womanizer always runs after the same type of woman, we even fail to notice when he exchanges one mistress for another. His friends perpetually cause misunderstandings by mixing up his lovers and calling them by the same name.

In pursuit of knowledge, epic womanizers...turn away from conventional feminine beauty, of which they quickly tire, and inevitably end up as curiousity collectors. They are aware of this and a little ashamed of it, and to avoid causing their friends embarassment, they refrain from appearing in public with their mistresses.

- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

nuff said

VITA BREVIS
A lifetime
is more
than
sufficiently long
for people
to get
what there is of it
wrong.

- Pitt Hein, Grooks III

perversions, punishments

In his room stood a chest of drawers full of horrible fragments of stuff, a wash-hand stand with a highly coloured basin, an empty jug and an old toothbrush. There was also a rotund female bust covered in shiny red material, and chopped off short, as in primitive matyrdoms, at neck, waist and elbows; a thing known as a dressmaker's "dummy" (there had been one of these in Adam's home which they used to call "Jemima"-- one day he stabbed "Jemima" with a chisel and scattered stuffing over the nursery floor and was punished. A more enlightened age would have seen a complex in this action and worried accordingly. Anyway he was made to sweep up all the stuffing himself).

- Evelyn Waugh, Vile Bodies

like the sword of damocles

Damien Hirst - The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991