on the desire to make something of literature

The Naturalists were hatmakers who made a plaster cast of the human head and left it at that. Art for art's sake consisted in making hats for the hat museum. The experimental poets exhausted themselves fabricating perfectly unwearable headgear. Political literature thought the thing to do was to stick little red flags or tricolors into old caps or berets.
The thing is to do, and to do well, something worth doing. A sturdy, beautiful hat, for example.
And the work of art, even as it is that, is also for that very reason a magic hat that fits every head, each according to its capacities; and it gives strength and valor to everyone who puts it on.
- Raymond Queneau, "What Is Art?" (1938)

particularism and conceptions of passion

For old Samoan society, in which a daughter’s marriage was an important route to social ascent, the idea of mating for reasons of personal sentiment had dangerous implications. We have seen that the sexual independence of lower-status girls was tolerated, as long as they acted in the status interests of their families. A danger in this sexual system had long been acknowledged: the girl’s inner feelings might become so strong in relation to an inappropriate (low-status) sexual partner that she would elope, gainsaying her parents and other relatives (avaga i le loto o le teine). In Samoan the word loto refers to private thoughts and personal feelings. The phrase momo i loto means “inner yearning” or “inner longing” and is used to describe the feelings of a girl who runs off with a boy and is brought home but then runs off again. In these cases friends may counsel parents that there is nothing they can do. Clearly, passion for a specific individual in sexual relations is not confined to Euro-Americans cultures. But in old Samoa this phenomenon was viewed as something of a hurricane, a misfortune in the face of which resignation was appropriate. It was not cultivated.
- Mageo, Jeannette Marie. 1996. “Spirit Girls and Marines: Possession and Ethnopsychiatry as Historical Discourse in Samoa.” American Ethnologist 23(1):61-82.

The Tragedy of the Cowboy

Frontier keynotes in [Frederick Jackson] Turner's landmark essay of 1893 associate the availability of free land on the western frontier with such supposedly "American" character traits as inquisitiveness, inventiveness, practicality, independence, diligence, restlessness, and exuberance. Similarly, in post-1925 media portrayals of the frontier we find a tough, exuberant, honest, and independent character, the outlaw, who is pitted against the forces of social order. These civilizing forces represent dependence/interdependence, comfort, dishonesty, and weakness, although paradoxically or tragically they are fated to win the struggle. (161)

Adams, Paul C. 1997. "Cyberspaces and Virtual Places." Geographical Review 87(2): 155-171.

Against Universalism

Against the possibility of contemporary universalism, [Foucault] makes a double critique. First, there is his substantive historical demonstration of absent reason. The rationalization of modern society, as manifest particularly in the thought and activity of the scientifically trained professions, is a fraud (e.g. Foucault 1977, 1978). Professionals actually engage in the manipulation of reason; their ministrations are forms of surveillance, their goal technical control. Enlightenment universalism amounts to [388] the particularism of power; it results in the suppression of subjectivity, not in the exercise of present reason.
Foucault’s second critique is an analytical one. In his later work he insists on the virtually complete identity of knowledge, or discourse, with power. In doing so, the very possibility of decentered experience is denied. The subject, Foucault is fond of repeating, is completely constituted by discourse. In this way, discourse becomes both the basis for power and merely its manifestation in another form. Because truth is relative to discourse, it is impossible to appeal to universalizing standards against worldly power: “Truth isn’t outside power, or lacking in power… Each society has its regime of truth, its ‘general politics’ of truth: that is, the types of discourse which it accepts and makes function as true” (Foucault 1980: 131). To set about rationally to evaluate the logical consistency, theoretical implications, or explanatory value of a given discourse is obviously a waste of time.

- Jeffrey Alexander, "The Post positivist "Epistemological Dilemma"" pg. 337-338, POSTMODERNISM & SOCIAL THEORY Ed. Seidman and Wagner

poetry: anticipation of love

Neither the intimacy of your look, your brow fair as a feast day,
not the favor of your body, still mysterious, reserved, and childlike,
nor what comes to me of your life, settling in words or silence,
will be so mysterious a gift
as the sight of your sleep, enfolded
in the vigil of my arms.
Virgin again, miraculously, by the absolving power of sleep,
quiet and luminous like some happy thing recovered by memory,
you will give me that shore of your life that you yourself do not own.
Cast up into silence
I shall discern that ultimate beach of your being
and see you for the first time, perhaps,
as God must see you --
the fiction of Time destroyed,
free from love, from me.

- Jorge Luis Borges (trans. Robert Fitzgerald), "Anticipation of Love"

Poetry: Tired Sex

Trying to strike a match in a matchbook
that has lain all winter under the woodpile:
damp sulfur
on sodden cardboard.
I catch myself yawning. Through the window
I watch that sparrow the cat
keeps batting around.

Like turning the pages of a book the teacher assigned --

You ought to read it, she said.
It's great literature.

- Chana Bloch, "Tired Sex"

poetry: The things they don't tell you about heaven

Apples still taste like apples. Funny thing,
serpents taste like apples too, and kisses

and bread. In fact, it is all about apples,
this place. Everything you touch is smooth and red.

Your skin is comfortably heavy on your bones,
like that sleepy moment between being awake and falling

into a dream. The moon is a pendulum clock,
and light from the sun comes down in drops, as rain. And,

as any child will tell you, what we call rain is really tears,
the soul of God weeping over something great or small,

as anything with a soul will do from time to time.
Mostly, it is the apples, and a longing kind of sad.

They are firm as musculature. They smell like the flesh
and juice of unrequited love.

- Jill Alexander Essbaum, "The things they don't tell you about heaven"

The Lure of Modernity

They consecrated the rest of their time to their waning dreams in the hills. … Sure, one survived, sure, one was free, but the aftertaste of misery was rising quickly. It was the bitterness of a land whose promises fly away. It was from the boredom with nature that did away with all patience before the least wish came true. … The hills had neither schools nor lights. You just found yourself with the sky over you like a lid, getting anxious, sometimes destitute, and always without perspective. The still hills did not care for any weakness. Thus, year after year, the maroon Trail began to go down to the Factory. There was opportunity there.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 139, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

Christ Parallels

The drifter’s destiny is to carry us, all together, toward worlds buried in us. He assumed what we were looking for and allowed us to look for it, without our having to suffer. The drifter, he was our desire for freedom in the flesh, our way of living worlds in ourselves, our City maroon.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 359, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

Making Myths

... legends are memories greater than memories.

-Patrick Chamoiseau, pg. 176, Texaco, trans. Rejouis & Vinokurov

Pinning Things Down

Nobody will agree, there is no such thing as an agreed value Shakespeare. This is not because Shakespeare is less precise than a mathematical equation it is because he is unfixed. Language is movement, and I do not only mean inevitable development or deterioration, I mean that words are fleet-footed things and when right run, escape us at the place where we think we have wrestled them flat.

- Jeanette Winterson, "A Work of My Own" pg 166, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

Freedom in Literature

What I wanted did not belong to me by right and whilst it could not be refused to me in quite the same way, we still have subtle punishments for anyone who insists on what they are and what they want. Walled inside the little space marked out for me by family and class, it was the limitless world of the imagination that made it possible for me to scale the sheer face of other people’s assumptions. Inside books there is perfect space and it is that space which allows the reader to escape from the problems of gravity.

- Jeanette Winterson, "Art & Life" pg 157, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

Good Old Materialism

Symbolic man surrounds himself with objects as tyrants surround themselves with subjects: ‘These will obey me. Through them I am worshipped. Through them I exercise control.’ These fraudulent kingdoms, hard-headed and practical, are really the soft-centre of fantasy. They are wish fulfillment nightmares when more is piled on more to manufacture the illusion of abundance. They are lands of emptiness and want. Things do not satisfy. In part they fail to satisfy because their symbolic value changes so regularly and what brought whistles of admiration one year is next year’s car boot sale bargain. In part they fail to satisfy because much of what we buy is gadgetry and fashion, which makes objects temporary and the need to be able to purchase them, permanent. In part they fail to satisfy because we do not actually want the things they buy. They are illusion, narcotic, hallucination.

- Jeanette Winterson, "Imagination and Reality" pg 144-145, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

Commensalism

Art is visionary; it sees beyond the view from the window, even though the window is its frame. This is why the arts fare much better alongside religion than alongside either capitalism or communism. The god-instinct and the art-instinct both apprehend more than the physical biological material world.

- Jeanette Winterson, "Imagination and Reality" pg 136, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

On personal change

It is not necessary to be shut up in one self, to grind through life like an ox at a mill, always treading the same ground. Human beings are capable of powered flight; we can travel across ourselves and find that self multiple and vast.

- Jeanette Winterson, "The Semiotics of Sex" pg 116, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

Emotion in Modernity

Consequences of misery and breakdown are typical and in a repressive society that pretends to be liberal, misery and breakdown can be used as subtle punishments for what we no longer dare legislate against. Inability to cope is defined as a serious weakness in a macho culture like ours, but what is inability to cope, except a spasmodic, faint and fainter protest against a closed-in drugged-up life where suburban values are touted as the greatest good? A newborn child, the moment of falling in love, can cause in us seismic shocks that will, if we let them, help us to re-evaluate what things matter, what things we take for granted. This is frightening, and as we get older it is harder to face such risks to the deadness that we are.

- Jeanette Winterson, "The Semiotics of Sex" pg 113-114, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

on being a true artist

The single-mindedness of those who make rather than fake art is interpreted as diffidence, arrogance, madness, cruelty, remoteness, paranoia. Freud called it sublimation and wish-fulfillment. The common theory of the artist as one possessed is well known, but I think it truer to call the artist one in possession; in full possession of a reality less partial than the reality apprehended by most people. The artist cannot occupy middle ground, and the warm nooks of humanity are not for her, she lives on the mountainside, in the desert, on the sea. The condition of the artist is a condition of Remove.
I do not mean that artists live like monks, of course they don’t, and nor do I mean that artists live in shacks. Michelangelo had five palaces and the only reason that Mozart is buried in a pauper’s grave is that he spent everything he was given and died young. The myth of the impoverished artist is as badly sourced as the myth of the mad artist. A list would reveal quite a different story. The condition of Remove is rather like the allegiance of the knight who is glad to eat drink and be merry but listening always for the insistent voice, the work to be done above all things else.

- Jeanette Winterson, "A Work of My Own" pg 168, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

Lies About Modernity

Science they say, has made poetry impossible; there is no poetry in motor cars and wireless. And we have no religion. All is tumultuous and transitional. Therefore, so people say, there can be no relation between the poet and the present age. But surely that is nonsense. These accidents are superficial; they do not go nearly deep enough to destroy the most profound and primitive of instincts, the instinct of rhythm… Let your rhythmical sense wind itself in and out among men and women, omnibuses and sparrows, whatever comes along the street, until it has strung them together in one harmonious whole. That perhaps is your task-- to find the relation between things that seem incompatible yet have a mysterious affinity. To absorb every experience that comes your way fearlessly, and saturate it completely so that your poem is a whole and not a fragment; to re-think human life into poetry and so give us tragedy again and comedy by means of characters not spun out at length in the novelist’s way, but condensed and synthesized in the poet’s way….

- Virginia Woolf - Letter to a Young Poet, 1932

On Breaking Out

What is forbidden is scarier, sexier, unnightmared by the white-collar catologuers of crap. ‘Don’t do that’ makes for easy revolt. What is forbidden is hidden. To worm into the heart and mind until what one truly desires has been encased in dark walls of what one ought to desire, is the success of the serpent. Serpents of state, serpents of religion, serpents in the service of education, monied serpents, mythic serpents, weaving their lies backwards into history.

- Jeanette Winterson, "The Semiotics of Sex" pg 114-115, Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effontery.

On the Ideal Life

That would be a glorious life, to addict oneself to perfection; to follow the curve of the sentence wherever it might lead, into deserts, under drifts of sand, regardless of lures, of seductions; to be poor always and unkempt; to be ridiculous in Piccadilly.

- Virginia Woolf, The Waves, pg 87-88.

on knowing the limits of academic devotion

I am one person-- myself. I do not impersonate Catullus, whom I adore. I am the most slavish of students, with here a dictionary; there is a notebook in which I enter curious uses of the past participle. But one cannot go on for ever cutting these ancient inscriptions clearer with a knife.

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, pg. 87