Power Quote

FINANCIAL UNREST

“To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise, you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen who play with their boats at sea — cruising, it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.”

– Sterling Hayden, Wanderer

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January 22nd, 2010 / 1:56 pm

Leonard Cohen tells a joke

From a CBC Interview, 1966

Leonard Cohen: I thought I would change my name and get a tattoo.

Interviewer: Where?

Leonard Cohen: There’s this place on St. Lawrence Boulevard.

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January 10th, 2010 / 6:36 pm

I do not count my borrowings, I weigh them. And if I had wanted to have them valued by their number, I should have loaded myself with twice as many.

– Montaigne, “Of Books”

quoted in Where Shall Wisdom be Found? by Harold Bloom

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January 7th, 2010 / 1:59 pm

“It’s often a distraction.”

I want to point out that responding to depiction and illustration often involves something apart from the formal characteristics of painting. It’s often a distraction. On the other hand, purely formal characteristics exercise the senses as do string quartets, piano concertos, Dixieland. Because of this the representation I’m interested in is of those things only the eye can touch.

Kenneth Noland, 1924 – 2010

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January 6th, 2010 / 2:42 pm

In Praise of Modesty

The writer was a tumbler. If not, then a tinker, carrying a hundred pots and pans and bits of linoleum and wires and falconer’s hoods and pencils and…you carried them around for years and gradually fit them into a small, modest book. The art of packing. — Michael Ondaatje, Anil’s Ghost

I think of this quotation a whole lot. I think a whole lot of this quotation. Blake’s interview of Andrew Zornoza made me think of it, the 14 years in the making part. My friend working around the clock on what will be a short non-definitive but brilliant biography made me think of it. Avatar and not wanting to see a movie that proposes to break new ground, that promises to change the way I think of the movie experience, made me think of it. Immodesty is dishonesty. To think we’ll never read another book after this one. To think we’ll never see another movie, or that ever after we’ll see movies differently. To think we won’t amend and mend and expand and retract our thoughts about art-making because this time we’ve gotten it right. What hubris.

This is not to equate modesty with small physical size. This is not to equate modesty with lack of ambition. To pack, select, winnow, whittle, fit, shape, pat, balance, attend, await, and weigh the materials of life and art to make a book is honest hard work–backbreaking, eye-straining, near-impossible work, and the reward always comes too late.

A quote like this gives postmodernity a good name. To admit to sweeping up shards, gathering scraps of broken meat, to allow that one book can’t hope to contain the Whole, or even any one whole. The days of circumnavigating the globe, the days of the brave frontier have passed. Foreclosed. We have now vaster materials, but smaller places to put them in. What possibility, what call.

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January 5th, 2010 / 9:03 pm

“There is an incessant influx of novelty into the world, and yet we tolerate incredible dullness.” -Thoreau

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December 17th, 2009 / 10:19 am

Power Quote: Precritical Compulsion

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— Ovskum, an Italian singer and guitarist, was quoted in one of the symposium’s lectures as saying, “my music does not come from a philosophy but from a precritical compulsion” —

If you can say that without irony, I’m pretty sure you win.

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December 15th, 2009 / 9:24 pm

Why do we become what we most desire to contend with?


– Cynthia Ozick, preface to Bloodshed and Three Novellas

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December 3rd, 2009 / 12:59 pm

Power Quote: Beavis

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdmSFXKM_QU

“I think that the problem with this video is it is highly derivative of many popular bands within the genre. Although when viewed on its own merits, it does have a deeper groove. However what it has in groove it lacks in originality. One can’t help but be reminded of such bands as Pearl Jam, White Zombie, Suicidal Tendencies and other bands that bear the mantle of so called “Alternative Rock.” One is even reminded of Laurie Anderson when she wore curlers. This video speaks less to the heart and more to the sphincter. In closing, I think Korn would do well to learn more from…”

Beavis and Butt-head

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November 20th, 2009 / 8:19 pm

Critics on Criticism: Roland Barthes

roland.barthesFrom “Blind and Dumb Criticism” in Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers:

Why do critics thus periodically claim their helplessness or their lack of understanding? It is certainly not out of modesty; no one is more at ease than one critic confessing that he understands nothing about existentialism; no one more ironic and therefore more self-assured than another admitting shamefacedly that he does not have the luck to have been initiated into the philosophy of the Extraordinary; and no one more soldier-like than a third pleading for poetic ineffability….

The reality behind this seasonally professed lack of culture is the old obscurantist myth according  to which ideas are obnoxious if they are not controlled by ‘common sense’ and ‘feeling’: Knowledge is Evil, they both grew on the same tree….

In fact, any reservation about culture means a terrorist position.

Author Spotlight & Power Quote / 10 Comments
November 14th, 2009 / 5:09 pm