Random
Lines From Stuff I Read Over the Weekend By These And Other People
Perec
Hunter
Sukenick
“An innovation in a literary form cannot establish itself as a new direction unless a sense of shared aims and objectives develops among experimental writers” (10). Patricia Waugh – Metafiction
“Did this mean I had won out over my rival? No; I had lost: a hopeless defeat. Because she had finally realized that my cousin loved only the moon, and the only thing she wanted now was to become the Moon, to be assimilated into the object of that extrahuman love” (14). Italo Calvino – Cosmicomics
“Beauty is therefore an event, a process, rather than a condition or a state. The flower is not beautiful in itself; rather, beauty happens when I encounter the flower” (4). Steven Shaviro – Without Criteria
“Then in a clearing the yellow flutter thickens clots on the ground a golden clump of vibrating butter from which butterflies in flickering flecks the source of all yellow butterflies. Not that. But like that” (4). Ronald Sukenick – 98.6
“A bedroom is a room in which there is a bed; a dining room is a room in which there are a table and chairs, and often a sideboard; a sitting-room is a room in which there are armchairs and a couch; a kitchen is a room in which there is a cooker and a water inlet… ” (27). George Perec – Species of Spaces
“I want a guy who parts his hair on the left. I want a guy who’ll lick my throat area. I want a guy who’ll finger my back cleavage. I want a guy who owns tools. I want a guy who collects ratshit. I want a guy don’t like to read. I want a guy who’ll slash my tires. I want a guy who hates a pinky in his ass.” Lindsay Hunter – “Meat From A Meat Man”
PS – New Lil Wayne album dropped today: I Am Not A Human Being, which one could find rather easily should one happen to do a google search of said title and the word mediafire in quotations. Just saying.
Been waiting for Sukenick love here.
perec always looks a very nice huggable person in his pictures.
Supposedly Perec had really bad teeth. After reading that he had really bad teeth, I noticed that in all his photographs when he’s smiling he always has his lips tightly sealed . . . so maybe it’s true.
Calvino, Calvino… . Always wished I could tell a story like that man could tell a story… .
love the Lindsay Hunter. also love that she has the same name as Lindsey Hunter. would love it all even more if the other Lindsey Hunter were able to write like this Lindsay Hunter, if they were one
I am still learning stuff from Lindsay Hunter.
Christopher, later in the paragraph from Shaviro that you quote (back on pp. 3-4), Shaviro continues his reading of Kant: “[B]eauty does not survive the moment of the encounter in which it is created.”
‘Create’ is a difficult – I think: a misleading – word to understand Kant with.
If there is such a moment of Kantian apprehension of beauty, there must be, in that apprehension, ‘conditions for the possibility’ of it being so, of that internal moment happening. While those inward conditions might reveal to thought nothing about the reality of the appearing noumenon – even its existence – , nevertheless, those conditions themselves leave their effects in the form of that momentary experience called “beauty”. – that is Kantian critique, right? – that we move inductively from an inward event to how things must be inwardly for that event, which is not doubted (despite skepticism as to some external stimulation), to have occurred.
Not that “beauty” is something external that the mind apprehends through the senses, but rather, that “beauty” is intelligible as an inward happening because the inward ‘conditions for its possibility’ are themselves not unreachably external. The “disinterestedness” of “beauty” and ‘utter gratuity’ of “passion”, in Shaviro’s view of Kant, flow from aesthetic judgement’s detachment from “interest” and “need” – the sense that something before one is beautiful is not connected to the interest or need that one might hold for that thing, namely, its utility for one.
But why does that “disinterestedness” and “gratuity” extend, or is analogous to, a disinterest in and dispassion for “beauty”-the-inward-happening? You understand? – when one calls something ‘beautiful’, one isn’t necessarily saying something about the intrinsic nature of that thing (even that it exists), but one is saying that there’s a difference, inwardly, between the (inner) event(s) one calls “beauty” and other (inner) events.
Does one not have an “interest in”, “need for”, and “passion for” the inward determination that one understands to be the “event of beauty”? Not “criteria” in the sense of grasping the ‘beautiful’ thing itself (or something about it), but rather “criteria” in the sense of apprehending that there’s been an “event of beauty” and, especially, that that event has ‘conditions for the possibility’ that it happened.