Expletives Deleted

Although i grew up with books and having spent a good deal of my adult life among them, make my living out of writing them and very much enjoy writing about them, i can contemplate with equanimity the science-fiction future world that every day approaches more closely, in which information and narrative pleasure are transmitted electronically and books are a quaint antiquarian, minority taste. Not in my time, anyway, i say to myself. And, anyway, a book is simply the container of an idea - like a bottle; what is inside that book is what matters. Even so, i admit to having fetishistic attitude to books, to their touch, their smell. All the same, human beings told each other stories, instructed one another in the names of things, speculated about the meaning of it all (and came to few if any conclusions), discussed the habits of animals, composed recipes, before there was such a thing even as writing and will doubtless continue to do so because the really important thing is narrative.

All books, even cookery books and car-maintenance manuals consist of narratives. Narrative is written in language but is composed, if you follow me, in time, All writers are inventing a kind of imitation time when they invent the time in which a story unfolds, and they are playing a complicated came with our time, the reader's time, the time it takes to read a story. A good writer can make you believe time stands still.

Angela Carter, Expletives Deleted, 1992

Double Portrait

Memory's a funny thing, isn't it. You don't agree? I don't agree either. Memory has never amused me much, and i find its tricks more and more wearisome as i grow older. Perhaps memory simply stays the same but has less work to do as the days fill out. My memory's in good shape, i think. It's just that my life is getting less memorable all the time. Can you remember where you left those keys? Why should i? Lying in the tub some slow afternoon, can you remember if you've washed your toes? (Taking a leak is boring, isn't it, after the few thousand times? Whew, isn't that a drag?) I can't remember half the stuff i do any more. But then i don't want to much.

Martin Amis, Money, 1984

A day beside the seaside

I think where i am not, therefore i am where i do not think... The ring of meaning flees from our grasp along the verbal thread. What one ought to say is: I am not wherever i am the plaything of my thought. I think of what i am where i do not think to think...

Jaques Lacan 1977

The Art Of Truth

London - June 2010

"To the truth of art, external reality is irrelevant. Art creates its own reality, within which truth and the perfection of beauty is the infinite refinement of itself. History is very different. It is an empirical search for external truths, and for the best, most complete, and most profound external truths, in a maximal corresponding relationship with the absolute reality of past events."

David Hackett Fischer - University Professor and Earl Warren Professor of History at Brandeis Unviveristy

Move

I am forever on the great stairway that leads up to the world. On that infinitely wide and open stairway i clamber about, sometimes up, sometimes down, sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left, always in motion. But when i soar up with a supreme effort and can see the gate shining above me, i wake up on my old boat, still forlornly stranded in some earthly sea.
W. G. Sebald

Rethinking

And indeed there will be time
To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—	40
[They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—
[They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”]
Do I dare	45
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all:—
Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,	50
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dying with a dying fall
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
And I have known the eyes already, known them all—	55
The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?	60
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all—
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
It is perfume from a dress	65
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
And should I then presume?
And how should I begin? The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock - T. S. Eliot 1917

A Brief Introduction

A photography based, thought-fuelled, self-absorbed reflection of today.

If you think: yesterday i was, tomorrow i will be, you are thinking: i have done a little.
Be what you are becoming, without clinging to what you could have been, might be.
Let's leave definitiveness for the undecided; we don't need it.

Luce Irigaray