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Fragmentary, No. 29
In one of my favorites of your drawings, two Popsicles are talking to each other. One accuses, “You’re more interested in fantasy than reality.” The other responds, “I’m interested in the reality of my fantasy.” Both Popsicles are melting off their sticks. ✧ Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts
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Fragmentary, No. 28
This reciprocal determination operates elsewhere as well, although by other means and with other aims. It involves a double displacement, which renders a concept plausible or true by pointing to an error and, at the same time, by enforcing belief in something real through a denunciation of the false. The assumption is made that what…
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A Retrospect of Prospective
As I was trying to write about the past, I decided that I’d rather rework something I’d written about the future, in the past; but that’s something especially relevant this time of year. Maybe it’s tradition. Read it here.
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Lemonade?
And one of the miners made a speech about capitalism using the analogy that “it’s like, say, a man gives you a lemon tree . . . “ (I think he was possibly Australian—but evidently, living in New Zealand.) “When do you have the time to pick the lemons? Before or after they are any…
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Fragmentary, No. 27
Looks like what drives me crazyDon’t have no effect on you—But I’m gonna keep on at itTill it drives you crazy, too. ✧ Langston Hughes, “Evil”
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Fragmentary, No. 26
Lecturing in JapanStephen Hawking was askednot to mention that the universe had a beginning(and so likely an end)because it would affect the stockmarket.Speculation aside,we all need a prehistory. According to Freud,we do nothing but repeat it.Beginnings are special because most of them are fake.The new person you becomewith that first sip of wine was already…
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Fragmentary, No. 25
The moderns confused products with processes. They believed that the production of bureaucratic rationalization presupposed rational bureaucrats; that the production of universal science depended on universalist scientists; that the production of effective technologies led to the effectiveness of engineers; that the production of abstraction was itself abstract; that the production of formalism was itself formal.…
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Fragmentary, No. 24
“The strongest guard is placed at the gateway to nothing. . . . Maybe because the condition of emptiness is too shameful to be divulged.” ✧ F. Scott Fitzgerald, Tender is the Night
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Fragmentary, No. 23
poets are useless, . . . are not only ‘non-utilitarian’,we are ‘pathetic’: this is the new heresy;but if you do not even understand what words say, how can you expect to pass judgementon what words conceal? ✧ H.D., The Walls Do Not Fall
IMPENSIVE
". . . and remember Lady Macbeth, who had her mind in her hand. We can't all be as safe as that."
IMPENSIVE 