barthes, roland

"what echoes in me is what i learn with my body: something sharp and tenuous suddenly wakens this body, which, meanwhile, had languished in the rational knowledge of a general situation: the word, the image, the thought function like a whiplash. my inward body begins vibrating as though shaken by trumpets answering each other, drowning each other out: the incitation leaves its trace, the trace widens and everything is (more or less rapidly) ravaged."

[r. barthes, the lover's discourse]

stevens, wallace

"Of Mere Being"

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze distance.

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

thompson, hunter s.

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me"

[h. s. thompson]

agee, james

"...for this human sphere is all one such interlocked and marvelously variegated and prehensile a disease and madness, what man in ten million shall dare to presume he is cleansed of it or more so than another, shall dare better than most hesitantly to venture, that one form of this ruin is more than a millionth preferable to another?"

[j. agee, let us now praise famous men]

barthes, roland

"It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with it, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus."

[r. barthes, camera lucida]

foucault, michel

ooh, foucault is so irresistible! even after years away, i'm still so swayed by his sweet words.

"Silence itself--the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers--is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies."

[m. foucault, the history of sexuality, volume i]

also, note to self: find a way to disagree with those you love (see: foucault, barthes, benjamin) when you think they are wrong. because you do disagree with them often enough. that will improve you.

mangum, jeff

oh, spontaneous tears. i forgot the painful ambiguity in the last line of this:

"When we break, we'll wait for our miracle,
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies,
When we break, we'll wait for our miracle,
God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life."

[j. mangum, "two-headed boy, part II"]