Monthly Archives: June 2011

What is there to say?

Posted on June 30, 2011 | Comments Off on What is there to say?

We sit beside each other, like two uncomfortable men on a couch. It’s the end of the day, dusk is settling. We can’t talk like women can, there’s an empty space between us, all around us. It’s up to us. What’s up to us? To make contact, to make life bearable, to give the evening, as they say, some semblance of meaning. You start. No, you start. But what is there to say?

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Posted in Writing

Posted on June 30, 2011 | Comments Off on

As if what was greatest about these artists (and there are others — Duras, say) is a kind of asceticism that leads them through their art as though it preceded it; as though writing (or painting, or filmmaking) was only a means, just as Zen can combine with both the art of archery and that of flower arranging. A kind of asceticism, a great sobriety that can lead a right-wing monarchist Catholic like Blanchot, young and privileged, very far from himself. Who is he, become writer? Who does he become?

Vague questions poorly posed. But I wonder in my foolishness whether there is not a kind of ethics in writing, in filmmaking, in painting… an art of life from the perspective of which (from its great heights) one would not laugh at Giacometti’s prose. This question, though: are we (this ‘we’ again — how laughable!) not too late for that, too late altogether? That asceticism must also be combined with a terrible self-mockery, an unsparing suspicion as the importance of writing, of painting, of filmmaking disappears altogether (only an idiot would call himself a poet; only a fool an artist. And who could call themselves a philosopher? Laughable, all laughable).

— Spurious

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Posted in Spurious

Posted on June 30, 2011 | Comments Off on

The fact that I am a woman clearly shapes my writing: thematically, in attitude, in awareness of social conditioning, marginality—but does not determine it exclusively. The writer, male or female, is only one partner in the process of writing. Language, in its full range, is the other, and is beyond gender […] The language a poet enters into belongs as much to the mothers as to the fathers.

— Waldrop, via here

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Seventeen

Posted on June 29, 2011 | Comments Off on Seventeen

He was seventeen. An age with wide margins. And then one night, a little before day. And then one day, and then one night, and then nights, and days which were nights, the confrontation with death, the confrontation with the dawn and dusk of death, the confrontation with himself, with no one.

Jabés, The Book of Questions (tr. Waldrop)

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Conversations of the end

Posted on June 29, 2011 | Comments Off on Conversations of the end

Don’t you have anything to say? Shall I say it for you? You’ve had plenty to say recently, haven’t you, in conversations with the people you’ve sought out, the friends you’ve had to make, the people you gratefully meet to make it sane though another evening, to escape from me, from yourself… Conversations tinged with the sense of an ending, with the sense that everything is coming to an end… Increasingly drunken conversations full of sarcasm, laughter… Conversations full of goodwill and confusion and fragile hope… Helplessness… Conversations overshadowed by the sense of a coming catastrophe, by the catastrophe that’s already happening… Stoned conversations in which you say too much, in which you go on about the End, about the necessity of the End, losing yourself in your words even as you shame yourself… Mad monologues in different voices in which you free yourself of me and the others free themselves of whomever they carry on their backs, free at last, in the end of time, the end of conversation, the end of sense… An endless confused monologue resembling the End, enacting the End as you get beyond me, beyond yourself, and everyone yawns and makes a move, goes to bed, bikes home, just as you’re getting started, just as the End is finally coming…

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Posted in Writing

Rules

Posted on June 23, 2011 | Comments Off on Rules

Ordinarily, in times of idleness, he would stroll into town. But when concentrating on his work, he usually went to the outskirts – out into the wilderness; thus far, he had adhered to this rule. But did he actually have any rules? Weren’t the few that he had tried to impose on himself constantly giving way to something else – a mood, an accident, a sudden inspiration – that seemed to indicate the better choice? True, his life had been oriented for almost twenty years toward his literary goal; but reliable ways and means were still unknown to him. Everything about him was still as temporary as it had been in the child, as later in the schoolboy, and still later in the novice writer.

— Handke, The Afternoon of a Writer (tr. Manheim)

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Cryptic

Posted on June 19, 2011 | Comments Off on Cryptic

I made you cryptic, didn’t I? The truth is we grew into each other not like lovers or happy families do, but like tendrils and thistles. Where else could I have gone, after I fell into you like some bumbling guardian angel? You hid, and I hid with you, what choice did I have? So we both had to wait, and so our lives – our life – became a waiting game. It was as if our story had ended the moment it began, the moment we found each other on that concrete path between the thistles, like some Kaspar Hauser with his failed teacher.

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Posted in Writing

Posted on June 15, 2011 | Comments Off on

Follow me, all you whom humiliation in love or neglect in friendship confines to your apartments, far from the pettiness and treachery of your fellow men. Let all the wretched, the sick, and the bored follow men—let all the lazy people of the world rise en masse;—and you, whose brain is aboil with sinister plans of reform; you, who in your boudoir are contemplating renouncing the world in order to live; gentle anchorites of an evening […] be so good as to accompany me on my voyage, we shall travel by short stages, laughing all along the way at travelers who have seen Rome and Paris.—Nothing shall stop us; and abandoning ourselves gaily to our fancy, we shall follow it wherever it wishes to take us.

— Xavier de Mastre, Voyage around My Room (via here)

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The Idiots

Posted on June 15, 2011 | Comments Off on The Idiots

[Extracts from Lars von Trier’s The Idiots film diary, my trans.]

Preface

The following is a kind of diary which I recorded on a dictaphone from just before the start of production until well into the editing stage. In keeping with the spirit of Dogma, I have neither read nor corrected the text. However, Peter Øvig has been kind enough to read it and make corrections where they were necessary in order to make the spoken language readable—but without my intervention or censure.

Without otherwise disavowing the text, I will merely note that all statements are unprepared and thus spontaneous. Since both the factual and analytical information probably contain quite a few inaccuracies (not to say untruths), it is advisable to read the text as a kind of self-therapy on the part of the author, born out of the agitated emotional state that was the very technique of the film.

Lars von Trier, March 1998

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Posted in Lars von Trier

If I said

Posted on June 14, 2011 | Comments Off on If I said

If I said, There’s a way out there, there’s a way out somewhere, the rest would come. What am I waiting for then, to say it? To believe it? And what does that mean, the rest? Shall I answer, try to answer, or go on as though I had asked nothing?

— Beckett, Texts for Nothing no. 9

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