Stock Images

“All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set peices which have already been staged often enough by others.  We try to produce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of the spectacle of history forcing themselves upon us [...] Our concern with history [...] is a concern with performed images already imprinted on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered”

-WG Sebald, 2001 (Austerlitz.  New York: The Modern Library.  Pg 71-2.)

Fame, its not your brain

“Until that moment Archimboldi had never thought about fame.  Hitler was famous.  Goring was famous.  The people he loved or remembered fondly weren’t famous, they just satisfied certain needs.  Doblin was his consolation.  Ansky was his strength.  Ingeborg was his joy.  The disappeared Hugo Halder was lightheartedness and fun.  His sister, about whom he had no news, was his own innocence.  Of course, they were other things too.  Sometimes they were even everything all together, but not fame, which was rooted in delusion and lies, if not ambition.  Also, fame was reductive.  Everything that ended in fame and everything that issued from fame was inevitably diminished.  Fame’s message was unadorned.  Fame and literature were irreconcilable enemies.”

-Roberto Bolano, 2008 (2666.  New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.  Pg 801-2)

competing monsters

“…this man was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the particular ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they’ve been present at a decisive moment in history, when it’s common knowledge…that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in monstrousness.”

-Roberto Bolano, 2008 (2666.  New York: Farrar, Strauss, & Giroux.  Pg 794)

Country ways

“Once I would have been content to fill my days with musings; but now, having been through a carnival of incident, I am quite seduced.  Like the daughters in the boarding-houses I sit tapping my fingernails on the furniture, listening to the tick of the clock, waiting for the next thing to happen.  Once I lived in time as a fish in water, breathing it, drinking it, sustained by it.  Now I kill time and time kills me.  Country ways! How I long for country ways.”

-JM Coetzee, 1976.  (In the Heart of the Country.  Pg 80.)

Continous Cities

“The city of Leonia refashions itself every day…on the sidewalks, encases in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday’s Leonia await the garbage truck…It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured  that you can measure Leonia’s opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia’s true passion is really as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity …

Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse.  Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands…the more Leonia’s talent for making new materials excels, the more the rubbish improves in quality, resists time, the elements, fermentations, combustions…

This is the result:the more Leonia expels goods, the more it accumulates them; the scales of its past are soldered into a curirass that cannot be removed.  As the city is renewed each day, it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterday’s sweepings…The boundaries between the alien, hostile cities are infected ramparts where the detritus of both support each other, overlap, mingle…”

Italo Calvino, 1972 “Continous Cities 1″ (in Invisible Cities.  New York NY: Harcourt.  Pg 114)