Ofterdingen and Kropotkin: January 2006

Boil 1.79

hyssyttely

*Sigh*

From behind 1.85

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. . . .
F.S. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Boil 1.78

Structure of irc conversations:

Donut[AFK]: HEY EURAKARTE
Donut[AFK]: INSULT
Eurakarte: RETORT
Donut[AFK]: COUNTER-RETORT
Eurakarte: QUESTIONING OF SEXUAL PREFERENCE
Donut[AFK]: SUGGESTION TO SHUT THE FUCK UP
Eurakarte: NOTATION THAT YOU CREATE A VACUUM
Donut[AFK]: RIPOSTE
Donut[AFK]: ADDON RIPOSTE
Eurakarte: COUNTER-RIPOSTE
Donut[AFK]: COUNTER-COUNTER RIPOSTE
Eurakarte: NONSENSICAL STATEMENT INVOLVING PLANKTON
Miles_Prower: RESPONSE TO RANDOM STATEMENT AND THREAT TO BAN OPPOSING SIDES
Eurakarte: WORDS OF PRAISE FOR FISHFOOD
Miles_Prower: ACKNOWLEDGEMENT AND ACCEPTENCE OF TERMS

found here

Spoil 1.66

Die Zeit liest Soziologie, raunt Heidegger:

Es ist die Zeit selbst, die sich »entzeitlicht«, was für Rosa heißt: Wir entscheiden nicht mehr im Licht zeitstabiler Werte, sondern bestimmen unsere Handlungsziele im Vollzug der Handlung, also in der Zeit selbst.

ARLANC 1.54

Geisterstunde

ARLANC 1.53

File 1.48

Have you heard this...the definitive blonde joke...

ARLANC 1.52

From behind 1.84

blütenlese 1.0

A recent quantitative survey investigated prior knowledge of applicants for postgraduate studies in the Humanitites. One category of results is worthy of mentioning: 60 % of unsuspecting applicants admitted to possessing "substantial knowledge" (32%) or at least "accurate comprehension, though limited in scope" (28%) of a work cited as
Althusserl, M. Phenomenology of Marxism.

http://superbad.com/

Spoil 1.65

Writers aren't exactly people. Or, if they're any good, they're a whole lot of people trying so hard to be one person. It's like actors, who try so pathetically not to look in mirrors, who lean backward trying - only to see their faces in the reflecting chandeliers.
F.S. Fitzgerald, The last tycoon, 16.

Kalkwerk|Limeworks

WELTFREMD
Ein gelernter Moebeltischler aus Maria Saal (einem beliebten Wallfahrtsort in Kaernten), der durch die Bekanntschaft mit einem urspruenglich begabten Komponisten, welchen wir selbst viele Jahre lang als ein Genie wie kein zweites bezeichnet haben, auf die Literatur gekommen ist und der Gedichte und kleine Komoedien geschrieben hat, die aber, so jene, die seine Gedichte und kleinen Komoedien in die Hand bekommen haben, tatsaechlich einerseits unlesbar, andererseits unspielbar gewesen waeren, ganz aus dem einfachen Grunde, weil sie niemand verstanden habe, ist aus Verzweiflung ueber seine Verkennung in den Laengssee gegangen und ertrunken. Die Zeitung, die, nachdem seine Leiche aufgefunden worden war, eine kurze Notiz ueber den Verkannten veroeffentlichte, betonte vor allem anderen, dass er weltfremd gewesen sei.
Th. Bernhard, Werke 14, 274.

ESTRANGED
A furniture maker from Maria Saal (a popular place of pilgrimage in Kaernten) who, through the acquaintance with an erstwhile gifted composer whom we ourselves for many years had deemed a genius like no other, had taken to literature, and who had written poems and little comedies which, however, according to those who had inspected his poems and little comedies, were in fact on the one hand unreadable and on the other not stageable, for the simple reason that nobody had quite understood them, in despair over his lack of recognition had gone into the lake and was drowned. The newspaper, which, following the recovery of the body, published a short note on the unrecognized, stressed above all that he had been estranged from the world.

Th. Bernhard, Werke 14, 274.
Trans. mine. Grammar not great, suggestions welcome.

File 1.47

This is a vanity I have often noted in writers; the more eminent the writer, the more pronounced this vanity is likely to be. They believe everyone should write as they do; not as well as they do, of course, but in the same fashion. In such a way do mountains long for foothills.
J. Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot, 150.

ARLANC 1.51

File 1.46

Translation requests. Your resident ghost needs these words translated:

Ochsenziemer

Altherrenreiter

Kinderglut

Selbstverewigungswille

weltfremd

Any suggestions welcome.

From behind 1.83

...ein laengeres Fluestergespraech ueber die im Gleichmass mit der Proliferation des Informationswesens fortschreitende Aufloesung unserer Erinnerungsfaehigkeit und ueber den bereits sich vollziehenden Zusammenbruch, l'effrondement, wie Lemoine sich ausdrueckte, de la Bibliothèque Nationale. Das neue Bibliotheksgebaeude, das durch seine ganze Anlage ebenso wie durch seine ans Absurde grenzende innere Regulierung den Leser als einen potentiellen Feind auszuschliessen suchte, sei, so, sagte Austerlitz, sagte Lemoine, quasi die offizielle Manifestation des immer dringender sich anmeldenden Beduerfnisses, mit all dem ein Ende zu machen, was noch ein Leben habe an der Vergangenheit.
W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz, 404.

Spoil 1.64

Boil 1.77

He had, of course, the eternal delusion of strong young men, that women gauge their passion by counting the number of times that the assault is renewed in the course of a single night. Well, to some extent we do: who would deny that? It is flattering, is it not? But it is not what counts finally. And after a while, there seems something almost military about it. Gustave had a way of talking about the women he had enjoyed. He would recall some prostitute he had frequented in the rue de la Cigogne: 'I fired five shots into her,' he would boast to me. It was his habitual turn of phrase. I found it coarse, but I did not mind: we were artists together, you see. However, I noted the metaphor. The more shots you fire into somebody, the more likely they are to be dead at the end of it. Is that what men want? Do they need a corpse as proof of their virility? I suspect they do, and women, with the logic of flattery, remember to exclaim at the transporting moment, 'Oh, I die! I die!' or some such phrase. After a bout of love, I often find that my brain is at its sharpest; I see things clearly; I feel poetry coming to me. But I know better than to interrupt the hero with my babblings; instead I ape the satisfied cadaver.
Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot, 140.

File 1.39 (update)

Uebelkeit nach zuviel Psychologie. Wenn einer gute Beine hat und an die Psychologie herangelassen wird, kann er in kurzer Zeit und in beliebigem Zickzack Strecken zuruecklegen, wie auf keinem andern Feld. Da gehen einem die Augen ueber.
Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente I, 423.

Nausea after too much psychology. If one has strong legs and is let near psychology, one may in little time, and in random zigzag, traverse distances like in no other field. One can hardly believe one's eyes at it.
Kafka, Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente I, 423.

Now that depth-psychology, with the help of films, soap operas and Horney, has delved into the deepest recesses, people's last possibility of experiencing themselves has been cut off by organized culture.
T.W. Adorno, Minima Moralia, 65.

File 1.45

Begin with an individual, and before you know it you find that you have created a type; begin with a type and you find that you have created - nothing. There are no types, no plurals. There is a rich boy, and this is his and not his brothers' story. All my life I have lived among his brothers but this one has been my friend. Besides, if I wrote about his brothers I should have to begin by attacking all the lies that the poor have told about the rich and the rich have told about themselves - such wild structure they have erected that when we pick up a book about the rich, some instinct prepares us for unreality. Even the intelligent and impassioned reporters of life have made the country of the rich as unreal as fairy-land.
F.S. Fitzgerald, "The Rich Boy", The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, 139.

ARLANC 1.50

Spoil 1.63

Ozymandias
I MET a Traveler from an antique land,
Who said, "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desart. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read,
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is OZYMANDIAS, King of Kings."
Look on my works ye Mighty, and despair!
No thing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1818

In 2005 I heard that Coalition forces were camped in the ruins of Babylon. I heard that bulldozers had dug trenches through the site and cleared areas for helicopter landing pads and parking lots, that thousands of sandbags had been filled with dirt and archaeological fragments, that a 2600-year-old brick pavement had been crushed by tanks, and that the moulded bricks of dragons had been gouged out from the Ishtar Gate by soldiers collecting souvenirs. I heard that the ruins of the Sumerian cities of Umma, Umm al-Akareb, Larsa and Tello were completely destroyed and were now landscapes of craters.
Eliot Weinberger, "What I heard about Iraq in 2005", London Review of Books, 5 January 2006

From behind 1.82

[...] and he floated noiselessly through the doorway like a healing zephyr. That impressed me from the start. This fellow didn't seem to have any feet at all. He just streamed in. He had a grave, sympathetic face, as if he, too, knew what it was to sup with the lads.
[...]
'Sir?' said Jeeves, kind of manifesting himself. One of the rummy things about Jeeves is that, unless you watch like a hawk, you very seldom see him come into a room. He's like one of those weird birds in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I've got a cousing who's what they call a Theosophist, and he says he's often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn't quite bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain in anger and pie.
P.G. Wodehouse, Carry on, Jeeves, 36-37

Ofterdingen and Kropotkin

Monday, January 30, 2006

Boil 1.79

Sunday, January 29, 2006

hyssyttely

From behind 1.85

Friday, January 27, 2006

Boil 1.78

Spoil 1.66

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

ARLANC 1.54

ARLANC 1.53

Monday, January 23, 2006

File 1.48

ARLANC 1.52

From behind 1.84

Friday, January 20, 2006

blütenlese 1.0

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Spoil 1.65

Kalkwerk|Limeworks

File 1.47

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

ARLANC 1.51

File 1.46

Monday, January 16, 2006

From behind 1.83

Saturday, January 14, 2006

Spoil 1.64

Boil 1.77

Monday, January 09, 2006

File 1.39 (update)

File 1.45

Sunday, January 08, 2006

ARLANC 1.50

Saturday, January 07, 2006

Spoil 1.63

From behind 1.82

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