Monday, April 30, 2007

For Sashi 0.3 (beta)

the logistics of experience
did form a duotych:
this life (which i named "biosphere")
and the beyond (called "nichts").

Comparativist, The. Collected Notes, Vol XI, p. 365.

Friday, April 27, 2007

nichts 0.6

If the conjectures of Sir William Jones, relative to the inscriptions found at Mongheer, and on the pillar at Buddal, be well founded, then the governing power on the banks of the Ganges, as late as about the time of the birth of Christ, was of the sect of Bhoodha. The Brahmens indeed had then introduced themselves into Hindustan, and had obtained lands, and even the rank of prime minister to the great Rajah: but they had not persuaded him to change his religion; a change which when accomplished, proved equally destructive to the prince, and to the people. However idle and ridiculous the legends and notions of the worshippers of Bhoodha may be, they have been in great measure adopted by the Brahmens, but with all their defects monstrously aggravated: rajahs and heroes are converted into gods, and impossibilities are heaped on improbabilities. No useful science have the Brahmens diffused among their followers; history they have totally abolished; morality they have depressed to the utmost; and the dignity and power of the altar they have erected on the ruins of the state, and the rights of the subject. Even the laws attributed to Menu, which, under the form in use among the Burmas, are not ill suited for the purpose of an absolute monarchy, under the hands of Brahmens have become the most abominable and degrading system of oppression, ever invented by the craft of designing men.

Buchanan, Francis. „On the Religion and Literature of the Burmas“, Asiatick Researches 6 (1799), 163-308, p. 166f.

Sunday, April 22, 2007

From behind 2.25

Hanging in the back of the shop, as they have hung for two generations, are bright framed prints of contrasting Victorian beauties, one of a golden-haired, delicate young lady with luminous blue eyes, her soft white shoulders draped in a Pre-Raphaelite something, the other a roguishly pretty gipsy maiden whose incredibly thick black hair falls in great round curls.
J. Mitford, Hons and Rebels

From behind 2.24

The Cotswold Country, old and quaint, ridden with ghosts and legends, is today very much on the tourist route. After "doing" Oxford, it seems a shame not to travel on another twenty miles or so to see some of the historic village with the picturesque names— Stow-on-the-Wold, Chipping Norton, Minster Lovell, Burford [...]
For some reason Swinbrook, only three miles away, seems to have escaped the tourist trade, and has remained as I remember it more than thirty years ago. In the tiny village post office the same four kinds of sweets—toffee, acid drops, Edinburgh Rock and butterscotch— are still displayed in the same four large cut-glass jars in the window.

Jessica Mitford, Hons and Rebels. (Gollancz, 1960), p.9.

Saturday, April 21, 2007

From behind 2.23

Crowds of beggar children were going from house to house or climbing up on to the railings of the front steps, trying to catch a glimpse through the window of a splendor that was denied to them. Sometimes too a door would suddenly be flung open, and scolding voices would drive a whole swarm of these little visitors away out into the dark street.

Th. Storm, Immensee. Transl. C.W. Bell.

Frederick Farrar hatte mir erzählt, daß am Abend des Wohltätigkeitsballs die gewöhnliche Bevölkerung, die zu einer solchen Veranstaltung naturgemäß keinen Zugang hatte, in hundert und mehr Booten und Kähnen an die Spitze des Piers hinausruderte, um dort draußen von ihren sachte schwankenden und manchmal etwas abdriftenden Warten aus zuzusehen, wie sich die bessere Gesellschaft zu den Klängen des Orchesters im Kreise drehte und in einer Lichterwoge gleichsam schwebte über dem nachtdunklen, zu dieser frühherbstlichen Zeit meist schon von Nebelschwaden überzogenen Wasser.

WG Sebald, Die Ringe des Saturn

Boil 2.13

'Odd, this neurotic tendency in the American businessman. Can you account for it? No? I can. Too much coffee.'
   'Coffee?'
'That and the New Deal. Over in America, it appears, life for the businessman is one long series of large cups of coffee, punctuated with shocks from the New Deal. He drinks a quart of coffee, and gets a nasty surprise from the New Deal. To pull himself together, he drinks another quart of coffee, and along comes another nasty surprise from the New Deal. He staggers off, calling feebly for more coffee, and...Well, you see what I mean. Vicious circle. No nervous system could stand it.'
PG Wodehouse, Joy in the Morning, p.195

Monday, April 16, 2007

Windows were watching us



Saturday, April 14, 2007

hyssyttely

Avril 14
April come she will

hyssyttely

Man-Nature Interface

Saturday, April 07, 2007

nichts 0.5

I gave birth to myself,
I came into my own womb.
Refrain: Enough now of vows, my yearnings have passed away
It is good that I fell prey
and I died that day
Looking both ways,
Tuka is as he is.

My death has died
and made me deathless.
Refrain: The place is erased, the bottom is erased. The body's emotions have been stripped.
The flood has come and gone,
I have held firmly to life.
Tuka says, the accumulated store is finished;
truth has come through.

Poems #1337 & # 2348 by Tukaram, in: Omvedt, Buddhism in India, New Delhi 2003, p. 208.

Spoil 1.90

Das Leben der Anderen | The Lives of Others

da da da - ich überwach dich nicht, du überwachst mich nicht, aha.

[File under: sentimentale fliegenklatsche]

The Lives of Others

The jacket copy for this biography proclaims Wharton ‘a fiercely modern author’, yet the very thoroughness with which Lee attends to cultural context keeps vividly before us how much of her time and place she managed to resist. Old New York may have given way to Paris in the 1920s, but chronological and geographical proximity no more connect Wharton to Picasso and Gertrude Stein than to Cole Porter, George Gershwin or Josephine Baker. ‘I do not write “jazz-books”,’ Wharton announced defensively in 1923; and all that jazz, as Lee makes clear, took in a lot of territory. ‘If Wharton had gone to visit the Eluards, just down the road,’ she observes,
she might have encountered Tristan Tzara, Louis Aragon, Man Ray, Duchamp, André Breton, or Max Ernst, with whom Gala [Eluard’s wife] was having a passionate affair. But Wharton confined her social life to her old friends from America, Paris and England, rather than making a life in the town. She was the lady of the manor, keeping her eye on the convalescent homes at Groslay, giving a donation to the curé of St-Brice and paying out sums to local schools and charities.
R.B. Yeazell, "Self-Made Man", London Review of Books, April 5 2007.

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

From behind 2.22

The house where, a week after her surgeon had shaken his head bitterly and sewn her abdomen back up, she'd grilled her most trusted daughter-in-law on the idea of an afterlife, and my sister-in-law had confessed that, in point of sheer logistics, the idea seemed to her pretty far-fetched, and my mother, agreeing with her, had then, as it were, put a check beside the item "Decide about afterlife" and continued down her to-do list in her usual pragmatic way, addressing other tasks that her decision had rendered more urgent than ever, such as "Invite best friends over one by one and say goodbye to them forever."

J. Franzen, The Discomfort Zone, p.4