Scribbles
9 May 2012
W.G. Sebald uses Wittgenstein's language=city metaphor to describe the personal disintegration of Austerlitz as he loses touch with language:If language may be regarded as an old city (...) then I was like a man who has been abroad a long time and cannot find his way through this urban sprawl any more, no longer knows what a bus stop is for, or what a back yard is, or a street junction, an avenue or a bridge. The entire structure of language, the syntactical arrangement of parts of speech, punctuation, conjunctions, and finally even the nouns denoting ordinary objects were all enveloped in impenetrable fog. (W.G. Sebald, Austerlitz)
To escape the insomnia which increasingly torments him, Austerlitz begins his nocturnal wanderings through London, often traversing the entire city in a single night
3 May 2012
In the Philosophical Investigations Wittgenstein compares a language to an ancient city, a maze of little streets and squares, of old and new houses, and of houses with additions from various periods; and this surrounded by a multitude of new boroughs with straight and regular streets and uniform houses. Jacques Roubaud reverses the metaphor. 'For myself I found this book-city, London, a books-city, and therefore language-city.' From the upper deck of a bus he sees pages and pages of almost identical lines of houses. He gets off the bus at the end of the line. Then, as night approaches, he gets back on the bus, rereads the same landscape on his way out, palindromically.London is not just this unreal place, this displaced city, this limbo of someone's prose; or if unreal, then it is not only that. It's also a city I often go to, where I need to be every now and again. (Jacques Roubaud, The Great Fire of London)
27 April 2012
I like descriptions of walking through a city. I don't mean detailed descriptions; the ones I like best are close to a bare list of street names. Street names and a few adjectives can often be enough to convey the quality that a city takes on for those who, like me, spend a lot of time walking along the streets with an aim that is, so to say, purely formal: a way to fool yourself into a sense of purposefulness. This (the walking) sometimes works, sometimes not.I decided to take a stroll around the streets of Milan for an hour before travelling on, although of course I might have known that any idea of the kind, in a city so filled with the most appalling traffic, will end in aimless wandering and bouts of distress. On that day, the 4th of August, 1987, I walked down the Via Moscova, past San Angelo, through the Gardini Pubblici, along the Via Palestro, the Via Marini, the Via Senato, the Via della Spiga, the Via Gesù, into the Via Monte Napoleone and the Via Allessandro Manzoni, by way of which I finally reached the Piazza della Scala, from where I crossed the cathedral square. Inside the cathedral I sat down for a while, untied my shoe-laces, and, as I still remember with undiminished clarity, all of a sudden no longer had any knowledge of where I was. (W.G. Sebald, Vertigo)
23 April 2012
'The things are already there but the connections you still have to make yourself':You're so far away today
that I first see your mouth move
and hear your words only three minutes later.
17 April 2012In nightmares, or some of them, the whole anxiety comes from the unreachableness of something that is, under the laws of daylight, reachable. It doesn't even have to be something very desirable. It could be a piece of clothing or a paper cup; just it being reachable and not reachable at the same time is enough.
8 August 2011'Every learned book, every learned article, adds to the weight of things for others to read, and thereby reduces the chance of their reading other books or articles. Its publication is therefore not automatically justified by its having some merit: the merit must be great enough to outweigh the disservice done by it being published at all.' (Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics)
7 August 2011In order to understand the concept of addition you need to know how to add, but in order to understand the concept of riding a horse you don't need to know how to ride a horse.
6 August 2011Foundationalism: 'So you think that the orange is the fundamental fruit? The paternitas frutatas? The fruit that lies at the basis of all other fruits? The fruit on which all other fruits depend for their fruitiness but that itself depends on nothing for its fruitiness?'
5 August 2011Indulgance: 'May I have, supplementary to my purchase, not just one but two bookmarks?'
27 July 2011 I thought about things today, and I came to the conclusion that we're fucked.
15 March 2011 I am writing this from Caffe Greco on Columbus Avenue, San Francisco. It is raining. When it is not raining here, it is so foggy that it might as well be raining. A man in a top hat and sunglasses just walked by, wearing a jacket which looked like it was cut out of a Persian rug. A sparrow is hopping on the marble floor. I just bought Empire of the Sun by J.G. Ballard from the City Lights Bookstore. The first line of the second paragraph is terrific: 'Jim had begun to dream of wars'. I finished my cappuccino. It was good. This morning I spent two hours getting the fonts for this website right. It is done. It is drizzling now. Yesterday I saw the ocean. There were big waves. I don't know whether the waves were big because they were shocked by the earthquake in Japan, or just because they felt that they had to be big since they were in the Pacific Ocean. It was foggy when I came, then it started drizzling, then rain, then drizzle again. I got stuck in a restaurant on the beach. The waitress kept pouring more coffee, and it took me two refills before I could bring myself to refuse. The other day I walked from Valencia Street to Mission Street and back again, because I felt too embarrassed to reject the instructions I had been given by a man loitering at the bus stop. Life is easy, but complicated. On the other side of the ocean lies Japan. People are dying there. People die everywhere. They have a tendency of doing that. It stopped drizzling...
28 February 2011 In the past few weeks I have, among other things, redesigned this website. To the untutored eye there might seem to be little difference, but you, I am sure, will see that I made some significant changes. I did this mainly because I wanted to add pictures, at least to some of the story-essays (which I will, from now on, call `moments'). So I justified the text and let the menus hang out to the right. I'm very happy now about the look of Encounters at the End of the World. On the whole though I would still like to change the fonts that I'm using. Some day I will have stared at fonts long enough to know which one belongs to these moments, which I will then buy a license for and embed using the @font-face technique that has recently become available; until that time, plain old Garamond or, if your computer doesn't support that, even plainer though less old Times New Roman will have to do.
9 October 2010 Today I put the old stories back online (the magazines didn't respond yet, but I don't like to have the stories offline) and I also added a new one, 'Encounters at the End of the World'. More will follow, but I don't know when or at what frequency. It shocked me to see that seven months passed without a single story. I am inclined to defend myself: I was studying logic, I faithfully attended almost all the classes like a good boy, I wrote three papers, two of which sapped my blood like a bat with rabies, I wrote reviews for de Volkskrant, I flew across the Atlantic by sheer willpower, I got lost in the New York underground, I flew back across the Atlantic, carried, this time, by a flying marmoset, etc.. But what's the point (of defending myself I mean)? I don't want to make up all kinds of things to hide the simple, unshameful truth: I got tired of my worldly ways and entered a Buddhist convent. I am writing this from the roof of the Himalaya. The wifi connection is amazing here, probably because the air is so clear. Can I recommend to you, in passing, Tim Park's Teach Us to Sit Still?
4 July 2010 The website underwent a slight amputation of sorts due to my decision to send in some of the stories for publication to actual, physical, tangible, paper-based magazines. You see, I sent them away, so they're not here anymore. They'll fly back to me someday though, in low spirits but smug as ever, I'm sure, and I promise, for what it's worth, that when they do I'll put them up here again.
18 February 2010 And when I say 'more or less regularly', of course I mean 'regularly' in the way that penguins regularly fly, or the way dinosaurs have regularly roared ever since that comet came to visit, or the way ants regularly think, 'What if I just did what's good for me for a change, you know, start an ice cream parlour, go back-packing in Thailand, there's so much I haven't seen,' etc...
3 December 2009 Although I have been able, so far, to upload a story to my website every day, it is too much for me now, and probably will be too much for me in the coming years. So it won't be 'daily' anymore, but I'll still try to upload a story more or less regularly.