Literature Category Archives
no parking
15 September 2014 | Geography, Literature | No Comments
а вот хорошая цитата про те времена, когда я еще любил читать:
Cities have often been compared to language: you can read a city, it’s said, as you read a book. But the metaphor can be inverted. The journeys we make during the reading of a book trace out, in some way, the private spaces we inhabit. There are texts that will always be our dead-end streets; fragments that will be bridges; words that will be like the scaffolding that protects fragile constructions.T. S. Eliot: a plant growing in the debris of a ruined building; Salvador Novo: a tree-lined street transformed into an expressway; Tomás Segovia: a boulevard, a breath of air; Roberto Bolaño: a rooftop terrace; Isabel Allende: a (magically real) shopping mall; Gilles Deleuze: a summit; and Jacques Derrida: a pothole. Robert Walser: a chink in the wall, for looking through to the other side; Charles Baudelaire: a waiting room; Hannah Arendt: a tower, an Archimedean point; Martin Heidegger: a cul-de-sac; Walter Benjamin: a one-way street walked down against the flow.
And everything we haven’t read: relingos, absences in the heart of the city.
в поисках утраченного
14 September 2014 | Culturology, Literature, Sport | 1 Comment
Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them. People who couldn’t live without story had been driven into the concents or into jobs like Yul’s. All others had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why Seculars were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part?
welcome to Quinta
11 September 2014 | Lifeform, Literature, Politics | 6 Comments
а уж с врагами-то проблем не будет:
At the NATO summit in Wales last week, General Philip Breedlove, the military alliance’s top commander, made a bold declaration. Russia, he said, is waging “the most amazing information warfare blitzkrieg we have ever seen in the history of information warfare.”
It was something of an underestimation. The new Russia doesn’t just deal in the petty disinformation, forgeries, lies, leaks, and cyber-sabotage usually associated with information warfare. It reinvents reality, creating mass hallucinations that then translate into political action. Take Novorossiya, the name Vladimir Putin has given to the huge wedge of southeastern Ukraine he might, or might not, consider annexing. The term is plucked from tsarist history, when it represented a different geographical space. Nobody who lives in that part of the world today ever thought of themselves as living in Novorossiya and bearing allegiance to it—at least until several months ago. Now, Novorossiya is being imagined into being: Russian media are showing maps of its ‘geography,’ while Kremlin-backed politicians are writing its ‘history’ into school textbooks. There’s a flag and even a news agency (in English and Russian). There are several Twitter feeds. It’s like something out of a Borges story—except for the very real casualties of the war conducted in its name.
статья вообще предельно меткая, и оттого жуткая до дрожи, если честно. потому что не в том даже дело, что война, или занавес, или охота на ведьм. или отдельный карлик-убийца, или все головы этого Легиона.
а в том, что реальности больше не существует:
Ultimately, many people in Russia and around the world understand that Russian political parties are hollow and Russian news outlets are churning out fantasies. But insisting on the lie, the Kremlin intimidates others by showing that it is in control of defining ‘reality.’ This is why it’s so important for Moscow to do away with truth. If nothing is true, then anything is possible.
и за тем углом, который считают самым страшным, тоже ничего нет
11 September 2014 | Culturology, Literature, Politics, Television | 4 Comments
зато в терапевтических целях смотрим “Жизнь Клима Самгина”. чтобы все-таки не видеть в каждой и каждом оголтелого убийцу, а лишь растерянность, бессилие, страх.
но в последнее время любой доктор Чехов гибнет под тяжестью “Бесов”. что и гадать, когда сам Горький писал:
Уместно прибавить вывод одного иностранца, внимательно наблюдавшего русский народ. «У этого народа нет исторической памяти. Он не знает свое прошлое и даже как будто не хочет знать его».
<...>
Я думаю, что русскому народу исключительно — так же исключительно, как англичанину чувство юмора — свойственно чувство особенной жестокости, хладнокровной и как бы испытывающей пределы человеческого терпения к боли, как бы изучающей цепкость, стойкость жизни.
очевидно, поэтому им и нужен внутри царь, а снаружи враг.
My First Kafka
22 August 2014 | Art, Literature | No Comments
оказывается, автор Матьё Рот и художник Рохан Даниэль Исон выпустили чудесный пересказ историй Франца Кафки для самых маленьких — с обязательными картинками:
The adaptation is so smooth, and the stories so naturally eerie and imaginative, that if it rhymed one would assume Seuss wrote it. “During the day / Gregor crawled back and forth / along the walls / and the ceiling,” Roth writes. The three tales are accompanied by the illustrations of Rohan Daniel Eason, whose predominantly black-and-white drawings are comprised of dizzying, wispy-lined details beside thick walls of black. He decorates the Nobodies in “Excursion” with menacing black curlicues and makes the pitiable Gregor Samsa ornate and enormous. The over-all effect is a cross between Edward Gorey and a dichromatic “Yellow Submarine.”
добро пожаловать в жизнь.
hacker’s choice
12 August 2014 | Hardware, History, Literature | No Comments
One of the defining images of the cyberpunk movement of the 1980s and 90s was William Gibson’s cyberspace decks. Although never explicitly described, they seemed to be something like a self-contained keyboard with electrode leads hanging off and a sometimes unmarked keyboard that hackers used to jack into the Matrix. I remember running around in my parents’ basement with my unplugged Atari 800XL (which was about the size and shape of a thick Ono-Senday) pretending to be a cyberhacker making a run on the House Of Blue Lights. I obviously didn’t have a lot of friends.
из статьи про клавиатуры, no surprises.
бытие определяет сознание
9 August 2014 | Art, Design, Literature | No Comments
можно, кстати, начать собирать обложки Nineteen Eighty-Four: мне кажется, их дизайн, его изменения — это очень показательный срез известных настроений в обществе.
how soon will they shoot me?
5 August 2014 | Literature, Politics | 2 Comments
то есть, можно, конечно, вспоминать один закон или другой проект, но какой смысл? все уже сказано:
The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness: only power, pure power. <...> We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
и все повторяется.
and gives us wings
31 July 2014 | Culturology, Literature | 1 Comment
из интервью Александра Володина незадолго до смерти:
Ты помнишь “Снежную королеву”? Помнишь, девочка Герда нашла своего мальчика, растопила его сердце, и они, счастливые, уехали в свой Солнечный Узбекистан. Мне всегда было жалко Снежную Королеву. Мою одинокую в белом, о которой все мечтают, но никто никогда ее не полюбит.
просто цитата
27 July 2014 | Literature, Metaphysics | No Comments
So what was Pynchon thinking? To begin with, he was apparently thinking what he usually thinks, which is that modern history is a war between utopianism and totalitarianism, counterculture and hegemony, anarchism and corporatism, nature and techne, Eros and the death drive, slaves and masters, entropy and order, and that the only reasonably good place to be in such a world, given that you cannot be outside of it, is between the extremes.