Dibujo sobre la historia de Julio Cortázar, La noche boca arriba, 1956
Y salían en ciertas épocas a cazar enemigos; le llamaban la guerra florida.
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chronicling a labyrinth of architectural + personal contemplation based in atlanta
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"To great writers, finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives"
— Walter Benjamin, c. 1940
Definitions of the Month (August 2011)
August 2011 saw the Beginning of My Collaboration with gray_matter(s)
- Entelechy: The realization of potential; The supposed vital principle that guides the development and functioning of an organism or other system or organization.
- Aleatory: Relating to or denoting music or other forms of art involving elements of random choice (sometimes using statistical or computer techniques) during their composition, production, or performance
- Anechoic: Free from echo; A coating or material that tends to deaden sound
- Exonym: Name of a geographical feature in an official or well-established language occurring in that area where the feature is located
- Endonym: Name used in a specific language for a geographical feature situated outside the area where that language is spoken, and differing in its form from the name used in an official or well-established language of that area where the geographical feature is located
- Fallibilism: The principle that propositions concerning empirical knowledge can be accepted even though they cannot be proved with certainty
- Shibboleth: A custom, principle, or belief distinguishing a particular class or group of people, especially a long-standing one regarded as outmoded or no longer important
- Peristaltic: the process of wavelike muscle contractions of the alimentary tract that moves food along in hollow tubes of the body, especially the alimentary canal
- Vertiginous: Causing vertigo, especially by being extremely high or steep
- Eschatology: The part of theology concerned with death, judgment, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind
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Reblogged from fuckyeahhistorycrushes
James Joyce, c. 1915 (via historycrushes)
Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk / Arcades Project, 1927-40
“The Passagenwerk or Arcades Project was an unfinished lifelong project of philosopher Walter Benjamin, an enormous collection of writings on the city life of Paris in the 19th century, especially concerned with the iron-and-glass covered “arcades” (Passages couverts de Paris). Benjamin’s Project, which many scholars believe might have become one of the great texts of 20th-century cultural criticism, was never completed due to his death under uncertain circumstances on the French-Spanish border in 1940. Written between 1927 and 1940, the Arcades Project has been posthumously edited and published in many languages as a collection of unfinished reflections. These arcades began to be constructed around the beginning of the nineteenth century and were sometimes destroyed as a result of Baron Haussmann’s renovation of Paris during the Second French Empire. Benjamin linked them to the city’s distinctive street life and saw them as providing one of the habitats of the Flâneur (i.e., strolling in a locale to experience it).”
Dino Buzzati, Fantasy and Journalism, c. 1945 (via writersnoonereads; skibinskipedia)
No one reads Dino Buzzati, who believed that “Fantasy should be as close as possible to journalism.”
Unknown Mason, Canal Bridge Keystone, Venice, Italy, c. 1700s
A story is told by Louis Kahn of a mason, his name subsequently lost from the pages of history, who, when sculpting the keystone that would finish a bridge in Venice, decided to render the face of a man in anguish, paying homage to the structural work in which he was engaged. Kahn adored this work, both for its poetic honesty hidden in ornament and for the essential condition of a material continually experiencing structural tension and compression.
"I grieve that so many works of such brilliant writers had been destroyed by the hostility of the time and of man, and that almost the sole survivor from this vast shipwreck is Vitruvius, an author of unquestioned experience, though one whose writings have been so corrupted by time that there are many omissions and shortcomings. What he handed down was in any case not refined, and his speech such that Latins might think that he wanted to appear Greek, while the Greeks would think he babbled Latin. However, his very text is evidence he wrote neither Latin nor Greek, so that as far as we are concerned, he might just as well not have written at all, rather than write something which we cannot understand."
"The sudden change of ambiance in a street within the space of a few meters; the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres; the path of least resistance that is automatically followed in aimless strolls (and which has no relation to the physical contour of the terrain); the appealing or repelling character of certain places — these phenomena all seem to be neglected. In any case they are never envisaged as depending on causes that can be uncovered by careful analysis and turned to account."
— French Situationist Guy Debord, On Dérive, Introduction to a Critique of Urban Geography, 1955
I tried the “I Write Like” analyzer just to see what I would get. I entered one of my first posts here on Tumblr, about “La Ciudad de la Cultura de Galicia,” because it contained the most text I had actually written on this blog myself. Apparently, my style is closest to James Joyce out of however many writers they have cataloged. Nice.
After getting this result, I wanted to know more about the site that gave me such a compliment. Their Tumblr containing quotes by a plethora of various writers can be found here, and the founder’s description of the algorithm that governs the linkage is here. I would be interested to see next the list of all the writers they have for comparison.
