“so ingenious are the arrangements of the state of flux we call
our moral history are they not almost as neat as mathematical
propositions except written on water –”
(page 89)
Anne Carson. The Beauty of the Husband: a fictional essay in 29 tangos. Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2002.
Borrowed from the Grande Bibliothèque, Montreal.
“If there is a task, it might be to participate in making “the public” more brilliant, more skeptical, more disobedient, more capable of self-defense, and more dangerous again—dangerous to elites, and dangerous to stability; when it comes to education, dangerous to the idea that universities should be for the rich, rather than the public, and hostile to the creeping sense that American universities should be for the global rich rather than the local or nationally bounded polity. It is not up to the public intellectual alone to remake “the public” as a citizenry of equals, superior and dominant—that will take efforts from all sides. But it is perhaps up to the intellectual, if anyone, to face off against the pseudo-public culture of insipid media and dumbed-down “big ideas,” and call that world what it is: stupid.”
Mark Greif. “What’s Wrong with Public Intellectuals?“In The Chronicle of Higher Education. Web. February 13, 2015.
Found via social media.
“The idea of the public intellectual in the 21st century should be less about the intellectuals and how, or where, they ought to come from vocationally, than about restoring the highest estimation of the public. Public intellect is most valuable if you don’t accept the construction of the public handed to us by current media. Intellectuals: You—we—are the public. It’s us now, us when we were children, before the orgy of learning, or us when we will be retired; you can choose the exemplary moment you like. But the public must not be anyone less smart and striving than you are, right now. It’s probably best that the imagined public even resemble the person you would like to be rather than who you are.”
Mark Greif. “What’s Wrong with Public Intellectuals?“In The Chronicle of Higher Education. Web. February 13, 2015.
Found via social media.
“This situation creates new conditions for performance as well. To destabilize an already obsolete opposition between public and private today hardly creates possibilities for new experiences. Nowadays, when actors and spectators touch each other in performances, they are aware that the binary between public and private belongs to the past. What, then, does such physical contact achieve today?”
(page 65)
Erika Fischer-Lichte. The Transformative Power of Performance: A New Aesthetics. Trans.: Saskya Iris Jain. New York: Routledge, 2008.
“We often find that when interaction must proceed in the presence of outsiders, outsiders tactfully act in an uninterested, uninvolved, unperceiving fashion, so that if physical isolation is not obtained by walls or distance, effective isolation can at least be obtained by convention. Thus when two sets of persons find themselves in neighboring booths in a restaurant, it is expected that neither group will avail itself of the opportunities that actually exist for overhearing the other.
Etiquette regarding tactful inattention, and the effective privacy it provides, varies, of course, from one society and subculture to another. In middle-class Anglo-American society, when in a public place, one is supposed to keep one’s nose out of other people’s activity and go about one’s own business. It is only when a woman drops a package, or when a fellow motorist gets stalled in the middle of the road, or when a baby left alone in a carriage begins to scream, that middle-class people feel it is all right to break down momentarily the walls which effectively insulate them.”
(page 230)
Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Anchor Books, 1959.
Seen referenced in multiple texts on performance theory, and purchased used from Powell’s Books in Portland, OR.
“We still use the word public of course, but we have seen a great blurring of the boundaries between public and private, the continuing erosion of privacy but also a loss of the expectation that dress, behavior, and communication ought to be different when we are in a public place, and that there are rules and obligations that go along with being a part of a public. And we have experienced a loss of our longstanding sense of individualism, replaced by an emphasis on personalization; a loss of citizenship based on equality, replaced by group identity based on grievance and all manner of neo-tribalism; a loss of traditional notions of character and personal integrity, replaced by various forms of identity construction via online profiles, avatars, and the like; the loss of separate public and private selves, replaced by affiliations with different lifestyles and media preferences.”
Found in “Death and the Public Realm” by Lance Strate on the Hannah Arendt Centre website.
“While walking, the body and the mind can work together, so that thinking becomes almost a physical, rhythmic act — so much for the Cartesian mind/body divide. Spirituality and sexuality both enter in; the great walkers often move through both urban and rural places in the same way; and even past and present are brought together when you walk as the ancients did or relive some event in history or your own life by retracing its route. And each walk moves through space like a thread through fabric, sewing it together into a continuous experience — so unlike the way air travel chops up time and space and even cars and trains do.”
(page xv)
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust.
Recommended to me by my sister; I finally bought a copy at St. George’s Bookstore in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. We wandered in, three Canadians on a Friday evening, and ended up entertaining the owner with our absurdities until closing.
“It had come to me not in a sudden epiphany but with a gradual sureness, a sense of meaning like a sense of place. When you give yourself to places, they give you yourself back; the more one comes to know them, the more one seeds them with the invisible crop of memories and associations that will be waiting for you when you come back, while new places offer up new thoughts, new possibilities. Exploring the world is one of the best ways of exploring the mind, and walking travels both terrains.”
(page 13)
Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust.
Recommended to me by my sister; I finally bought a copy at St. George’s Bookstore in Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin. We wandered in, three Canadians on a Friday evening, and ended up entertaining the owner with our absurdities until closing.
“There is something else that happens during the live performance of an opera. At least, it happens to me. I become slightly unsure of my own full existence. I am all eyes and ears. There are certain moments when I can feel a beautiful loss of sharp and clear personal identity. I could almost be anyone else. This, seemingly, is what happens to other people when they take drugs.
That uncertainty, the giving of yourself over to the music on the stage and the drama and lights, has a complex emotional texture. Sometimes it goes outwards and the way of listening is sharp; it is easy to feel that life itself, during a soaring aria or a moment when a melody lifts, is at its most perfect and pure. Or just that the music is perfect and pure. To hell with life!
The other part is when I lose concentration. Then the power of the music or the singing moves inwards, and I start to let my mind wander. A few times over the years, some way of handling a new novel, or a way of ending a short story, can come here in the dark more precisely and exactly than before, prompted by the music. And then I sit up and feel guilty and go back to listening as carefully as I can.”
Colm Tóibín, Six novelists on their favourite second artform, article in The Guardian Online, Saturday April 27, 2013.
“Fiction begins to roll when an idea, a memory, or something imagined or heard or seen, moves into rhythm. Although this happens silently – words on a page are silent – it comes nonetheless with sound. It is the rhythm of prose that hits the reader’s nervous system, and all the more powerfully for being buried in silence, or disguised as silence. Also, although reading is usually done alone, there is something strangely communal about it. It would not do somehow to be the only person in the world who would ever read Madame Bovary or Dubliners or The Portrait of a Lady.
Even though one reader might never meet the others, the fact that those readers are there, and might be there too in the future, seems to matter to the process of reading. I would not like to be alone in reading a book I admire. I do not know why this is the case.”
Colm Tóibín, Six novelists on their favourite second artform, article in The Guardian Online, Saturday April 27, 2013.
Libraries Within Libraries 