paris arcades

In 1929, Benjamin once again believed that he could pinpoint when, where, and how this breakthrough into the unreal and universally falsifying spirit of his age occurred. In Paris, in fact, the capital of the nineteenth century. Not in the form of an individual or a book, but in a new form of construction, built from iron and steel: the Paris arcades, the cabinets of curiosity, bathed in a perpetual artificial twilight, of coming consumer capitalism. In their window displays the whole disparate world of commodities, forms, and symbols was placed side by side for the onlooker’s gaze, and in the end offered for purchase. Neither entirely an internal space nor part of the streetscape, the arcades were deliberately arranged as liminal places that leveled out every fundamental difference. Half cave, half house, half passageway and half room.

In the finite individuals who strolled aimlessly through them, with their always brimming, constantly redecorated vitrines, these arcades created the appearance of infinite availability, which would extend to the rest of the world—and anesthetize it.

—Wolfram Eilenberger, Time of the Magicians: Wittgenstein, Benjamin, Cassirer, Heidegger, and the Decade that Reinvented Philosophy (Penguin Books, 2020), trans. by Shaun Whiteside. [343-344]

gifted lines

Cento:
I couldn’t think of anything on my own,
so I offer you these lines by others.

density and sparkle

Without discussing the merits or demerits of Fires, I would like to say that the almost excessive expressionism of these poems still seems to me to be of a form of natural and needed confession, a legitimate effort to portray the full complexity and passion of an emotion. This tendency, persisting and reemerging at all times in literature, in spite of wise puristic or classical restrictions, stubbornly, maybe nightmarishly, tries to create an entirely poetic language, one in which each word, loaded with maximum meaning, would reveal its hidden significance in the way phosphorescences of stones are revealed under certain lights. The poet always wants to put feelings or ideas in concrete forms, in forms that may become in themselves precious (the very term is revealing), like those gems that owe their density and sparkle to the almost unbearable pressures and temperature they’ve been through.

—Marguerite Yourcenar, Fires (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1981)

vintage hardy

Vintage Hardy is a poet who, according to his own admission, “abhorred the smooth line.” That would sound perverse were it not for six centuries of verse writing predating his, and were it not for somebody like Tennyson breathing down his neck. Come to think of it, his attitude wasn’t very dissimilar from that of Hopkins…At any rate, Thomas Hardy is indeed by and large the poet of a very crammed, overstressed line, filled with clashing consonants, yawning vowels; of extremely crabby syntax and awkward, cumbersome phrasing aggravated by his seemingly indiscriminate vocabulary; of ear/mind-boggling stanzaic designs, unprecedented in their never-repeating patterns.

—Joseph Brodsky, introduction to The Essential Hardy (Ecco Press, 1995)

hand built

Quote found today at the Ken Matsuzaki exhibit at Pucker Gallery on Newbury Street in Boston:

I spent twenty years throwing on the wheel, but eventually I left it to hand-build, one-by-one, the forms I had in my heart. I began to think that it was important to first know what I wanted to make and only then worry about developing the techniques by which to achieve it.

—Ken Matsuzaki, Burning Tradition: Ceramics by Ken Matsuzaki, exhibit catalogue Pucker Gallery in Boston, June 2008, translated by Andrew L. Maske