Through the book you can witness the thought process of the book owner. You may guess the different moments in which layers of information were added. The reader’s experience of the book got recorded. You can see the unfolding of an intellectual and emotional process. Proof of the dialogue between a writer and a reader in which both are simultaneously and paradoxically, present and absent.
The book is called Aion. Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self by Carl. C. Jung. 1959. Translated by R.F.C. Hull and published for Bollingen Foundation Inc. by Pantheon Books inc. New York, New York.
Nowhere in this book - studied in detail, and intensely lived - can the name of the reader/owner, be found. I can only speculate why.
I am attracted to traveling into a mare incognita - an unknown sea of thoughts and meanings, codes, and patterns defying causality. I am inviting you to travel that sea and share your underlines and fragments of text from books meaningful in your life.
At the moment I am adding the entries in the order I received them - it is like a scroll. Many thanks to those who are contributing.
At the moment I am adding the entries in the order I received them - it is like a scroll. Many thanks to those who are contributing.
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Somebody gave me a copy of Ray Bradbury’s “The golden apples of the sun", almost 40 years ago.
There was an anonymous handwriting in the foreword that read:
"Acaso no depende todo de nuestra manera de interpretar el silencio que nos rodea?"
Jorge Manghi
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"We live not alone but chained to a creature of a different kingdom: our body." Proust
"When someone loves you, the way they say your name is different. You know that your name is safe in their mouth" Billy, age 4’
"Courage is the form of every virtue" c.s. lewis
"Once the realization is accepted that even between the closest human beings. Infinite distances continue to exist, a wonderful living side by side can grow up, if they succeed in loving the distance between them which makes it possible for each to see the other whole against the sky"
Rilke
and Margo
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Quoting G.I. Gurdjieff:
"When self-deceit is destroyed and a man begins to see the difference between the mechanical and the conscious in himself, there begins a struggle for the realization of consciousness in life and for the subordination of the mechanical to the conscious. For this purpose a man begins with endeavors to set a definite decision, coming from conscious motives, against mechanical processes proceeding according to the laws of duality. The creation of a permanent third principle is for man the transformation of the duality into the trinity."
- text is from In Search of the MIraculous, by P. D. Ouspensky
PB.
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"The people who wrote the constitution lived in a world more dangerous than ours. They were surrounded by territory controlled by hostile powers, on the edge of a vast wilderness. Yet they understood that even in perilous times, the strength of self-government was public debate and public consensus. They knew too that men are fallible, themselves included, and prone to abuse great office. They left us safeguards against men whose appetites for power might exceed their moral wisdom.
To forget this - to ignore the safeguards, to put aside our basic values out of fear, to imitate the foe in order to defeat him - is to shred the distinction that makes us different. For, in the end, not only our values but our methods separate us from the enemies of freedom. The decisions we make are inherent in the methods that produce them. An open society cannot survive a secret government. Constitutional democracy is no romantic notion. It’s our defese against ourselves, the one foe who might defeat us." Bill Moyers, THE SECRET GOVERNMENT: The Constitution in Crisis, Seven Locks Press, 1988, p. 101.
xxx Sheila Pinkel
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From Aion
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Here's my underlined text. It's from Nightwood, by Djuna Barnes. The underlining I did in college around 1988. Had to dig it up but worth the hunt! This book was terribly meaningful for me at the time. Thanks for the opportunity to remember, and good luck with the project.
Best,
Sabrina Craig
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This photo is from Echolalias by Daniel Heller-Roazen.
He is quoting Marina Tsvetaeva so the thought that to compose is already a translation is hers.
Dianna Frid
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S, From WJT Mitchell, Iconology, U Chicago, 1986. First read this in 1990, then again in 1992, several times since then, most recently this Spring. The ballpoint pen was the earliest, red was most recent, but there are parts of this book with three inks from other readings. I knew immediately what to send.
Hannah Higgins
Martin Heidegger, 1927. Trans 1962/2001, Blackwell. On Hearkening vs. listening, and understanding.
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Hello Silvia,
I hope all is well with you & thank you for including me in this call. Attached please find my contribution. It's something I just read the other day but find it expresses a lot of what I've been realizing about teaching (and art-making) over the past few years.
It's from the essay "Talking Nonsense and Knowing when to Stop" by Adam Phillips, collected in a volume of his essays titled Side Effects. If you want that directly included on the pdf (along with my name as contributor) let me know and I'll scrawl it on and resend.
Again, thanks for including me and I look forward to seeing the completed project!
Best,
Steve Harp
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Silvia,
This sounds great. I will be out of town on the 3rd but below is a quote I would like to contribute.
"For the faithful, the patient, the hermetically pure, all the important things in this world--not life and death perhaps, which are merely words, but the important things--work out rather beautifully."
from Seymour--An Introduction by J.D. Salinger
Matt Shaw
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I'll type out an excerpt that is taken from that one book I mentioned to you in class last semester. The title is When Women Were Birds, and the author is Terry Tempest Williams. I don't mind my name being evident in the project so go ahead and include it :-)
"Milk and blood live together."
With gratitude,
Elizabeth Haptonstahl
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1. the book title & author
2. The handwritten quote & page
attribution.
The book belonged to my maternal
grandmother, Maybelle Carlson, and she wrote her notes in 1974, the year
my grandfather died.
Melissa Pinney
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Hola Silvia!!
Perdona el retraso en contestar, estaba fuera con un proyecto y no he podido seguir el ritmo de email. Me encanta el proyecto!
Como voy fuera del plazo que dijiste no he podido mirar muy a fondo, pero aquí te envío un par de subrayados que recuerdo que me parecieron interesantes (uno de ellos es de un libro que leí en una clase tuya!).
- Franz Kafka - A Dream. La nota mía lee: "Metáfora pasos y paths de la vida"
- Alan Lightman - Einstein's Dreams. La nota mía lee: "Formas de vivir con y entender el tiempo"
Espero que llegue a tiempo! y Dile hola a Edra de mi parte :) (y de Casilda, mi mujer)
Suerte con el proyecto y Un abrazo!
Julio
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Hi Silvia,
I'm attaching a pdf for you. It's a page from the book "Formations of Violence" by Allen Feldman (Uni of Chicago Press, 1991). The marked paragraph at the top, and the underlined sentence in particular, held a strong resonance for me when I read the book as a student at SAIC in 1996. At the time my work was dealing with state violence and the incarceration of political prisoners. This paragraph visually conjured up the idea of an enforced internalization of the state, and I've returned to it again and again, and quoted the underlined sentence in many written texts and lectures since then.
Let me know if this works, or if you need a better quality image.
I look forward to hearing how the project goes!
All the very best for now,
Conor McGrady
Hi Silvia,
Hello and greetings from Maine - I having a remarkable time at the Skowhegan residency this summer. Quite transformative. Thanks for the invitation to participate in your project - it sounds excellent and The Franklin is such a great space! I am sorry I wont be back in time for the opening but have a nice evening. I have always enjoyed this quote by Paul Virilio from his book The Original Accident:
”Catastrophes are being mass produced, for every invention is simultaneously the invention of its own special type of destruction. To invent trains is to invent derailment, to invent ships is also to invent shipwreck.”
I hope this is helpful and I hope everything is going great with you.
best,
Christopher Meerdo
Sent by Mathew Paul Jinks
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Here is my contribution - perhaps I turned it around by "underlining" with a picture, but feel free to use it however you like. Should be a very interesting project!
Carole Harmel
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Silvia,
Attached is a scan of a page from the bookTao Te Ching, attributed to Lao Tsu. There are no markings on it but the page has separated from the binding due to its constant reference over the years. I have returned to EIGHT when my mood needs perking up or I need to contemplate....something.
There are also random sayings that I have come across in my life and that have stuck with me, which are not strictly highlights from books:
If you rest, you rust. Helen Hayes.
The cure for anything is salt water--sweat, tears or the sea. Isak Dinesen.
Watch your thoughts, they become words.
Watch your words, they become actions.
Watch your actions, they become habits.
Watch your habits, they become character.
Watch your character, it becomes your destiny.
Frank Outlaw
I know this response doesn't fit your guidelines exactly, but it is how I interpreted the instructions nevertheless.
Sounds like a great project!
Carl Ulaszek
UIC Theatre.
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Here is something from the Marx-Engels Reader.
Bob Sanders
Bob Sanders
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"Takin' it to the streets" A Sixties Reader
Edited by Alexander Bloom
Wini Breines
This page was what Nixon said to Republicans in 1966 when he was trying to get them to back his next run for the White House.
It was so strange to hear events that I lived through in an historical context.
Anyway, all through this book I had things to say and underlined and wrote in margins and chose this one because no matter how much changes there is so much that seems to stay the same.
I hope you are enjoying this lovely rain storm.
Jenn Weinshenker
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Zach Sherwood
Attached is my submission.
Author: William Faulkner
Book: As I Lay Dying
This may very well be the first line of a book I ever highlighted or underlined in a book I owned. I felt it was important to choose this one as those elements of rediscovery and a sense of time—a personal history of one's self—I felt while sorting through my stacks of books once I found this one seemed to resonate well with what you were talking about within your email.
This image is only at 72 dpi, if you need something higher resolution, let me know—or anything else for that matter.
Thanks for reaching out.
Best of luck with your project!
Zach Sherwood
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"Yesterday I saw Mozart's opera Cosi fan tutte on television. On closer observation, I saw traces of electrons in the cathode ray tube."
-from Into the Universe of Technical Images by Vilém Flusser
best,
Cameron Gibson
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“In a world without forgiveness, evil begets evil, harm generates harm, and there is no way short of exhaustion or forgetfulness of breaking the sequence. Forgiveness breaks the chain. It introduces into the logic of interpersonal encounter the unpredictability of grace. It represents a decision not to do what instinct and passion urge us to do. It answers hate with a refusal to hate, animosity with generosity. Few more daring ideas have ever entered the human situation. Forgiveness means that we are not destined endlessly to replay the grievances of yesterday. It is the ability to live with the past without being held captive by the past. It would not be an exaggeration to say that forgiveness is the most compelling testimony to human freedom. It is about the action that is not reaction. It is the refusal to be defined by circumstance. It represents our ability to change course, reframe the narrative of the past and create an unexpected set of possibilities for the future…In the face of tragedy, forgiveness is the counter-narrative of hope. It is not a moral luxury, an option for saints. At times it is the only path through the thickets of hate to the open spaces of coexistence.”
-- The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations, by Jonathan Sacks (formerly, the Chief Rabbi in the UK) (London/NY: Continuum Books, 2002), p. 179
---
“When you are trying to decide whether someone deserves your forgiveness, you are asking the wrong question. Ask instead whether you deserve to become someone who consistently forgives.”
-- A Little Book of Forgiveness: Challenges and Meditations for Anyone with Something to Forgive by D. Patrick Miller
(Berkeley, CA: Fearless Books, 3rd ed., 2004), p. 21
Sent by J.N. Levi
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From The Poetics of Space by Gaston Bachelard [trans., Maria Jolas]:
"The poetic image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche…."
from - Rilke, from "Wendung":
...Wenn er, ein Wartender, saß in der Fremde; des Gasthofs
Zerstreutes abgewendetes Zimmer
Mürrisch um sich, und im vermiedenen Spiegel
Wieder das Zimmer
Und später vom quälenden Bett aus
Wieder:
Da beriets in der Luft,
Unfaßbar beriet es
Über sein fühlbares Herz,
Über sein durch den schmerzhaft verschütteten Körper
Dennoch fühlbares Herz
Beriet es und richtete:
Daß er der Liebe nicht habe.
(Und verwehrte ihm weitere Weihen.)...
…
When he, whose vocation was Waiting, sat far from home—
the hotel's distracted unnoticing bedroom
moody around him, and in the avoided mirror
once more the room, and later
from the tormenting bed
once more:
then in the air the voices
discussed, beyond comprehension,
his heart, which could still be felt;
debated what through the painfully buried body
could somehow be felt—his heart;
debated and passed their judgment:
that it did not have love.
(And denied him further communions.)
…
[trans., Stephen Mitchell]
first line of Hölderlin's "Rousseau":
“Wie eng begränzt ist unsere Tageszeit.”
Strait crating zones our daytime here.
[trans. mine]
opening lines of Hölderlin's "Patmos":
“Nah ist
Und schwer zu fassen der Gott.
Wo aber Gefahr ist, wächst
Das Rettende auch.”
Breath’s brush--
Impalpable, slippery power and glory
Wherein danger’s
Deliverance lurks.
[trans. mine]
Paul Shullenberger
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Hello Silvia:
What a great project! I might think of something with more notes--but I am reading
The Prime of Life by Simone deBeauvoir (autobiography)
1962 translation. An old paper back I found when I was cleaning the house.
I may or may not be here on the 3rd....
mes amités...
Janina Ciezadlo
I do have a particular line that I circled that changed my life. I'm trying to find the book itself (it's around here somewhere) but here's the story:
I was a graduate student in Theoretical Anthropology at Indiana University. I had just turned 21. A bit young for such esoteric things. I was reading Sir Edmund Leach's 'Political Systems of Highland Burma" when I came across this line, that has ben engraved in my mind since 1968. And I quote exactly:
"The katchin gumsa were, of course, dama to to sumlat of pimlao." I circled the sentence, wrote "Of course" in the margin...and dropped out of school. True story. Jerri found the book in the basement several years ago and saw that indeed I wasn't making this up.
I'll find the book and scan it.
Best,
Alan Teller
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Dear Sylvia, It is so good to hear from you and I have been thinking of you lately. This is from a children's story that I believe is from England. Although I haven't underlines this passage it has been something that I refer to and repeat in my head over the years and my husband and I have read it to our kids many times.
April Sopkin
April Sopkin
Title: THE SEA-THING CHILD Author: Russell Hoban Illlustrated by: Patrick Benson
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sin que me lo pidan, contribuyo
from Cristobal Williams
Quevedo
Amor Constante mas alla de la muerte
Su cuerpo dejará, no su cuidado;
Serán ceniza, mas tendrá sentido;
Polvo serán, mas polvo enamorado
De Borges, La Noche Cíclica
No sé si volveremos en un ciclo segundo
Como vuelven las cifras de una fracción periódica;
Pero sé que una oscura rotación pitagórica
Noche a noche me deja en un lugar del mundo.
Que es de los arrabales
Borges, del Poema Al Cuarto Elemento, al final
Acuérdate de Borges, tu nadador, tu amigo.
No faltes a mis labios en el postrer momento
Baudelaire, Correspondances de la primer estrofa
L'homme y passe à travers des forêts de symboles
Qui l'observent avec des regards familiers
Baudelaire , Recueillement , dos primeras lineas
Sois sage, ô ma Douleur, et tiens-toi plus tranquille.
Tu réclamais le Soir ; il descend ; le voici :
Baudelaire, Le Balcon, dos ultimas lineas de la segunda estrofa
Nous avons dit souvent d'impérissables choses
Les soirs illuminés par l'ardeur du charbon.
Gérard de Nerval, "El Desdichado", tercer Estrofa
Suis-je Amour ou Phoebus ?.... Lusignan ou Biron ?
Mon front est rouge encor du baiser de la Reine ;
J'ai rêvé dans la grotte où nage la Sirène...
Arthur Raimbaud , Le Batteau Ivre quinta estrofa
Plus douce qu'aux enfants la chair des pommes sures,
L'eau verte pénétra ma coque de sapin
Et des taches de vins bleus et des vomissures
Me lava, dispersant gouvernail et grappin
y la penultima estrofa
Si je désire une eau d'Europe, c'est la flache
Noire et froide où vers le crépuscule embaumé
Un enfant accroupi plein de tristesses, lâche
Un bateau frêle comme un papillon de mai
Catullus, de memoria de algun poema
Te he amado, Cynara a mi manera
Eliot, lo dejo para otro dia es muchisimo
W.H.AUden, de In Memoriam William Yates
in the nightmare of the dark, all the dogs of Europe bark
and the living nations wait, each sequestered in its hate
Hi Silvia!
How are you? Sorry for the delay with this; I am on a residency in Utah, so been a bit off the grid. The attached image is from Meeting The Universe Halfway by Karen Barad. Hope summer is treating you well!
Take care-
Jeremy Bolen
Hi, Silvia: Attached is a picture. It was hard for me to fulfill the mission, though, and haven't fully here, because I never write in books. I think it's a class thing; I was taught to revere the book, and to preserve it and pass it on unsullied, and so I usually only write my name in the cover and sometimes not even that. So here is an example, the earliest I could find.
Title: The Fairy Tale Book, Translated by Marie Ponsot with Illustrations by Adrienne Segur (and the e has an accent mark I can't make with google text).
Therese Quinn
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“There is a day, an hour. When you understand that the swift flowing river runs in one direction only and nothing can reverse it.” MUDWOMAN, Joyce Carol Oates
Luigi Salerni
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Hi, Silvia: it was nice seeing you at the Logan Center, a couple of months
ago. I am happy to participate in your project, though don't know if I can
be there on the 3rd of August. I'll try.
Perhaps - no certainly - because my wife and I just celebrated our 50th
anniversary, and I am both very thankful and emotional about it, the words
I include [I had copied on a piece of paper; I would never desecrate a
book by underlining or writing in the margins; that's how I was raised]
relate to us personally.
The book is: THE LAST GIFT OF TIME: LIFE BEYOND SIXTY, by Carolyn G.
Heilbrun: "Ours is a long marriage, and we have found solitude together."
David M. Sokol
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Dear Silvia--
Since all I am doing this summer as I revise my book manuscript is going back over books I've read in the past, contributing to this project was easy. I am attaching a picture of a section from a page from this book that I marked at some point a while back:
Henry Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, vol.1, 1958, p. 163.
"Humanism" is not fashionable, but I have loved for a long time this conception of humanization that Lefebvre draws from Marx. It always strikes me how much people in the twentieth century were comfortable thinking about feeling, and how clearly important they thought feeling was for any work to be god work.
The picture is not signed, but it is fine with me if you include my name somewhere. "Elise Archias" is fine.
Good luck with your piece. It sounds very moving.
Elise Archias
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Here is my contribution. I apologize for the
Clichéd late eighties art student nature of my submission… It was the only thing I COULD FIND… We don't like to mark up books.
The Anti-Aesthetic Essays on Postmodern Culture. Edited by Hal Foster.
1. Modernity_An Incomplete Project.
Jürgen Habermas.
2. Postmodernism and Consumer Society.
Fredric Jameson.
Gregory A. Williams. Rockville, MD.
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hi Silvia,
The project sounds great. Unfortunately, I will be out of town on a residency on August 3. Is the event for one night only?
Meanwhile, here is my jpgs. it's from Basin and Range by John McPhee.
happy summer!
Jin Lee
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This is from the introduction to A Year With Rumi by Coleman Barks. 2006
He quotes this wonderful poem by Galway Kinnell
"Prayer"
Whatever happens. Whatever
what is is is what
I want. Only that. But that.
I got to sending this to you in a kind of a round-about way. It was the first thing I thought of sending you. I was reading the introduction to this wonderful book on the day I got your email.
Then, I did an experiment the next day while I was standing in my studio. I thought about your project, and I turned to my book case. The first book my eyes landed on was A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway. copyright 1964. I pulled it off the shelf and opened it randomly to see what I found.
I have this little, brown copy - with me since college when I took a course with a man named Wilmot Ragsdale at UW Madison. "Literary Aspects of Journalism". Loved that class. Ragsdale was an amazing teacher. I wrote a paper comparing Hemingway's book with Cezanne's paintings.
Anyway, my copy of the book is covered with notations and underlinings in two or three colors of pencil and ink. I guess a lot of it was very important to me at the time. I couldn't sort out something to send. I decided to stick with the poem out of the Rumi book.
But thank you for reintroducing me to the Hemingway! One of the bits that I underlined copiously had to do with a project that Hemingway worked on with Sylvia Beach. It seems apropo... The artists in Paris at the time took up a collection - they wanted to help support T.S. Eliot so he could leave his bank job and concentrate on his writing. Nice community project that one.
Anyway, thanks for the project and best of luck with the production. I've got a note in my calendar for the 3rd.
You can use my full name if you would like. And also, as much of this email as you would like.
Warmly,
Liz Chilsen
Clichéd late eighties art student nature of my submission… It was the only thing I COULD FIND… We don't like to mark up books.
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hi Silvia,
The project sounds great. Unfortunately, I will be out of town on a residency on August 3. Is the event for one night only?
Meanwhile, here is my jpgs. it's from Basin and Range by John McPhee.
happy summer!
Jin Lee
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Quotes that Mónica F.C. likes:
He wasn’t clever at all: he merely told
the unhappy Present to recite the Past
W.H. Auden, In memory of Sigmund Freud
People to whom sin is just a matter of words, to them salvation is just words too.
William Faulkner, As I lay dying
(…) as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.
James Joyce, The Dead
É com uma alegria tao profunda. É uma tal alleluia.
Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
Lo supieron los arduos alumnus de Pitágoras:
los astros y los hombres vuelven cíclicamente
Jorge Luis Borges, La noche cíclica
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Hi Silvia,
How are you? I am not sure if it is too late for my participation in your project.....but here you have one page of my actions from the series of Eco - Social Unism. My notes on Lenny Moss " Moral Molecules, Modern Selves, and Our "Inner Tribe".
Cheers,
Gosia Koscielak
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From Tim Nickodemus
From Tim Nickodemus
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Hola Silvia,
Lovely to hear from you and to learn about what you are working on. I like
the inspiration for the project and cannot wait to hear/see/experience
more of it. In the meantime, here is what I can offer as a contribution:
Intelligence.... circles around, taking the greatest possible number of
external views of the object, which, instead of penetrating, it draws
toward itself. But it is intuition which will lead us into the very
interior of life.
Author: Antonio Gramsci. Book: Selections from the Prison Notebooks.
Many reasons why I like this thought of Gramsci's. As far as noting this
as my contribution, sure, you can put my full name in: Iván Arenas
Gracias Silvia,
Catch you soon,
Iván Arenas
Hi Silvia! Sounds like a fun project.
As a good Catholic girl I did very little writing in books – which generally had to be returned at the end of the school year or to the library. There was something sacrosanct about the book and why would I add my comments? I remember writing down a passage from Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. It began something like:
“Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who know each other only with their eyes… “
I would have been in my late teens, early twenties and this quote seemed to describe my deepest and most passionate relationships up to that point - relationships with people that I was hyperaware of but never spoke with, people whose presence I could sense even before seeing in an almost feverish way. I even sent the passage once to one such person, anonymously of course. I was glad when I “grew out of that” and began to have actual relationships and now would have no patience for that kind of unrequited longing – give me a hand to hold anytime… but I can’t deny the power of those connections.
Gerry Griffin
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Dear Silvia,
Thanks so much for including me in this request. Trying to pick a
selection has itself been a fascinating process. My contribution is
attached and the source is Pema Chodron's, "When Things Fall Apart: Heart
Advice for Difficult Times."
Sadly, I'll be out of town on Aug 3, but please do send me the event
announcement, there is a grad student who has done some work on marginalia
that I know would love to see your work. Thanks again,
Michelle Boyd
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Hi Silvia,
I hope it is not too late. She is one of my very favorite authors in the world.
Good luck with the work, keep me posted!
Kirsten Leenaars
Here is my quote:
When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.
— Jeanette Winterson, “Why be happy when you could be normal?"Se
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So good to hear from you! Hope all is well. I have attached a doc for your use and also duplicated it below in case our systems aren't compatible.
All the very best, Linda James
PS, I do love to read and think about what I have read so you might find what I have included more than necessary. Of course I know you will use whatever you need - or not - just know that the submissions come to you from a place of authenticity.
From I.F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates, quoting Aristotle (assumed Nicomachean Ethics):
“…a cityless man is like a solitary [note: Stone translates this word as solitary where others translate it as isolated] piece in checkers. A solitary checker piece standing alone has no function. It has meaning only when associated with other pieces in a game…Man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but if he be isolated from law and justice, he is the worst of all beings…if he be without virtue, he is a most unholy and savage being…[The sense of] justice that alone can lift him above his own savage impulses belongs to the polis[;] for justice, which is the determination of what is just, is an ordering of the political association [e.g., the polis, the community].”
From Margaret Sanger in Woman and the New Race taken from Make Way for Winged Eros, A Book of Days by Jackie Rice – journal purchased in Glasgow, Scotland:
“The problem of birth control has arisen directly from the effort of the feminine spirit to free itself from bondage.”
From Josephine Baker’s Arsenal Pressbook (September 20, 1933) taken from Make Way for Winged Eros, A Book of Days by Jackie Rice.
“Art is an elastic sort of love.”
From Alexandra Kollontai (assumed from Lover of Worker Bees) taken from Make Way for Winged Eros, A Book of Days by Jackie Rice.
“Love, in and of itself, is a great, creative force; it broadens and enriches the psyche of him on whom it is bestowed. There is no doubt that love will become the cult of future humanity.” [Think Dalai Lama, Shambhala Buddhism]
From James Miller’s The Passion of Michel Foucault:
“In a eulogy composed shortly after Foucault’s death, André Glucksmann praised the philosopher for breaking with ‘the terrorist radicalism of the theoretical avant-gardes since Dada.’… [At the end of his life, Foucault] had in some way successfully transformed his way of thinking about politics. He no longer viewed every legal code, as he once had, merely ‘in terms of the method of subjugation that it institutes.’ He no longer treated the ‘model of war’ as a paradigm for the analysis of society: ‘Taking that route leads directly to oppression,’ he now argued, adding that the social critic must always proceed with caution and humility. Asserting the rights of the individual against the power of government now seemed to him a useful and worthy enterprise. Still, Foucault did not – indeed could not—commit himself wholeheartedly to any conventional understanding of liberalism. Dangerous and potentially lethal forms of disorder still sometimes held out the possibility of a total transfiguration of human existence – such, in Foucault’s view, was the great promise, tragically betrayed, of the revolution in Iran in 1978.”
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My computer is not co operating and I can't edit it. you may edit it any way you want I scanned it. and I will send another one as I find it, but I quote from books all the time and copy and paste in my own little books. Great idea and I am happy to be part of it. love Fern Shaffer
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From Anita David
Fashion tends to diminish all that it touches, and what might fool the cursory glance as being genuine and good often turns out on closer inspection to be a mirage of authenticity and a mutated, pastiche version of the good. The paradigm of the fashionizing process is the New York commonplace of a fashionable young man taking over from an unfashionable old man the ownership of the real nineteenth-century saloon, tearing out its insides and replacing them with a stylized imitation of the insides of a nineteenth century saloon. Because common sense has been drugged by fashion, albeit the "good" fashion for the solidity and workmanship that originally endeared the premises to the new owner, no normal instinct survives to question the destruction of the irreplaceable, or the validity of the fake that pretends to improve on it. The most tasteful kind of fashion almost always proves the most destructive, because it sets it sights on the worthiest targets.
The Fashionable Mind, Kennedy Fraser
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." — Voltaire
Here you go.
Lise Ricketts
Lise Ricketts
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Hello - Margeaux told me about your project, which is rewarding for all of us.
I would like to add this paragraph, written by one of my favorite authors, Antoine de Saint-Exupery (better known, of course, for The Little Prince), but this is from I book I love, Wind, Sand and Stars.
Best to you, thanks for the opportunity.
Joan
Joan Brooks Baker
"When the wild ducks or the wild geese migrate in their season a strange tide rises in the territories over which they sweep. As if magnetized by the great traingular flight, the barnyard fowl leap a foot or two into the air and try to fly. .........All the ducks on the farm are transformed for an instant into migrant birds, and into these hard little heads, till now filled with humble images of pools and worms and barnyards, there swims a sense of continental expanse, of the breadth of seas and salt taste of the ocean wind. The duck totters to right and left in its wire enclosure, gripped by a sudden passion to perform the impossible and a sudden love whose object is a mystery....the cal that stirred must torment all men....but domestic security has succeeded in crushing out that part of us that is capable of heeding the call. We scarcely quiver; we beat our wings once or twice and fall back into our barnyard. We are prudent people. We are afraid to let go of petty reality in order to grasp at the great shadow...There is a day of the year when the eels must go down to the Sargasso Sea, and come what may, no one can prevent them. On that day they spit on their ease, their tranquility, their tepid waters......”
Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery, translated by Lewis Galantiere
Hi Silvia--
Sending this to you just in time for the deadline! It's been a chaotic time, or I would have submitted sooner.
My brief text is typed below. It is a poem called Late Fragment, by Raymond Carver, that I once found in a book, retyped, and tacked to my wall.
Looking forward to seeing this project AND to seeing you again, too!
Big hug,
Sherry Antonini
Late Fragment
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
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Sylvia:
Attached please find an image which has stuck with me since I bought this book at a grade school book sale in fifth grade. "Jill Has Two Ponies", by Ruby Ferguson, 1952. I think you can see the quote underlined in pencil on the left hand page.
Sounds like an interesting piece. Keep me posted.
Margaret Lass-gardiner
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Dear Silvia,
I'm sending you some things you may be abel to use in your media project, but I'm sending them piecemeal, just in case the documents are too large for your computer. The attachments here are from the book In the Land of Israel, by Amos Oz. Essie had taken notes for the passage marked on pp. 252-253 on a separate piece of paper. She probably intended to use this book as a resource in the project she was starting on the olive trees in Israel/Palestine. It was going to be such a thought-provoking, carefully crafted piece. That you can use some of it in your project keeps the energy alive.
There's more to come...
Love,
Susie Peters
From the library of my dear friend Esther Parada, 1938 - 2005
http://www.uic.edu/depts/lib/projects/parada/html/home.html
http://www.uic.edu/depts/lib/projects/parada/html/home.html
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HI Silvia,
Here are two passages in Antonio Machado's Juan de Mairena II (Editorial Losada, Buenos Aires, 1969, sexta edición: 1977) that I marked. Sorry for the tardy reply. I hope this will be of some use.
best,
-- Paul Hertz
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Small Gods: Discworld Novel - by Terry Pratchett
"Dam the river of truth? Then there are leaks of great force."
Sent by Chris Perkowitz-Colvard
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Hi Silvia-
Just remembered the attached quote, which is special to me…
ML
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"Meditation upon death does not teach one how to die"
Memoirs of Hadrian, by Marguerite Yourcenar
Best of luck, Syvia,
Sent by Donald Downs
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Dear Silvia,
I hope that I can consider myself a friend, a distant colleague, and certainly I am a citizen of the world.
I am spending the month in western North Carolina, and so I don’t have most of my library with me; most of my decorated books are in Chicago. However, I did have one book with me that might be relevant. I wasn’t sure if you could use the text or if you needed an image of the page (if so, let me know and I will try to get a PDF or a photo for you).
The text is Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (Verso, 1991), a classic analysis of the cultural origins of nationalism (Anderson is a professor of international studies at Cornell).
The text is from page 9 (and perhaps it has some relevance to art worlds):
“No more arresting emblems of the modern culture of nationalism exist than cenotaphs and tombs of Unknown Soldiers. The public ceremonial reverence according these monuments precisely because they are either deliberately empty or no one knows who lies inside them, has no true precedents in earlier times. To feel the force of this modernity one has only to imagine the general reaction to the busy-body who ‘discovered’ the Unknown Soldier’s name or insisted on filling the cenotaph with some real bones.”
Note that the italics are Anderson’s, while the underlining is mine, and I have drawn a sideline for the full nine lines.
I hope that this helps your project. If you need an image, let me know.
All the best.
Gary Alan Fine
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Hi Silvia,
I chose my underlined section from Women Who Run With the Wolves by Clarissa Pinkola Estès. I adored this book and was happy to rediscover 13 four leaf clovers and a feather from my neighbor's chicken in Chocaya, Peru that I had pressed between its pages. Apparently, this is the best way to get these sort of items past the Port Authority and Customs :)
"It is just this 'hyper-normalcy' that creeps up on us till we have a routine life, and a lifeless life without really meaning to. This encourages the neglect of intuition which in turn produces lack of light in the psyche. We must do something then, we must set out in the woods, go find the scary woman, or else one day as we are nodding down the street a manhole cover will snap open and whoosh we will find ourselves snatched by some unconscious thing that will throw us about like a rag - joyous or otherwise, mostly otherwise, but for good outcome."
Suerte y Paz
Robin Hann
xoxox
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Hi Silvia!
Below is a link to my image. I'm not sure how big you wanted it so I'm including it at full resolution.
The highlighted excerpt is from the novel Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. Please include my name as "Ivan Lo."
Thank you for asking for me participation and good luck with your project!
Ivan Yee-Gwan Lo
Humanitarian Photographer
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Dear Silvia,
Good to hear from you. Your project is very interesting and I would like to contribute something. The deadline is too soon for me to do anything new so I’m attaching some old work. I’m not sure if this will fit your request but I’ve been doing cut ups and altered pages of books a lot over the years and more so in the last decade. I’ve attached some pages from a book I did with Michael Piazza in 2005. We each selected 10 books according to bar code check numbers each from 0-9. I started with my books 0 and 1 and pages 1 and 2 then Michael’s books 2 and 3 and pages 3 and 4 and so on passing through the books producing a new book of 180 pages called “He r se” from some altered words on page 1.
I have attached 6 pages (3 double pages) which break down like this:
Page 42 (BH) “Oulipo: A primer of potential literature” Editor Warren F. Motte Page 43 (MP) “The Theory of the Leisure Class” Thorstein Veblen
Page 150 (BH) “Mrs. Dalloway” Virginia Woolf Page 151 (MP) “Roughneck” Jim Thompson
Page 152 (MP) “Stars of the New Curfew” Ben Okri Page 153 (BH) “Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship” Gershom Scholem
This gives the title and author of the book the page comes from and the initials of who did the page (BH) me and (MP) Michael. However we went collectively under the name of “paralipomena”.
Look Silvia use any of it if it fits the criteria and good luck with the project. This Franklin backyard gallery sounds interesting.
All the best,
Bertha
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Hi Silvia,
Sorry that it took me so long to respond! Here is my image for your project, attached. It is from the book On Longing, by Susan Stewart. You can list me by my full name if you'd like.
Thanks for thinking of me to be a part of your project!
Best,
Kara Cochran
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Hi Silvia --
from me -- for your project : Let me know if you have any questions or need more information. thank you again for inviting !
not sure the format you want / author first or after the excerpt, so please make consistent with others you are using. Julia
_____
from Julia Fish /
Henri Bergson
"Our perceptions are undoubtedly interlaced with memories, and, inversely, a memory, as we shall show later, only becomes actual by borrowing the body of some perception into which it slips. These two acts, perception and recollection, always interpenetrate each other, are always exchanging something of their substance as by a process of endosmosis."
from Matter and Memory
1896. translation by Nancy Margaret Paul and W. Scott Palmer
1988 Urzone Inc. / 1991 Zone Books, Distributed by MIT Press
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"MINNAWATTA
MINNAWATTA
POODLEDOG
POODLEDOG
BLOOMING
BLOOMING"
These were words used on a brochure page or flyer from roughly the 1930s or 1940s. They appeared as I've written them above, very graphically to illustrate typefaces. The visual quality of the words, the musical intonation of the repetitive sounds and physicality of saying the words lead me to make a series of artworks that included language/words derived from serendipitous or nonsensical relationships whether visually, audibly and/or conceptually as related to a "Webster's" understanding or meaning. The first piece I made included these exact words below the silhouette of a derby hat. Since then, I've retained a conscientious as well as subliminal appreciation for language incorporated in the visual arts (you might remember Don Baum and I curated a show called "Urgent Messages" based on both of our interests in the same).
I delayed sending this because I know I have this original brochure someplace and am trying hard to dig it up so I can scan it for you as well in the event that this even meets your needs for your project. Regardless, it has been great revisiting these ideas and realizing how significant this minor nonsense is to my very being!!! Thanks!
Will let you know if I unearth the thing.....
Warm Regards,
Ken
--
Hi Silvia,
Just a note that I actually found the flyer I was describing...thought I might also find the piece I did after it but no luck. Not sure if it even fits your criteria or schedule, but thought I'd send a jpg just in case. Hope your project is moving along.
Warm Regards,
Ken
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Dear Silvia,
I love the idea of this project!
Here is my humble contribution:
I have a friend who's an artist, and he sometimes takes a view which I don't agree with. He'll hold up a flower and say, "Look how beautiful it is," and I'll agree. But then he'll say, "I, as an artist, can see how beautiful a flower is. But you, as a scientist, take it all apart and it becomes dull." I think he's kind of nutty.
First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people--and to me, too, I believe. Although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is, I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. But at the same time, I see much more in the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells inside, which also have a beauty. There's beauty not just at the dimension of one centimeter; there's also beauty at a smaller dimension.
There are the complicated actions of the cells, and other processes. The fact that the colors in the flower have evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; that means insects can see the colors. That adds a question: does this aesthetic sense we have also exist in lower forms of life? There are all kinds of interesting questions that come from a knowledge of science, which only adds to the excitement and mystery and awe of a flower. It only adds. I don't understand how it subtracts.
- Richard Feynman, from What Do You Care What Other People Think?
For me this anecdote has served as an emphatic affirmation of my own desire for deep research into the nuts and bolts of music, my calling, in order to better understand its emotional power.
If you use my offering, feel free to use my name.
Love,
Fred Simon
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Silvia,
Attached is the photo you requested (kind of). As I mentioned, I'm not much of a underliner/note in book type, but I AM a write down quotes in my sketchbook type, so the Image I have sent you is the book the quote is from (Josef Albers "Interaction of color"), next to a page from a recent sketchbook in which I wrote the quote at the bottom of the page, "Color is the most relative medium in art". Hopefully this works for your project!
I'm still working on questions for the Comosite blog which I hope to send to you by Wednesday, altho there is no rush to respond, I just will be traveling the west coast for a few weeks soon.
As for my own travelings and movings, My wife and I got married right after I graduated and we spent the next year moving around the country for her job as a travel nurse, but we've since landed in Oakland CA for thelast 2ish years, and is looks like we will be here a few more as my wife starts gradschool, and I'm applying to MFA programs in the fall. Well see how that goes.
Thanks again for your invitation and continued support of what we do with Composite. It means alot to us!
Zach Clark
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From:
The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque
Gilles Deleuze
(if you need to see the pen marks with which i marked this paragraph, i can re-crop).
Best,
Todd Mattei
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Hi Silvia,
I meant to reply to this sooner.. I hope you can still use my contribution...
Years ago I read that the two most important influences on one's life are the people you meet and the books you read. I consequently started reading a lot more and working harder to have conversations with people that were beyond my everyday social sphere. This approach has made all the difference in the world.
Good luck with the project!!
Best,
Raquel M. Ladensack
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