Quotes 2017 (extra)

"Joy, he [Bill Reid] liked to say, is a well-made object. And objects (as he also liked to say) have a way of becoming more than objects, through the skill, intensity and love that render them well made."

Robert Bringhurst in the introduction to Bill Reid, Solitary Raven.

UCLA にて

２年ぶりにカリフォルニア大学ロスアンジェルス校に滞在中です。今回はアーバン・ヒューマニティーズ（都市人文学）を推進しているグループからのお招き。

http://www.urbanhumanities.ucla.edu/

建築・都市学と、人文地理、社会学を初めとする人文社会系の複合領域から、ロスアンジェルス、メキシコシティ、上海、東京などの研究を進めている人たちです。われわれの大学院プログラム PAC（場所、芸術、意識）とは完全にシンクロ。

到着し、早速日曜日にダウンタウンの「小東京」でワークショップを行いました。ワークショップではぼくがPort Bのプロジェクト「東京ヘテロトピア」を解説し、ついで日系コミュニティ文化センターのビル・ワタナベさんによるリトル・トーキョーの歴史をめぐるお話。

それから小グループに分かれて、このエリアに埋め混まれたさまざまな歴史のかけらを訪ねることにしました。これから今週一杯で、各チームが自分たちの作品を制作します。文章、ヴィジュアル作品、パフォーマンスなど。金曜日の最終発表会には、今学期、日本文学科で教えている古川日出男さんも加わります。題して「リトル・トーキョー・ゴースト・ストーリーズ（百物語）」。

どんな作品ができてくるのか、楽しみです。

Quotes 2017 #59

"Otherwise, this humble narrative genre [the FAIT DIVERS] obeys the same laws that make literature evolve with our vision of the world. It used to be that insignificant FAITS DIVERS were referred to as 'dogs hit by cars.' Television journalists now call them 'trash cans on fire.' I sense in this transition from the dog to the trash can, from the living to the inanimate, a depersonalization typical of our times."

Roger Grenier, Palace of Books (Alice Kaplan trans.)

Quotes 2017 #58

"Far from engaging in a philosophy of a subject, Michelet and Quinet think of the people in light of their problematic---for always deferred---identity. Rather than embodying a self-presence, the people either are ABOVE themselves---the people in the heroic state that establish themselves in the very invention of liberty---or they are BELOW themselves, when the experience of liberty threatens to revert into its opposite, namely servitude. In short, never coinciding with themselves, never equal to themselves, the people are simultaneously where they are manifest, and where they come to existence, confronted with the ordeal of an insurmountable self-discrepancy. A discrepancy that would wrongly be considered a shortcoming, for it is quite certainly by this deficiency, and by maintaining it, that the opportunities for an anti-authoritarian city are encountered."

Miguel Abensour, Democracy Against the State.

Quotes 2017 #57-b

"I inverted the image of the map from his letter in my mind and began driving south to the highway. After a few moments I turned off the headlights and rolled down the window. I listened to the tires crushing gravel in the roadbed. The sound of it helped me hold the road, together with instinct and the memory of earlier having driven it. I felt the volume of space beneath the clear, star-ridden sky, and moved over the dark prairie like a barn-bound horse."

Barry Lopez, "The Mappist."

Quotes 2017 #57

"The world is a miracle, unfolding in the pitch dark. We're lighting candles. Those maps---they are my candles."

Barry Lopez, "The Mappist."

Quotes 2017 #56

"And there's a becoming black, which is extremely important and has been asserting itself in recent years. And also a becoming that I don't know how to describe because the words are so stupid, a becoming-environment, a becoming-raised-consciousness about the faces of Brazil, its landscapes, its plant and animal realities. I have an impression that this could transform modes of subjectivation profoundly."

Félix Guattari, Molecular Revolution in Brazil.

まさに山川草木鳥獣虫魚党の主張です。

Quotes 2017 #55

"I am a native of nowhere. I do not know where I come from because I have come from just about everywhere. Until the eighth grade I had never gone to less than three schools a year. In the fifth grade I won the spelling bee in Jacksonville, lost it in Winnipeg, and won it again in Springfield, Missouri."

Clark Blaise, I had a Father.

Quotes 2017 #54

"The desire to read returned as abruptly as it had left. One day I picked up a copy of John McPhee's BASIN AND RANGE. I read it in the evenings, gaining his sense of deep time to understand the dynamism of a landscape that seems the quintessence of stillness."

Barry Lopez, "The Construction of the RACHEL".

Quotes 2017 #53

"Superman is qualitatively, not quantitatively, different from existing man. The thing that the superman discards is precisely our boundless, purely quantitative nonstop progress. The superman is poorer, simpler, tenderer and tougher, quieter and more self-sacrificing and slower of decision, and more economical of speech."

Martin Heidegger, What is Called Thinking? (trans. by J. Glenn Gray)

宮津へ

丹後の宮津に初めて行ってきました。２月１９日（日）に開催された京都府立大学の松田法子先生がコーディネートしたシンポジウム、「宮津新浜の芸能文化と社会・人・まち」のため。松田さん、学生の井津元さん、そしてドイツ文学／演劇の林立騎さんとぼくが発表。締めくくりは、町の人たちもたくさん出演し、歴史資料としても貴重な、古木洋平監督による３０分の映像作品。天橋立を擁し、この地方の主要な港として栄えた宮津の往時のゆたかさを偲ぶひとときでした。お世話になったみなさま、ありがとうございました！

初めての天橋立は雪の残る景色の中で、山から見ても、その場を歩いても、心にしみわたる美しさ。さすがは日本三景の一。いずれここに外国の詩人たちを招待して小さな国際詩祭をやってみたらどうか、とふと考えました。

「コヨーテ歩き撮り」第２８回

勁草書房のサイトでの連載、更新されました！

http://keisobiblio.com/2017/02/20/coyote028/

Quotes 2017 #52

"For Depestre, a zombie has never been as simple a creation as the bleary-eyed villains of 1930s Hollywood B movies. Instead zombification is a state of deterioration based on the loss of one's ti bonanj, one's good angel, which turns one into a vacuous shell of one's former self. A case can be made that the Jacmel I am visiting now cannot help but be a slightly zombified version of its former self, having lost many of its own angels, among them one of its most adept literary chroniclers, to other shores."

Edwidge Danticat, After the Dance.

Quotes 2017 #51

"There is a strange energy in me, an urge to learn life from the roots, and an irrepressible desire to provoke people and things into revealing themselves to me. This makes me think of Herr Benjamenta. But I want to think of something else, that's to say, I don't want to think of anything."

Robert Walser, Jakob von Gunten.

Quotes 2017 #50

"Susan, who is four years younger than me, thinks we live in a selfish age. She talks of a Thatcherism of the soul that imagines that people are not dependent on one another. In love, these days, it is a free market; browse and buy, pick and choose, rent and reject, as you like. There's no sexual and social security; everyone has to take care of themselves, or not. Fulfillment, self-expression and 'creativity' are the only values."

Hanif Kureishi, Intimacy.

Quotes 2017 #49

"HORSE RADISH SAUCE
To a spoonful of mustard add three tablespoonfuls of vinegar and a little salt; if you have it, put in two spoonfuls of cream. Grate into this as much horse radish as will thicken it; then mash a clove of garlic, and your sauce is ready."

Lafcadio Hearn's Creole Cookbook.

Quotes 2017 (extra)

"We are all the eyes and ears of the earth; and we think the world's thought."

Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things.

Quotes 2017 #48

"He had studied English literature--books like GREAT EXPECTATIONS. When I too came to do the same thing, I saw how so many things had ended up getting intertwined here: my father's performance of the book; how the scenes became part of our daily lives and language; how all this spoke to me about the kind of family my father had come from and the changes he had been through before I was in this world."

Michael Rosen, "Memories and Expectations".

修論審査を終えて

２００８年に開設した新領域創造専攻ディジタルコンテンツ系。本日、第８回目の修士論文口頭試問を行いました。今年の修了生は８名。ちょっと少ない。でもうち４名がぼくの研究室で、これについてはそれなりに感慨深し。

４名が修論で扱ったのは、シェアハウスに見る現代日本のシェアリングエコノミーとその背後にあるもの、ボニン・アイランダーズ（小笠原諸島民）のエスニッ ク・アイデンティティ生成史、宮澤賢治作品に見る青の意味＋詩の創作、阪神淡路大震災と東日本大震災後のミュージアムの取り組みと記憶の継承。

分野でいえば、社会学、歴史人類学、文学、美術館・博物館学となりますが、これだけの多様性をもった研究室は、あまりないと思います。もっとも、ぼくは別 に大した指導をしているわけではなくて、主な仕事はかれらが何かを出してくるのをじっと待つこと。そして今年も、待った甲斐がありました。

われわれの専攻は「論文＋作品制作」という形式で修士号を取得できます。今年は、上記の宮澤賢治論＋賢治の心象スケッチを追うかたちでの作品制作により、 ついに文芸創作の修士号を、それも理想的なかたちで出すことができて、感無量でした。この創作は、いずれ詩集として出版されることでしょう。それを心から よろこびたい、新鮮な風が吹き抜ける作品です。

４月からは研究室の所属学生もぐっと少なくなり、予定では修士２年、１年ともに１名ずつ。しかしその分、徹底的にラディカルな探求にとりくめることと思います。

この専攻の直接の同僚たち、倉石信乃さん、宮下芳明さん、波戸岡景太さんを明治にお迎えしたのが２００７年で、ちょうど１０年前でした。かれらのおかげで確実に、明治はおもしろくなりました。

４月からは建築・都市学専攻総合芸術系、別名「場所、芸術、意識」系として再出発します。アートと呼ばれる営みが私たちの社会をいかに直接に変えるか、その最前線を見極め、そこに身を投じる場にしたいと思っています。

Quotes 2017 #47

"Do you know the mountain halls on Unter den Linden? You ought to pay them a visit some day. The entrance fee is just thirty cents. Even if you should happen to see the cashier eating bread or sausage, there's no need to turn back in disgust, just consider that it's her supper she's eating. Nature demands its rights everywhere. Anywhere there's nature, there's meaning. And now you'll step inside, into the mountains."

Robert Walser, "Mountain Halls".

Quotes 2017 (extra)

I just came across this great sentence. Rather difficult to explain, though.

"Lyrics about love becomes, in other words, like another musical instrument, and love songs become, somehow, pure song."

Nick Hornby, 31 Songs.

Quotes 2017 #46

"Baudelaire had the true intuition of number as a tactile hand or nervous system for interrelating separate units, when he said that 'number is within the individual. Intoxication is a number.' That explains why 'the pleasure of being in a crowd is a mysterious expression of delight in the multiplication of number.' Number, that is to say, is not only auditory and resonant, like the spoken word, but originates in the sense of touch, of which it is an extension."

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media.

Quotes 2017 #45

"It can be a shock to find out capitalism has not always existed. Economists present 'the market' as the natural state of humanity... When you realize that capitalism, once did not exist---either as an economy or a value system---a more shocking thought arises: it might not last for ever. If so, we have to get our heads around the concept of transitions, asking: what constitutes an economic system and how does one give way to another?"

Paul Mason, Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future.

優河さんと葉山で

１１日（土）、葉山でシンガーソングライターの優河さんとのイベント「山のうた、光の葉」を行いました。Bookshop Kasper 主催。近くの山にのぼり、海を眺めながら、ぼくの朗読、彼女のアカペラ、ついでふたりでピエール・バルー追悼の意味を込めてのÇa va, ça vient。それから本屋さんに戻り、優河さんの歌とぼくの詩を交互に。最後はぼくの詩に彼女が即興の音楽をつけてくれて。青空から雪、みぞれ、霰とお天気がめまぐるしく変わり、地形と気象のおもしろみをたっぷり味わえる午後になりました。

優河さんは、とにかくすごい歌手。声を聞くだけで震えます。屋外のアカペラによるアイルランド民謡で、そのすごさを再認識。お店では愛用のマーティンの弾き語りでしたが、かろやかなスリーフィンガー・ピッキングとソウルフルな声がひとつになって、その場にいたみんなを包みこみました。ご一緒できてほんとうに幸運でした。

お世話になったKasper の青木さん、企画を立ててくれた熊谷さん、ありがとうございました！

Quotes 2017 #44

"During my twenties a succession of thin volumes of verse--Frost's A WITNESS TREE, Philip Larkin's WHITSUN WEDDINGS, Seamus Heaney's NORTH--were the wedges I used to prise open new ways of seeing and feeling."

Nicholas Carr, "The Dreams of Readers"

Quotes 2017 #43

"The woman watched the sun go down. they watched it bathe and wallow in the sea and throw a cloth across the sky. They thanked my father for his help. We give to you the gift of turning life to ice, they said. And this we give you, too. They tipped a little perfume from a jar into a scallop shell. He smelled it---but the skin upon his nose touched the arc of liquid. It froze. Dissolve it in your mouth, they said, and make a wish. My father sucked. My father wished. He wished he had a healthy arm, four fingers and a thumb. It will come true, the woman said."

Jim Crace, The Gift of Stones.

Quotes 2017 #42

"I have always disliked being photographed, but I intensely disliked being photographed by Anna. It is a strange thing to say, I know, but when she was behind a camera she was like a blind person, something in her eyes went dead, an essential light was extinguished. She seemed not to be looking through the lens, at her subject, but rather to be peering inward, into herself, in search of some defining perspective, some essential point of view."

John Banville, The Sea.

Quotes 2017 #41

"Music is the sweetest thing in the world. I absolutely adore notes. I'll run a thousand paces just to hear one. Often when I'm walking through the hot streets in summer and hear the sound of a piano from an unknown house, I stop in my tracks, ready to die on the spot. I'd like to die listening to a piece of music."

Robert Walser, Masquerade & Other Stories.

Quotes 2017 #40

"Without going into detail, and merely to give a general idea (even if we do not feel entirely justified in rounding off figures when it is a question of human lives), it will be recalled that in 1500 the world population is approximately 400 million, of whom 80 million inhabit the Americas. By the middle of the sixteenth century, out of these 80 million, there remain ten. Or limiting ourselves to Mexico: on the eve of the conquest, its population is about 25 million; in 1600, it is one million."

Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America (trans. by Richard Howard).

Quotes 2017 #39

"A kind of morbid curiosity overcame him. What had become of the Cold War with Russia? For that matter, what had become of Russia? Rapidly, he scanned the remaining pages. What he discovered made the hackles of his neck rise.

      Russia, as a category, had been abolished. It was just too painfully unpleasant. Millions of men and women, millions of square miles of land---GONE! What was there, instead? A barren plain? A misty emptiness? A vast pit?"

Philip K. Dick, Eye in the Sky.

「すばる」２０１７年３月号

昨年１２月３日に明治大学リバティーホールで開催した「声の氾濫」。このイベントのために、温又柔、木村友祐、姜信子、中村和恵のみなさんとぼくがそれぞれ書き下ろした短篇が、文芸誌「すばる」の現在発売中の号に掲載されています。

いずれも、舞台ヴァージョンとは少しちがった文字ヴァージョンに。改めて楽しんでいただけることと思います。

この号、他にも文学における声や翻訳の問題に正面から取り組んだ、読み応えのある記事が勢揃いしました。ぜひお買い求めくださいね。

Quotes 2017 #38

"Sometimes people ask me if I am from a bookish family. I find it difficult to answer. One answer would be no, not in the traditional sense. My father left school at thirteen and my mother at sixteen. But another answer is: Christ, yes, they really were. Like a lot of working-class English people, in the Fifties and Sixties my father found his cultural life transformed by Allen Lane's Penguin paperback revolution. Now anyone could read Camus or D.H. Lawrence or Maupassant, for no more than a price of a pack of fags."
 
Zady Smith, "Library Life."

「コヨーテ歩き撮り」#27

更新されました！

http://keisobiblio.com/2017/02/06/coyote027/

Quotes 2017 #37

"Then, in the last light of day, I was startled by a line of dark torsos and a strange hand on a wall just above the canyon floor. I froze, rigid with fear. My usual mental categories of alive and not-alive became permeable. The painted figures stared at me, transmuted from mere stone as if by magic, and I stared back in terror.

      After a few seconds, my body intervened with my mind, pulling it away from a gaze that engulfed me. The torsos became JUST pictures. My mind discovered a comfortable category for the original perception and the confusion passed. But strangely, seeing them as representations did not reduce the emotion I felt. I was chilled, shivering, though the air was warm. I could not override the feeling that the figures were looking at me, and that I was seeing what I wasn't supposed to see."

Jack Turner, The Abstract Wild.

Quotes 2017 #36

"Take fifty photos of anyone. There will be some photos where the face is so different you can hardly recognize the subject. I mean most people have many faces. Jerry had one. Don Juan says anyone who always looks like the same person isn't a person. He is a person impersonator. "

William Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night.

Quotes 2017 #35

"To protect yourself from lightning, the Navajo say, wear a bead of turquoise in your hair. The Navajo divinity Changing Woman, so named because she is life springing from nothing and a woman who renews her youth each season, lives in a house with a turquoise door and four footprints of turquoise leading to a turquoise room. Changing Woman looks through binoculars of rock crystal, the stone of light beams and fire and a natural ally of turquoise. Carried on the tongue, rock crystal is the word in a prayer that means truth."

Ellen Meloy, The Anthropology of Turquoise.

「水牛のように」２０１７年２月号

ウェブマガジン「水牛のように」２月号に「狂狗集　２の巻」を発表しました。

http://suigyu.com/2017/02

俳句の５・７・５をクレイジーに壊した、短い１行詩の集積。 まずはごらんください。

Quotes 2017 #34

"The animal scrutinizes him across a narrow abyss of non-comprehension. This is why the man can surprise the animal. Yet the animal--even if domesticated--can also surprise the man. The man too is looking across a similar, but not identical, abyss of non-comprehension. And this is so wherever he looks. He is always looking across ignorance and fear."

John Berger, "Why Look at Animals?"

Quotes 2017 #33

"Mardohai Simhon claimed the silk scarf he wore around his neck was a mirror.
      'Look,' he said, 'my head is separated from my body by a scarf. Who dares give me the lie if I say I walk with a knotted mirror under my chin? The scarf reflects a face, and you think it is of flesh. Night is the mirror. Day the scarf. Moon and Sun reflected features. But my true face, brothers, where did I lose it?'
      At his death, a large scar was discovered on his neck."

Edmond Jabes, The Book of Yukel.

Quotes 2017 #32

"Day by day he felt the skin of his face hardening in the weather; the stubble of hair on the lower part of his face became smooth as his skin roughened, and the backs of his hands reddened and then browned and darkened in the sun. He felt a leanness and a hardness creep upon his body; he thought at times that he was moving into a new body, or into a real body that had lain hidden beneath layers of unreal softness and whiteness and smoothness."

John Williams, Butcher's Crossing.