French Lessons #4

"Je préfère le métro à l'autobus. Dans le métro, on ne voit que les visages. Et dans l'autobus, juste des paysages." (Danny Laferrière)

Quotes 2017 #90

"It should be easy, now, to understand the destitution of indigenous, oral persons who have been forcibly displaced from their traditional lands. The local earth is, for them, the very matrix of discursive meaning; to force them from their native ecology (for whatever political or economic purpose) is to render them speechless--or to render their speech meaningless--TO DISLODGE THEM FROM THE VERY GROUND OF COHERENCE. It is, quite simply, to force them out of their mind."

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous.

「西江文庫」にむかって

明治大学図書館紀要「図書の譜」第２１号（２０１７年３月）にエッセー「＜西江文庫＞にむかって」を寄稿しました。故・西江雅之先生の蔵書は一括して明治 大学図書館に寄贈されました。公開は２年ほど先になると思われますが、ぼくが垣間みた、先生の本とのつきあい方について。

French Lessons #3

"Les nègres fugitifs, et particulièrement ceux qui détachent les autres, sont châtiés rigoureusement, car on les attache à un pilier et après leur avoir découpé toute la peau à coups de lianes, on flotte leurs plaies avec du piment, du sel et du jus de citron, ce qui leur cause des douleurs incroyables." (Révérend Père du Tertre)

Quotes 2017 #89

"A tiny little schoolboy with the name of Trachtenbauer was at my door when I opened it. / I say tiny little and that's literally what I mean. He was about eight inches tall, the size of a sizeable penis, the average height of a cat, which meant that when the doorbell rang while I was pouring my cornflakes into the bowl and I went through to the hall thinking it would be the postman and opened the door and looked out, it was as if there was no one there at all, and it was only as I was about to close it that I heard the squeaking of a small voice at shin level."

Ali Smith, "Trachtenbauer."

French Lessons #2

"Mais la vraie vocation de Blake était la prophétie. Il prophétisait à tout propos; c'était une habitude d'esprit." (Julien Green)

Quotes 2017 #88

"He hated the flowery manner of writing made fashionable by Chateaubriand, and which a hundred lesser authors had sedulously aped. Stendhal's aim was to set down whatever he had to say as plain and exactly as he could, without frills, rhetorical flourishes of picturesque verbiage. He said (probably not quite truly) that before starting to write he read a page of the CODE NAPOLEON in order to chasten his language. He eschewed description of scenery and the abundant metaphors which were popular in his day. The cold, lucid, self-controlled style increases the horror of the story he has to tell in LE ROUGE ET LE NOIR, and adds to its enthralling interest."

W. Somerset Maugham, Ten Novels and Their Authors.

French Lessons #1

"Les philosophes s'intéressent à la pensée. La poétique tente d'écouter dans le langage les mouvements du corps. Spinoza pense l'unité des deux." (Henri Meschonnic)

I have decided to post French quotations as well. For the past decade (after I quit teaching French to concentrate more on our graduate program) I have been more and more away from French matters. Now is the time, if ever, to re-inhabit this sphere.

Quotes 2017 (extra)

"Aesthetics are not about politics; they are politics themselves."

Félix González-Torres

Quotes 2017 #87

"Time is crucial to Deleuze's ethics of philosophy and the philosophical encounter with literature. And it is because cinema is that medium that enables us to rethink time that cinema is at the heart of our self-transformation. Our relation to time is ethical and political precisely because it is our way of living time (or our 'duration') which explains the problems of politics: how it is that our desire submits to its own repression?"

Claire Colebrook, Gilles Deleuze.

Quotes 2017 #86

"Yes, intimate knowing, a kind of inquiring reciprocity. When I was walking across the campus this morning I found a beetle. Its life had expired. It was on its back on the sidewalk. I squatted down to examine it and in my mind I asked, 'Who were you?' and 'What was the cause of this?' I tried to enter into a state in which the beetle was not an object. To initiate some kind of relationship with what was left of the beetle is, for me, a kind of practice, an effort to stay in touch with the world. To stay intimate."

Barry Lopez, in William Tydeman, Conversations with Barry Lopez.

Quotes 2017 #85

When the mind swings by a grass-blade
      an ant's forefoot shall save you
the clover leaf smells and tastes as its flower

Ezra Pound, The Pisan Cantos.

Quotes 2017 #84

"In 'Transcendence of the Ego', Sartre argues that when one turns inward to examine one's own states one creates a new object, the ego, that had previously not existed. For Sartre, there is no independent subject of the classical kind, access to which is secured, as Descartes believed, by introspection, an inspection of the mind. Consciousness cannot know itself independent of its relation to things. Far from being a privileged form of self-knowledge, introspection is for Sartre largely deceptive."

Robert Bersconi, How to Read Sartre.

Quotes 2017 #83

"The hell with him, he thought bitterly. The hell with patriotism in general. In the specific and the abstract. Birds of a feather, soldiers and cops. Anti-intellectual and anti-Negro. Anti-everything except beer, dogs, cars and guns."

Philip K. Dick, Eye in the Sky.

Quotes 2017 #82

"If you turn your skin, flesh and fat inside out just like you do a sweater, you turn into a woman. You become a perfect woman, more real than any woman out there... Womanly women, sewing women, office women, anchor women---they are all fake. They are all men's women."

Kyoko Yoshida, "Kyoto Panorama Project."

小さなツアー、フランス／ベルギー

２本のドキュメンタリー映画の上映会のために、フランスのパリとリール、そしてベルギーのヘントを回りました。２本というのは畠山容平監督の『未来をなぞる』と河合宏樹監督の『ほんとうのうた』。前者は世界的写真家・畠山直哉の震災後の動きを追うもの、そして後者は小説家の古川日出男らとぼくが行った朗読劇『銀河鉄道の夜』全国ツアーを追うものです。

「２本の共通点は？」というと、それはぼくが出演していること！　まあ、それはどうでもいいのですが、震災後の日本のアーティストたちの動揺と迷いと戦いを、どちらも描いたものだといえそうです。

今回の上映は、リール在住の杉江扶美子さんとモルガン・フランソワさんが『ほんとうのうた』にフランス語字幕をつけてくださったことがきっかけとなって企画されました。 この映画はすでにダグ・スレイメイカーさんによる英語字幕があり、それはケンタッキー劇場をはじめアメリカの数カ所で上映されていますが、フランス語圏ではもちろん初めて。一方の『未来をなぞる』のほうは、写真家の畠山さんがリール周辺と縁が深いこともあって（彼はこの地方の炭鉱のぼた山の壮絶に美しい写真集を出しています）、一種の共演のようにして、今回の上映が実現することとなりました。

まずパリではINALCO（国立東洋語・文明学院）で、 １５日に『未来をなぞる』、１６日に『ほんとうのうた』を上映。ぼくは前者では上映後の質疑応答、後者では上映前のイントロと上映後の質疑応答をこなしました。ついでリールでは、外国語書籍専門店V.Oの地下室で、１７日に『ほんとうのうた』、１８日に『未来をなぞる」。さらに２０日にはヘント大学に場を移し、『ほんとうのうた』の英語字幕版を上映しました。いずれも活発な質問があり、みなさんが熱心に見てくれたことがはっきりとわかる、いい上映会になりました。

改めていうまでもなく、こうしたすべては６年前の東日本大震災をきっかけとしてそれぞれの人生に生じた、新たな苦闘と模索を反映しています。簡単に結論づけられることは何もありませんが、問いはつねに新たに、そして何度でもよみがえりつつ、私たちにむかってきます。

いまも終息にはほど遠い福島第一原子力発電所の状況をはじめ、あの日はっきりと変わった日本社会は、いよいよその亀裂と苦悩を深くしています。出口はどこにも見えません。

もう一度あの日に戻り、すべてを考え直しましょう。物質的にも精神的にも、われわれはどんな社会を望んでいるのか。そのかたちは、世界の他の地域、他の国々の人々との対話により、しだいにはっきりしてきます。 そんな対話の材料を、これらのドキュメンタリーが提供できるように、ぼくには思えます。

お世話になった杉江さん、フランソワさん、お招きいただいたパリのアンヌ坂井先生、ヘントのアンドレアス・ニーハウス先生、ミック・デネッケー先生、ほんとうにありがとうございました！

Quotes 2017 #81

"Among these plants is the 'corpse vine' (AYAHUASCA), which produces the curative hallucinations of the shaman who, in his spiritual voyages, envisages the investiture of kinship in the forest, as when he sees a forest tree as full of people. His soul travels beyond the confines of the living and the dead into the generalized and depersonalized worlds of the forest and the river, which have been created and are maintained by 'owners' variously described as mothers, anacondas, and beautiful tall white foreigners. 

Though the owners are usually indifferent to humans, they do inflict sickness and death on those who must inevitably invade their domains to survive---to hunt, fish, and farm. It is the shaman who must intervene, paradoxically, by means of the very plant, ayahuasca, whose source of power lies with the owners. He comes to see, as the spirits do, human settlements in the depth of the river and the center of the forest. By sharing the spirits' food and listening to their powerful songs, he mediates between them and the Piro."

Vincent Crapanzano, Negative Horizons.

Quotes 2017 #80

"Bill took out his guitar and began to sing country-and-western songs. The music too was something of a revelation to me. Country music when I was growing up in a redneck town seemed mostly about truckdriving and reactionary Okies from Muskogee, and in the metropolis I moved to, it never intruded itself much on my consciousness. My parents were immigrants' kids, with no more relationship to the culture of the American outback than to the landscape in which they raised us. I had dismissed country as a syrupy retrograde stuff, but the songs Bill sang had a wit and rancor that caught me by surprise."

Rebecca Solnit, Savage Dreams.

Quotes 2017 #79

"The amount of water suspended in the air in the form of cloud is enormous. A small cumulus cloud, 'like a man's hand,' may hold anything from a hundred to a thousand tons of water in suspension. A large cumulus cloud is a mountain of water drops and ice crystals, weighing perhaps a hundred thousand tons, and no meaningful figure can be given for the weight of the deep layer-cloud systems that accompany the depressions of the temperate latitudes."

O.G. Sutton, Understanding Weather.

Quotes 2017 #78

"Emerging from the cinema's cave, drenched in luminous shadows, she liked to keep the silver secret to herself. Whenever she closed her eyes, the back of her eyeballs would re-project the film on the hemispheric screen inside her scull."

Kyoko Yoshida, "They Did Not Read the Same Books."

Quotes 2017 #77

"We decided that this pole told the story of the Bear Mother, kidnapped by a young bear chief (who of course assumed human form when he reached his home and removed his shaggy coat), of their marriage and the twin, half-human cubs she bore, and of the sacrificial death of the Bear Father so the twins could be returned to their human kindred and become the first ancestors of the bear clan."

Bill Reid, "Totem."

Quotes 2017 #76

"Ejaculation is at once a physiological and a linguistic concept. Impotence and speech-blocks, premature emission and stuttering, involuntary ejaculation and the word-river of dreams are phenomena whose interrelations seem to lead back to the central knot of our humanity. Semen, excreta, and words are communicative products."

George Steiner, After Babel.

Quotes 2017 #75

"In a movement so fast it was finished before I grasped it, the first man shot a large jackrabbit, which he leaned down to snatch from the grass without dismounting. He gutted it with a small sharp tool and spilled the intestines out as we rode along. His movements were as deft as a weaver's, and I felt an unexpected pleasure watching him."

Barry Lopez, "In the Great Bend of the Souris River."

Quotes 2017 #74

"The oceans abound in squid. They form the sole food of sperm and bottle-nosed whales and are eaten extensively by dolphins, seals, and oceanic birds. Huge concentrations of squid hovering just below the illuminated zone of surface waters may even be responsible for producing the phantom bottom reflections that haunt echo soundings of the deeper ocean basins."

Lyall Watson, Gifts of Unknown Things.

Quotes 2017 #73

"You think salvation can function without damnation? You think virtue can exist without sin? That's the trouble with you atheists; you don't grasp the mechanics of evil."

Philip K. Dick, Eye in the Sky.

Quotes 2017 (extra)

"Nothing restores faith in the possibilities of world harmony as quickly as a well-tuned C-major chord."

Marshall Brown, The Tooth that Nibbles at the Soul.

Quotes 2017 #72

"What is psychoanalysis if it is not an attempt to derive and give authority to a verbal construct of the past? The past is to be re-called by present discourse, Orpheus walking to the light but with his eyes resolutely turned back. Free association and the provocative echo of the analyst are designed to make recollection or, more accurately, collection, spontaneous as well as significant. But whatever the methodology, the resurrection is verbal."

George Steiner, After Babel.

Quotes 2017 #71

"What I want, is TO BE what poetry evokes, which is to say what it creates out of nothing. It really is, as you were saying, something BEYOND poetry, quite the opposite of denigration."

Georges Bataille to Michel Leiris, 14 July 1943.

Quotes 2017 (extra)

"Deconstruction and mobility: these are the mental processes in which we discover that self-scattering which is the principal feature of Baudelairean desire."

Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud.

Quotes 2017 #70

"A psychoanalytic theory of fantasy can be most profitably brought into analysis of literary texts not in terms of specific sexual content, but rather in terms of the mobility of fantasy, of its potential for explosive displacements."

Leo Bersani, Baudelaire and Freud.

Quotes 2017 (extra)

"There were moments that spring when I felt as if Rorty was trying to cure us of our infatuation with the numinous and inviting us instead to live in a world where there was nothing more profound than zoning laws and recycling centers."

Michel Bérubé, "Introduction" to Philosophy As Poetry.

Quotes 2017 #69

"The Wolf of the Haidas was a completely imaginary creature, perhaps existing over there on the mainland but never seen on Haida Gwaii. Nevertheless he was an important figure in the crest hierarchy. Troublesome, volatile, ferociously playful, he can usually be found with his sharp fangs embedded in someone's anatomy. Here he is vigorously chewing on the Eagle's wing, while that proud, imperial, somewhat pompous bird retaliates by attacking the Bear's paws."

Bill Reid, "The Spirit of Haida Gwaii."

「見えない波α」

左右社サイトでのウェブ連載「見えない波α」１３回はぼくの回でした。

http://sayusha.com/webcontents/c16/p201703081941

ここに出てくる「メシャスベ」とはミシシッピ川のことです。

この連載、いつまでも続きます（という予定です）。

Quotes 2017 #68

"'Chicago gangsters,' Laws amplified. / 'Then into the Army to slaughter peasants and burn their huts. That's the kind of system we have; that's the kind of country this is. Breeding ground for killers and exploiters.' / Turning to his wife, he said, 'Right, honey? The kids taking dope, capitalists with blood on their hands, starving bums scavenging through garbage cans---'"

Philip K. Dick, Eye in the Sky.

「すばる」４月号

「すばる」４月号の特集は「あの人の日記」。ぼくは「アラスカ日記２０１４」を寄稿しました。５０枚ですから、そこそこ読みでがあります！　その後の「リワイルディング」をめぐる活動の発端となった旅でした。

非常に充実した、おもしろい特集。それに加えて、温又柔さんの待望の新作小説２００枚も掲載されています。 日頃、文芸雑誌を買うこともない人にも、お勧めできる号です。

Quotes 2017 #67

"We should cut Fanon a little slack here when he reads literature as evidence, understand that he is reading the text as mind, as he would in his practice read minds as text. We cannot imitate him absolutely. The mind doctor does it one-on-one, not just in groups, and therefore when Fanon says that it is not just individual but social, we have to believe him more. What I am trying to do is to talk about subject position. And when he reads literature as evidence, we have to understand his protocols and not imitate him, as socialism attempted to imitate Marx."

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Readings.

Quotes 2017 #66

"[George] Wallace is actually a crucial figure here. Nowadays, Americans mainly remember him as a failed reactionary, or even a snarling lunatic: the last die-hard Southern segregationist standing with an axe outside a public school door. But in terms of his broader legacy, he could just as well be represented as a kind of political genius. He was, after all, the first politician to create a national platform for a kind of right-wing populism that was soon to prove so infectious that by now, a generation later, it has come to be adopted by pretty much everyone, across the political spectrum."

David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules.

「IMA」１９号

写真雑誌「IMA」１９号にフォンクベルタ＋フォルミゲーラ『秘密の動物誌』から７点の写真が掲載されています。なつかしい！　これに合わせて解説的エッセーを寄稿しましたので、ぜひごらんください。本はいまも、ちくま学芸文庫で手に入るよ。

Quotes 2017 #65

"This visit to Paris made a very great impression upon Gertrude Stein. When in the beginning of the war, she and I having been in England and there having been caught by the outbreak of the war and so not returning until October, were back in Paris, the first day we went out Gertrude Stein said, it is strange, Paris is so different but so familiar."

Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas.

Quotes 2017 #64

"He was sometimes difficult to talk to, because he had no interest in facile or socially polite conversation, lunch party talk. His conversation was about things that mattered to him, and he was not made uncomfortable by hesitations or breaks in an exchange. His silences appeared to be measuring and sometimes made me anxious. It was years before I understood that his habit was to brood until he felt moved to respond."

Alec Wilkinson, My Mentor.

"He" is William Maxwell.

Ghost Stories Night!

Those of you in the LA area, please come to our reading event tonight. It's called Ghost Stories Night and presented by the Urban Humanities Initiative and the Yanai Initiative. Student's work based on the Little Tokyo workshop of last Sunday, my poetry and slideshow of Minami Soma, Fukushima and Furukawa Hideo's reading of Lafcadio Hearn's Mimi nashi hoichi!

At Decafe, Perloff Hall, UCLA, 7 to 9 pm.

Quotes 2017 (extra)

"Often, a moment's impulse sets off a suicide. The day my friend Romain Gary killed himself, he called Geneva, where they were expecting him, to arrange a ride from the airport; he asked a nurse what medicine he should take; he had lunch with Claude Gallimard, his editor, to discuss taxes. He killed himself at the end of this ordinary afternoon."

Roger Grenier, "Leave-taking" in Palace of Books.

Quotes 2017 #63

"Throughout the country confrontations between intrusive groups and those previously settled in this place or that---what Indonesians call PENDATANG (newcomers) and ASLI(oroginals)---have led not just to sectarian eruptions but to ethnic, cultural, tribal, ideological, and economic ones as well. (Petroleum deposits, being place-bound, are not---as Nigeria also demonstrates---altogether conducive to national unity.) If, as I believe, neither the separation of Indonesia into more workable and homogeneous parts nor the integration of it under the aegis of a pervasive, difference-drowning identity is, save perhaps here and there, on the cards, the country will have to develop effective ways of containing and stabilizing such multiplex and multiform differences---something it has hardly as yet begun to do."

Clifford Geertz, Life Among the Authors.

Quotes 2017 #62

"Criticism begins, in other words, with reading: by responding to the implicit appeal made by the work (or, better perhaps, the promise of the work-to-be) to the contingent, always future reader dormant in each and every one of us."

Leslie Hill, "Affirmation Without Precedent."

Quotes 2017 #61

"Dead people never stop talking. Maybe because death is not death at all, just a detention after school. You know where you're coming from and you're always returning from it. You know where you're going though you never seem to get there and you're just dead. Dead. It sounds final but it's a word missing an ING."

Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings.

「水牛のように」３月号

更新されました。「狂狗集」の旅はつづく。

http://suigyu.com/2017/03

Quotes 2017 (extra)

"I believe that I have experienced waiting in its purest form, by which I mean waiting without waiting for anything."

Roger Grenier, "Writing and Eternity."

Quotes 2017 #60

"As we already found in the case of the shingle beach, seen from the perspective of the sea the ground is much more complex and dynamic that we might have thought. Far from being the hard surface of materiality that we had imagined, upon which all else rests, it reappears as a congeries of heterogeneous materials, thrown together by the vicissitudes of life in the weather world. Indeed wherever we look, the ground bears witness to the liveliness of the processes that have gone on or are going into its formation---to the effects of rain, wind, frost and so on."

Tim Ingold, Being Alive.