Category: Writing

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In search of the bohemian….

Reflecting philosophically, I have often attempted to examine the notion of bohemianism, to pin it down to some sort of tangible set of ideals and identities: all attempts have thus failed save to say that bohemianism is more a state of mind than anything else…
A friend of mine some time ago told me an anecdote about a group of Italian anarchists who turned up at a protest rally dressed in fine business suits. This clash of images provoked a completely perplexed response from the authorities who could not reconcile their dress code with the contradiction in their actual intentions.
Thus, bohemianism, like anarchism, should best be reserved as a ‘technique of mind’ rather than a code of dress that often presents mere images in place of deeply held sets of ideas or ideals.

[MN] 7 December 2021

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Blaise Cendrars: ‘On Grammar’

I ignore and despise grammar, which is at the point of death, but I am a great reader of dictionaries and if my spelling is none too sure it’s because I am too attentive to the pronunciation, this idiosyncrasy of the living language. In the beginning was not the word, but the phrase, a modulation. Listen to the songs of birds!

– Blaise Cendars in Paris Review Interview, The Art of Fiction, no. 38.

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William S. Burroughs: ‘On Travel in Time and Space’

“ I think the political and social chaos we are seeing on every side reflects an underlying biologic crisis – the end of the human line. All species are doomed from conception like all individuals. Evolution did not come to a reverend halt with Homo Sapiens. We have the technologies to re-create a broad artifact and to produce improved and variegated models designed for space conditions…”

– William S. Burroughs

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Julia Kristeva — The Vale of Soul-Making

When the starry sky, a vista of open seas, or a stained-glass window shedding purple beams fascinate me, there is a cluster of meaning, of colors, of words, of caresses, there are light touches, scents, sighs, cadences that arise, shroud me, carry me away, and sweep me beyond the things I see, hear, or think. The “sublime” object dissolves in the raptures of a bottomless memory. It is such a memory, which, from stopping point to stopping point, remembrance to remembrance, love to love, transfers that object to the refulgent point of the dazzlement in which I stray in order to be.

— Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. (Columbia University Press; Reprint edition April 15, 1982)

Julia Kristeva — The Vale of Soul-Making
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The Archaeology of Foucault update 12: archival work in Paris on drafts of The Archaeology of Knowledge and Foucault’s notebooks — Foucault News

Originally posted on Progressive Geographies: As the last update on this book said, I was able to make a trip to Paris over reading week. I spent most of the time at the BNF working on archival materials related to The Archaeology of Knowledge. There is a manuscript on philosophical discourse, probably written in 1966, which seems to be an…

The Archaeology of Foucault update 12: archival work in Paris on drafts of The Archaeology of Knowledge and Foucault’s notebooks — Foucault News