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Category Archives: Dichotomies
Character and Appearance
Edmund White States of Desire sums up the character of the gay men in Portland and Seatle thus Few people in the Northwest appear to be individuals, but many do think for themselves. Elsewhere the reverse is true: the originality … Continue reading
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Form of a Bifurcation
In Every Force Evolves a Form there is an essay on the painter Balthus, an essay structured as a series of aphoristic paragraphs. In one of those paragraphs, Guy Davenport draws what could be characterized as a distinction between experience … Continue reading
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Expression: Sensations and Representations
Malebranche offers an interesting take on the signifying limits of words. Consider this explanation from Thomas M. Carr Descartes and the Resilience of Rhetoric. The ideal use of words, according to Malebranche, is to communicate the pure ideas of the … Continue reading
Contrasting Pairs
Instead of an Index of First Lines, one wishes for an index of concluding lines. unbeingdead isn’t beingalive from e.e. cummings 73 poems last line of poem 31 And so for day 462 19.03.2008
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Zooming Past Theory
At first I thought it was a screed against jargon. Then I approached it as a defense of narrative in cognitive activity. None of this satisfied me. I am a believer in the big word for the big occasion and … Continue reading
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Necessary Luck
The Ottawa Citizen reprinted (Saturday, January 21, 1989) an essay “Our clever but shallow 3-minute culture” by Michael Ignatieff which had previously appeared in the British newspaper The Independent. The introduction pits depth against randomness: With great insight and originality, … Continue reading
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A Taste for Algebra
From a file folder from the early 1990s a typescript of a single paragraph with heading: Identity & Dichotomy Has it ever struck you that when one colour associated with X is taken up by Y, it means something Z? … Continue reading
Semicolons
Todd May in his book on Deleuze with particular style uses punctuation to vivid effect: a small arrest and then the flow resumes. Pages apart one instance of the form calls out to its other incarnations. Take for example: Machines … Continue reading
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Fugue
An ornate baroque escapade, a drift towards mania, a flight into fancy, laying tracks. In French the artist and the mad person are not so separate as might be suggested by Edmund White on Genet describing solitary confinements: If the … Continue reading
Travels
Via a 1970 imprint published at Kandy, Ceylon, by the Buddhist Publication Society and the scholarly work of Bhikkhu Nanajivako, a passage from The World as Will and Respresentation as translated into English by E.F.J. Payne, a passage bearing on … Continue reading