Hermogen (Free subscription) | yesterday
The interpretation of dreams was for Freud an important element of psychoanalysis. What Roland Barthes later claimed about art, namely that there is no "noise", was for Freud the basic premise for entering the dream world. Phenomena that were believed to be banal, arbitrary and inconsequential, like dreams or slips of the tongue, fascinated Freud; not in and of themselves but as symptoms...
CAPES & FORESTS (Free subscription) | 27/11/2009
Waiting 6. A mandarin fell in love with a courtesan. "I shall be yours", she told him, "when you have spent a hundred nights waiting for me, sitting on a stool, in my garden, beneath my window." But on the ninety-ninth night, the mandarin stood up, put his stool under his arm, and went away. "What is to be done" 1. (...) Or else: I stubbornly choose not to choose; I choose...
Perverse Egalitarianism (Free subscription) | 26/11/2009
Here’s an interesting piece from Global-e: One day, way back in the 20th century, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Roland Barthes sat under an equatorial tree, living in their own imagined primitive past, discussing Global Studies. “What,” asked Barthes, “might the four of us contribute to a field that analyzes the world as a [...]
Chasing Ray (Free subscription) | 23/11/2009
So between the Winter Blog Blast Tour, finishing up my December column and a feature on NF for teens and a rush read/review job for Booklist (5 day turnaround), I feel like my life has been spinning around me while I stood in the middle with a glazed over look in my eyes and acute inability to focus. I have more notes on Thoreau to dump into my western book file, along with a few on Stegner and some...
Light reading (Free subscription) | 16/11/2009
From Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes : X tells me that one day he decided "to exonerate his life from his unhappy loves," and that this phrase seemed so splendid to him that it almost managed to compensate for the failures which had provoked it; he then determined (and determined me) to take more advantage of this reservoir of irony in all (aesthetic) language.
Light reading (Free subscription) | 16/11/2009
Reading Roland Barthes is amazing for many reasons, but the latest one is that by looking up the word decalcomania ("Fiction: slight detachment, slight separation which forms a complete, colored scene, like a decalcomania") I have learned the origin of the term decal ! (And: the decal craze of the late 1800s !)
A Canto A Day (Free subscription) | 16/11/2009
First, a thought about the crazy economics of book publishing. Where the Stress Falls by Susan Sontag is a collection of essays and speeches from the last 20 or so years of her life. As I've noted earlier, it's a beautiful looking book, and the production inside is just as clean and stylish as the cover. But at about 350 pages, and with no new content, the cover price of £12 is ridiculous. Waterstone's...
monochrom (Free subscription) | 16/11/2009
Roland Barthes died almost 30 years ago, on 26 March 1980, but his works continue to engage new and old readers with remarkable consistency. Books about him keep appearing: literary and philosophical essays by Jean-Claude Milner (2003), Jean-Pierre Richard (2006) and Eric Marty (2006), a gossipy biography of his last years by Hervé Algalarrondo (2006), a chapter about his piano-playing by François...
2 or 3 things I know (Free subscription) | 15/11/2009
that moment in cinema when capturing the human face still plunged audiences into the deepest ecstasy, when one literally lost oneself in a human image as one would in a philtre, when the face represented a kind of absolute state of the flesh, which could be neither reached nor renounced. — Roland Barthes
Light reading (Free subscription) | 15/11/2009
Umberto Eco on lists (courtesy of Marginal Revolution ). Michael Wood on Roland Barthes (courtesy of Paperpools )
<HTMLGIANT> (Free subscription) | 14/11/2009
From “Blind and Dumb Criticism” in Mythologies, translated by Annette Lavers: Why do critics thus periodically claim their helplessness or their lack of understanding? It is certainly not out of modesty; no one is more at ease than one critic confessing that he understands nothing about existentialism; no one more ironic and therefore more self-assured than [...]
PASSAGES (Free subscription) | 14/11/2009
Simon Patterson, The Great Bear, 1992 (detail) Roland Barthes' assertion of the 'death of the author' somehow evaporates when the object of one's writing is suddenly reading what one has written. While Barthes promoted the creative intervention of the reader in the experiencing of a work - or in the case of my current conundrum, the viewer - the sudden presence of the author ( director ) has a somehow...
Doodleblog (Free subscription) | 12/11/2009
"To hide a passion totally (or even to hide, more simply, its excess) is inconceivable: not because the human subject is too weak, but because passion is in essence made to be seen: the hiding must be seen: I want you to know that I am hiding something from you, that is the active paradox I must resolve: at one and the same time it must be known and not known: I want you to know that I don't...
Reflections (Free subscription) | 12/11/2009
How do we read this photograph of the artist Alision Lapper with her son Parys? Do Roland Barthes’ ideas help? source I am keeping a page as a list of responses to the seminal book Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. I will post additions as separate posts. Questions that are motivating this include; What is the spirit of photography? What can we learn from Camera Lucida – in our reading and...
The Untrusted (Free subscription) | 12/11/2009
Tibetan troops occupied the Tang dynasty capital of Chang'an for 15 days in 764. Plymouth became the first town in England to receive a charter from Parliament in 1439. Leon Trotsky was expelled for the Communist Party in 1927 and Seymour Hirsh broke the story of the My Lai Massacre in 1969. Born today: Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815-1902), Alexander Borodin (1833-1887), Auguste Rodin (1840-1917), Roland...
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