brute facts

Well, the choice at Readings: Lesbian Bedtime Stories, Franzen, Dalrymple, Aristotle's ethics. It seems as if almost everything is in that very small bookshop-except the books you really want. The books are there, like so many facts stacked on the shelves, all perfectly aligned, and all you have to do is sift through them and choose...

So, you went back to what you had on your desk at home: The Vertigo Years. Reads a bit like that Johnson book on modernity. A bit like rushing through the history of the world via newspaper clippings: the ordinary, startling aspirations and stupidities of human history. Fact piled on top of fact. Interesting detail upon detail: from a poetic fragment to a scientific discovery; from a rambling discussion on walking to the political dissolution of a world in flux (and when wasn't the world in flux?). Your head begins to spin (perhaps that's the desired effect?).

And this book seems much the same. Crowd the whole world into a few pages. The endless whirl of entertaining tidbits and anecdotes, the unusual and funny, the weird and wonderful. Spliced up (Splissen), this is what you note:

Felix Salten, the creator of Bambi, also wrote the pornographic Josefine Mutzenbacher (1906).

The escape from the lack of political representation into pleasure or culture (or fundamentalism, perhaps?). [Was thinking when I read this: you used to get these miniature busts of Beethoven, Mozart, etc in your packets of Cornflakes!]

Freud...Zzzz (or maybe that's just a bit of repression creeping in there!)

Scnitzler's work aimed to "show the repressed and bewildered people on the page and on stage acting out their neuroses like electrons spinning around an empty core..propelled by unseen forces"

[Good grief! Haven't you got anything better to do?)

Language could not be relied upon...blah..blah..blah.

Reason, Truth, Nature, God. The stable world of the belle epoque. All suddenly seem a bit less real (which is to say: not real). Then what? The desiring self-or maybe not even that, for aren't we just neurons firing away in the dark abyss, or the product of vast evolutionary forces beyond our control ("A death withstood..." said the miserable bastard)..a dying animal?

"There was nothing but physiology, everything else was make-believe...Man was nothing but a mass of highly unstable perceptions creating the impression of personality."

All is provisional, in ferment, relative. The illusion of stability, of civilisation, of there being one perspective must now be put to one side. There are no more guarantors or anchors, and no more vantage points. The heart of darkness. Sovereign becoming. Learn to laugh at the human farce. Go back to the fundamental, first principles (if there are any)...the basic structure: in architecture, in music. The primitive and collectivism as an antidote. The Man of Destiny.

Loos: "This furniture lacks all style..It is a style that will not last. After it, the style of 1899 will have its day, and will be entirely different."

Singular, Unique. Singular...

This is as good as it gets.

"There was no titillation in Schiele's existentialist explicitness, no inviting curves...his were angular, breathing creatures, lonely at the very moment of embrace..[they] looked into the world with eyes wide open, shining with fear or alive with defiance, or deep loneliness; their hands either iconic claws or missing altogether...These hands do not give the warmth of human closeness, they do not grasp the world...his figures are not in touch with one another."

Bacon? Raw, quivering flesh is all there is.

Well, anyone who's been reading this blog will know my views on all this. So, I won't bore you, dear reader. Except to say, I'm sure you can guess which book I bought.