He was less interested in traditional coherence than in what he called jouissance: joy, surprise, adventure, pleasure — tantric orgasms of critical insight rolling from fragment to fragment. He proclaimed the death of the author and advocated a style of reading he referred to as “writerly,” in which readers work as active creators of a text.

"One winter, I read almost all of the ancient Greek plays. As a matter of fact I read them out loud. And throughout, finishing the reverse side of each page would tear it from the book and drop it into my fire."

David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress 

"Maybe what makes life so terribly fatiguing is nothing other than the enormous effort we make for twenty years, forty years, and more, to be reasonable, to avoid being simply, profoundly ourselves, that is, vile, ghastly, absurd. It’s the nightmare of having to represent the halt subhuman we were fobbed off with as a small-size universal ideal, a superman from morning to night."

Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey into the End of Night

“They were adored by the Germans, who thought they were exactly what Englishmen ought to be. They made war look stylish and reasonable, and fun. So the Germans let them have four sheds, though one shed would have held them all. And, in exchange for coffee or chocolate or tobacco, the Germans gave them paint and lumber and nails and cloth for fixing things up.” ~ Kurt Vonnegut: Slaughterhouse-Five

"He went home for a nap after lunch. He was under doctor’s orders to take a nap every day. The doctor hoped that this would relieve a complaint that Billy had: Every so often, for no apparent reason, Billy Pilgrim would find himself weeping. Nobody had ever caught Billy doing it. Only the doctor knew. It was an extremely quiet thing Billy did, and not very moist."

Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five p.50

"But this is not all: the fact is that I find in the day’s light, in this diffused, pale, almost shadowless luminosity, a darkness deeper than the night’s."

Italo Calvino, If on a Winters Night a Traveller p.53

"As they left the airport, the three of them noticed how bright it was in Sonora. It was as if the light were buried in the Pacific Ocean, producing an enormous curvature of space. It made a person hungry to travel in that light, although also, and maybe more insistently, thought Norton, it made you want to bear your hunger until the end."

Roberto Bolaño, 2666 a Novel.

"We’ll hunt for a third tiger now, but like the others this one too will be a form of what I dream, a structure of words, and not the flesh and bone tiger that beyond all myths paces the earth. I know these things quite well, yet nonetheless some force keeps driving me in this vague, unreasonable, and ancient quest, and I go on pursuing through the hours another tiger, the beast not found in verse."

J . L. Borges, The Other Tiger, 1960

some-velvet-morning:

Jean-Paul sartre’s letter to SPK:

DEAR COMRADES! with most great interest I have read your book. I found in your book not only the sole possibility to radicalize anti-psychiatry but also a consistent practice, with the aim of abolishing the “therapeutic methods” of mental illness which are altogether only so-called ones. (…)

accidentalformalist:

Francis Alÿs

The Nightwatch

Surveillance cameras observe a fox exploring the Tudor and Georgian rooms of the National Portrait Gallery at night.

pkam:

Hope Gangloff

(Source: the-unnamable)

cheatsheet:

motherjones:

npr:

nprfreshair:

hwentworth:

Internet’s over, people.  Maurice Sendak just won.

Fresh Air remembers Maurice Sendak

Higher praise there could not be. —Wright

Heavens.

!!!

Hey Pete, what are you doing? Me? Just drinking coffee and eating this great letter a friend sent me. 

Dearest France,

We got your back in New York City.

Yours,

Pierrot le Fou, le flâneur.

"I have always imagined that paradise will be some kind of library."

Jorge Luis Borges (via nypl)

"Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language."

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (via proustitute)