Lars Iyer's Blog, page 44

Many attempted in vain to say the most joyful things joyf...

Many attempted in vain to say the most joyful things joyfully; here, finally, they are expressed in mourning.

Hoelderlin

John Williams reviews Wittgenstein Jr for the New York Ti...

John Williams reviews Wittgenstein Jr for the New York Times.

Galley Beggars have reissued Denton Welch's A Voice Throu...

Galley Beggars have reissued Denton Welch's A Voice Through a Cloud as a digital classic, with my introduction.

Brief review of Wittgenstein Jr as one of '8 books you ne...

Brief review of Wittgenstein Jr as one of '8 books you need to know' in GQ.

You ask what I mean by the 'nothingness' of revelation? I...

You ask what I mean by the 'nothingness' of revelation? I understand by it a state in which revelation appears to be without meaning, in which it still asserts itself, in which it has validity but no significance. A state in which the wealth of meaning is lost and what is in the prfocess of appearing (for revelation is such a process) still does not disappear, even though it is reduced to the zero point of its own content, so to speak.

Scholem in a letter to Benjamin

Surely one of the things that make it so difficult to wri...

Surely one of the things that make it so difficult to write about Sebald, to say anything genuinely new or revelatory about his work, is that he has done so much himself to frame the discourse of his own reception, to provide in advance the terms for critical engagement with the work; his fiction already practices a rather efficient sort of autoexegesis that leaves the critic feeling a certain irrelevance (the posture of awestruck adoration that one finds in so much of the critical literature is, I think, one of the guises such irrelevance assumes). 

Eric Santner, On Creaturely Life

... melancholy, the contemplation of the movement of misf...

... melancholy, the contemplation of the movement of misfortune, has nothing in common with the wish to die. It is a form of resistance. And this is emphatically so at the level of art, where it is anything but reactive or reactionary. When, with rigid gaze [melancholy] goes over again just now things could have happened, it becomes clear that the dynamic of inconsolability and that of knowledge are identical in their execution. The descriptino of misfortune includes within itself the possibility of its own overcoming.

Sebald, cited by Santner

I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everyth...

I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of. Everything passes into it now. I don't know what happens there.

Rilke, Malte

Will Rees's extremely interesting review of Wittgenstein ...

Will Rees's extremely interesting review of Wittgenstein Jr for the Quietus.

The characters themselves don’t really develop at all; it is that which binds them together—friendship, disappointment—which grows. It is this, the apparent background to the novel’s action, that shines through.

Sitting before my little fire, I know, when the wind blow...

Sitting before my little fire, I know, when the wind blows outside, moaning in the fieldstone chimmney I caused to be built for ornament, shrieking in the gutters and the ironwork and trim and trellises of the house, that this planet of America, turning round upon itself, stands only at the outside, only at the periphery, only at the edges, of an infinite galaxy, dizzingly circling. And that the stars that seem to ride our winds cause them. Sometimes I think to see huge faces bending between those stars to look through my two windows, faces golden and tenuous, touched with pity and wonder; and then I rise from my chair and limp to the flimsy door, and there is nothing; and then I take up the cruiser ax (Buntings Best, 2 lb. head, Hickory Handle) that stands beside the door and go out, and the wind sings and the trees lash themselves like flagellants and the stars show themselves between bars of racing cloud, but the sky between them is empty and blank.

Gene Wolfe, Peace