Noel > Recent Status Updates

I’m going to read it with The Dialectic of Enlightenment (I’ll hopefully get through them next month).

I’m not hooked, tbh.

Set aside for too long. Will probably finish this week.

I just had my last French test today! I’m definitely at B1 now. (I’ve kind of fallen off with French reading since I’ve been doing so much of it for class.) Besides registering for the last course in the series (hopefully the last I’ll be able to take before I graduate), which should get me to B2, I’m trying to make a list of proper books that’ll be good practice. So far I have:

I was talking with some people in Her Majesty’s presence – or it may have been something I said as a result of her own words – and I remarked, ‘At times when I’m beside myself with exasperation at everything, and temporarily inclined to feel I’d simply be better off dead, or am longing to just go away somewhere, anywhere, then if I happen to come by some lovely white paper for everyday use and a…

On a bright moonlit night, when your carriage is crossing a stream, it’s lovely the way the water will spray up in shining drops at the ox’s tread, like shattered crystal.

Things that are near yet far – The Miyanobe Festival.

Relationships between siblings or relatives who don’t like each other.

The winding path up to Kurama Temple.

The first day of the new year, seen from the last day of the old.


Things that are far yet near – Paradise.

The course of a boat.

Relations between men and women.

Things now useless that recall a glorious past – A fine embroidery-edged mat that’s become threadbare.

A screen painted in the Chinese style, that’s now turned dark and discoloured and developed a scarred surface.

A painter with poor eyesight.

A switch of false hair seven or eight feet long, that’s now fading and taking on a reddish tinge.

Grape-coloured fabric when the ash dye has turned.

[…]

It’s beautiful the way the water drops hang so thick and dripping on the garden plants after a night of rain in the ninth month, when the morning sun shines fresh and dazzling on them. Where the rain clings in the spider webs that hang in the open weave of a screening fence or draped on the eaves, it forms the most moving and beautiful strings of white pearly drops.

I also love the way, when the sun has…

Awkward and pointless things – … In the grip of foolish jealousy, a wife takes herself off and goes into hiding from her husband, certain that he’ll come looking for her – but he’s in no mind to do so, and goes about his business with brazen indifference, so she must face the fact that she can’t stay away from home indefinitely, and finally decides to return of her own accord.

Things that lose by being painted – Pinks. Sweet flag. Cherry blossom. Men and women described in tales as looking splendid.

Things that gain by being painted – Pine trees. Autumn fields. Mountain villages. Mountain paths.

Winter is best when it’s fearfully cold, while summer is most summer-like when it’s impossibly hot.

Toward the middle of the twelfth month there’s a great fall of snow. The ladies decide they should have a snow mountain built in the garden. All the servants at home are asked to come help create an “absolutely towering snow mountain” under the threat of losing three days’ pay. The Empress asks everyone how long they think the mountain will last. Everyone gives opinions ranging over a week or two, but…

Things that create the appearance of deep emotion – The sound of your voice when you’re constantly blowing your runny nose as you talk.

Plucking your eyebrows.

(Finally on my reading break after days of being sleep deprived, so hopefully I’ll get through this the next week.)

Perhaps the strict and pure concept of art is applicable only to music, while great poetry or great painting – precisely the greatest – necessarily brings with it an element of subject-matter transcending aesthetic confines, undissolved in the autonomy of form. The more profound and consequential an aesthetic theory, the more inappropriate it becomes to such works as the major novels of the nineteenth century.

In “Wolf as grandmother,” Adorno contests the arguments of those who defend cinema as “popular art” against “the norms of the autonomous work.” According to him, they’re mistaken in comparing the film, with its “lying stereotypes” and its “barbaric cruelty that divides the world into good and evil,” with the greatest fairy-tales, “which have the stepmother dance to death in red-hot iron

[…]

The bad comrade.* – In a real sense, I ought to be able to deduce Fascism from the memories of my childhood. As a conqueror dispatches envoys to the remotest provinces, Fascism had sent its advance guard there long before it marched in: my schoolfellows. If the bourgeois class has from time immemorial nurtured the dream of a brutal national community, of oppression of all by all; children already

[…]

All the little flowers. – The pronouncement, probably by Jean Paul, that memories are the only possessions which no-one can take from us, belongs in the storehouse of impotently sentimental consolations that the subject, resignedly withdrawing into inwardness, would like to believe the very fulfilment that he has given up. In setting up his own archives, the subject seizes his own stock of

[…]

Expiry. – Sleepless night: so there is a formula for those tormented hours, drawn out without prospect of end or dawn, in the vain effort to forget time’s empty passing. But truly terrifying are the sleepless nights when time seems to contract and run fruitlessly through our hands. We put out the light in the hope of long hours of rest that can bring succour. But as our thoughts run wild the

[…]

Part Three 😮‍💨

On American hotels:

The division of labour, the system of automatized facilities, has the result that no-one is concerned for the client’s comfort. No-one can divine from his expression what might take his fancy, for the waiter no longer knows the menu, and if he makes suggestions of his own he must be prepared to face rebuke for having overstepped his limits. No-one hastens to serve the guest, however long

[…]

To happiness the same applies as to truth: one does not have it, but is in it. Indeed, happiness is nothing other than being encompassed, an after image of the original shelter within the mother. But for this reason no-one who is happy can know that he is so. To see happiness, he would have to pass out of it: to be as if already born. He who says he is happy lies, and in invoking happiness, sins against it. He

[…]

Talent is perhaps nothing other than successfully sublimated rage, the capacity to convert energies once intensified beyond measure to destroy recalcitrant objects, into the concentration of patient observation, so keeping as tight a hold on the secret of things, as one had earlier when finding no peace until the quavering voice had been wrenched from the mutilated toy. Who has not seen on the face of a man

[…]

Adorno’s views on race are even more irritating than his views on gender:

Mélange. – The familiar argument of tolerance, that all people and all races are equal, is a boomerang. It lays itself open to the simple refutation of the senses, and the most compelling anthropological proofs that the Jews are not a race will, in the event of a pogrom, scarcely alter the fact that the totalitarians know

[…]

(A perceptive, though negative passage I want to comment on.)

Since I set eyes on him.* – The feminine character, and the ideal of femininity on which it is modelled, are products of masculine society. The image of undistorted nature arises only in distortion, as its opposite. Where it claims to be humane, masculine society imperiously breeds in woman its own corrective, and shows itself through this

[…]

In his text, the writer sets up house. Just as he trundles papers, books, pencils, documents untidily from room to room, he creates the same disorder in his thoughts. They become pieces of furniture that he sinks into, content or irritable. He strokes them affectionately, wears them out, mixes them up, rearranges, ruins them. For a man who no longer has a homeland, writing becomes a place to live. In it he

[…]

Part Two.

De gustibus est disputandum. – Even someone believing himself convinced of the non-comparability of works of art will find himself repeatedly involved in debates where works of art, and precisely those of highest and therefore incommensurable rank, are compared and evaluated one against the other. The objection that such considerations, which come about in a peculiarly compulsive way, have their

[…]