Reading notes from July 2012.
In the beginning, sometimes I left messages in the street.
Somebody is living in the Louvre, certain of the messages would say.
[first 2 sentences]
Somebody is living on this beach.
[last sentence]
"In addition to remembering things that one does not know how one remembers, one would also appear to remember things that one has no idea how one knew to begin with." p. 61
86 - "Sculpture is the art of taking away superfluous material, Leonardo once said, if that is at all relevant?"
87 - "In any event all that any of these stories would appear to add up to, one suspects, is that many more people in this world than one's self were never able to shed certain baggage."
192 - "You will say I am old and mad, was what Michelangelo wrote, but I answer that there is no better way of being sane and free from anxiety than by being mad."
203 - "russet is not a name one gives to a color."
246 - afterward David Foster Wallace - "What if somebody really had to live in a Tractusized world?"
254 - 'In other words - the words of Tractus's first & foremost line - the world is everything that is the case; the world is nothing but a huge mass of data, of logically discrete facts that have no intrinsic connection to one another. Cf the Tractus 1.2 "The world falls apart into facts_" 1.2.1 "Any one [fact] can either be the case, or not be the case, and everything else remains the same."'
254 - 'Kate's textual obsession is simply to find connections between things'
255 - 'He [Markson] has made facts sad.'
cats, burnings books page by page, driving, art, artists, dread, linear but punctuated and layered time
Michelangelo sculpture as removing the unwanted
"Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it" Michelangelo
http://travel.nytimes.com/travel/guides/europe/italy/tuscany-and-umbria/florence/21184/galleria-dellaccademia/attraction-detail.html Michelangelo's theory that sculpture is an "art that takes away superfluous material."
erasing portions of a drawing http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/25846 From 1951 to 1953, Robert Rauschenberg made a range of artworks that explored the limits and very definition of art. These works recall and effectively extend the notion of the artist as creator of ideas, a concept first broached by Marcel Duchamp with his iconic readymades of the early twentieth century. With Erased de Kooning Drawing, Rauschenberg set out to discover whether an artwork could be produced entirely through erasure - the removal of marks from a sheet of paper rather than the addition of them to it. Rauschenberg first tried erasing his own drawings but found that the results fell short of the threshold he believed an object must cross in order to be considered art. He then decided that the starting point for the project must be a drawing that was undeniably an artwork of significance.
He approached Willem de Kooning, an artist for whom he had tremendous respect, and asked him for a drawing that Rauschenberg would proceed to erase. De Kooning agreed, somewhat reluctantly, and deliberately chose a drawing that would be difficult to rub out. After Rauschenberg completed the laborious erasure, he and fellow artist Jasper Johns devised a scheme for labeling, matting, and framing the work, with Johns inscribing the following words below the now-obliterated de Kooning drawing:
ERASED DE KOONING DRAWING ROBERT RAUSCHENBERG 1953
leaving the music on when getting to a destination and the next driver starts listening where the last stopped
no chapters; like the author read until you get tired or interrupted or distracted and then come back to it
http://howlingwithmirth.blogspot.com/2010/10/dog-eared-18.html David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress, page 134.
Practically every single day at Corinth, for instance, when I did remember to let the cat back in, I said good morning to it.
Good morning, Rembrandt, being exactly how I said it practically every single time.
Russet as a color that one automatically associates with Rembrandt having been the origin of this, naturally.
Even if russet is perhaps not a color.
In any case it is surely not a color that has anything to do with painting, although admittedly it may be a color that has something to do with bedspreads. Or with upholstery.
Although not being a painting a cat can be russet too.
And being russet is apt to be named Rembrandt.
Which in fact no less an authority than Willem de Kooning found to be a perfectly suitable name, on an afternoon when the identical cat happened to climb into his lap.
Perhaps I have not mentioned that my russet cat climbed into Willem de Kooning's lap.
My russet cat once climbed into Willem de Kooning's lap.
http://biblioklept.org/2012/01/31/list-of-rejections-of-wittgensteins-mistress-david-markson/
List of Rejections of Wittgenstein's Mistress - David Markson