In any case, it is best not to inquire into how life, with all its contrasting developments, can impinge upon our love: the laws that govern such things, whether their workings are inexorable or just unexpected, seem to be those of magic rather than of rationality.
From Purple Diary:
The Fontaine Molière, part sculpture and part architectural element, next to Purple, 37 rue de Richelieu (1st arrondissement), (1841-1844), Louis Visconti, architect and Bernard-Gabriel Seurre and James Pradier, sculptors.
Photo: Olivier Zahm.
Cultural message into mass image…
Given that what is in question is not a ‘naïve’ analysis but a structural description, the order of the messages, the first is in some sort imprinted on the second: the literal message appears as the support of the ‘symbolic’ message.
What is the signifying structure of ‘illustration’? Does the image duplicate certain of the informations given in the text by a phenomenon of redundancy or does the text add a fresh information to the image?
This is without doubt an important historical paradox: the more technology develops the diffusion of information (notably of images), the more it provides the means of masking the constructed meaning under the appearance of the given meaning.
Even when the signifier seems to extend over the whole image, it is nonetheless a sign separated from the others: the ‘composition’ carries an aesthetic signified, in much the same way as intonation although suprasegmental is a separate signifier in language. Thus we are here dealing with a normal system whose signs are drawn from a cultural code (even if the linking together of the elements of the sign appears more or less analogical).
- Roland Barthes, Rhetoric of the Image, Image, Music, Text
And since rhetoric is then conceived exclusively as persuasion, as actual action upon others…
…asked by his wife whether he wants to have his bowling shoes laced over or laced under, Archie Bunker answers with the question: “What’s the difference?” Being a reader of sublime simplicity, his wife replies patiently explaining the difference between lacing over and lacing under, whatever this may be, but provokes only ire. “What’s the difference” did not ask for difference but means instead “I don’t give a damn what the difference is.” The same grammatical pattern engenders two meanings that are mutually exclusive: the literal meaning asks for the concept (difference) whose existence is denied by the figurative meaning.
Rhetoric radically suspends logic and opens up vertiginous possibilities of referential aberration.
For this deconstruction ends in a reassertion of the active performative function of language and it rehabilitates persuasion as the final outcome of the deconstruction of figural speech. This would allow for the reassuring conviction that it is legitimate to do just about anything with words, as long as we know that a rigorous mind, fully aware of the misleading power of tropes, pulls the strings. But if it turns out that this same mind does not even know whether it is doing or not doing something, then there are considerable grounds for suspicion that it does not know what it is doing. … Considered as persuasion, rhetoric is performative but when considered as a system of tropes, it deconstructs its own performance. Rhetoric is a text in that it allows for two incompatible, mutually self-destructive points of view, and therefore puts an insurmountable obstacle in the way of any reading or understanding. The aporia between performative and constative language is merely a version of the aporia between trope and persuasion that both generates and paralyzes rhetoric and thus gives the appearance of a history.
The ethical language of persuasion has to act upon a world that it no longer considers structured like a linguistic system but that consists of a system of needs…symbolic metaphorical meaning in the first part to a more contractual type of meaning in the second part…
- Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading
The ‘google books’ version may be found here.
Via BBC:
The Italian government has signed a deal with Google to put the contents of two national libraries on the internet.
Up to one million antiquarian books – including works by Dante, Machiavelli and Galileo – will be scanned and made available free on Google Books.
There is no copyright issue as all the works were published before 1868.
The Italian authorities welcomed the scheme as budget pressures have cut the amount that can be spent on preserving the collections in Rome and Florence. Mario Resca of the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage said the deal would help save the books’ content forever, noting that the 1966 Florence flood ruined thousands of books in the city’s library.
Previous attempts by Google to scan books have run into legal troubles in the US and France. A French court ruled that Google had committed copyright violation to the detriment of three publishers by scanning entire books or excerpts and putting them online. Google is appealing the ruling. And Google had to settle a 2005 class action lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and Association of American Publishers, which also charged the company with copyright infringement.
From Rapha, by Joe Hall:
Ernest Hemingway, American author and journalist, lived and worked in Paris during the 1920s. In A Moveable Feast, the book in which he writes of his time in the French capital, Hemingway describes trips to Parisian velodromes at the zenith of track racing.
“…the lonely absolute speed events of one man racing an hour against the clock, the terribly dangerous and beautiful races of one hundred kilometers on the big banked wooden five-hundred-meter bowl of the Stade Buffalo, the outdoor stadium at Montrouge where they raced behind big motorcycles, Linart, the great Belgian champion that they called ‘the Sioux’ for his profile, dropping his head to suck up cherry brandy from a rubber tube that connected with a hot water bottle under his racing shirt when he needed it toward the end as he increased his savage speed, and the championships of France behind big motors of the six-hundred-and-sixty-meter cement track of the Parc du Prince near Auteuil, the wickedest track of all where we saw the great rider Ganay fall and heard his skull crumple under the crash helmet as you crack an hard-boiled egg against a stone to peel it on a picnic.”
Similarly, see Tristan Bernard au Velodrome Buffalo.
Howard Zinn, 1922-2010
“His writings have changed the consciousness of a generation, and helped open new paths to understanding and its crucial meaning for our lives. When action has been called for, one could always be confident that he would be on the front lines, an example and trustworthy guide.”
- Noam Chomsky
Boston.com article on his passing.
J.D. Salinger, 1919-2010
J.D. Salinger, the legendary author, youth hero and fugitive from fame whose “The Catcher in the Rye” shocked and inspired a world he increasingly shunned, has died. He was 91.
Mr. Salinger died of natural causes at his home on Wednesday, the author’s son said in a statement from Mr. Salinger’s literary representative. He had lived for decades in self-imposed isolation in the small, remote house in Cornish, N.H.
“The Catcher in the Rye,” with its immortal teenage protagonist, the twisted, rebellious Holden Caulfield, came out in 1951, a time of anxious, Cold War conformity and the dawn of modern adolescence. The Book-of-the-Month Club, which made “Catcher” a featured selection, advised that for “anyone who has ever brought up a son” the novel will be “a source of wonder and delight—and concern.”
The rest of the Wall Street Journal article is here.
