Status Updates From Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfi...

'Zidane’s text-over tells us in a near-perfect paraphrase of Gray’s, “I had a running commentary in my head, when I was playing. It wasn’t really my own voice; it was the voice of Pierre Cangioni, a television anchor from the 1970s—It wasn’t that his words were so important; but the tone, the accent, the atmosphere, was everything—you can almost decide for yourself what you want to hear.” Agency is editing.'

'Zidane is perhaps the closest Toussaint comes to meta-fiction—a classic melancholia—Like everyone else—(he) missed the incident itself, but saw it on the replay screen: always-already mediated, even for those present. If it’s violence that makes space meaningful, then Zidane’s act was the event par excellence—an embodiment of raw, animal consciousness in space, aware only of “le sentiment d’être là, simplement là.”'

'The unlikely combination is pure (Gerhard) Richter: a preoccupation with the everyday and un-adorned (a favourite expression of his, repeated in numerous correspondence, is Es ist wie’s ist: “it is how it is”), married to a sense of some kinetic violence lurking either at the heart of these or at the interface between them and the viewer.'

'As though also thinking of “hands busy about the work of the earth,” he writes: “Take the trouble to listen to a single word: in that word, nothingness is struggling and toiling away, it digs tirelessly, doing its best to find a way out, nullifying what encloses it”—No writer is more death-obsessed than Blanchot; and, for him, death is intimately tied in with the question of time.'