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‘That She is incapable of abstraction from the particular to the general implies She cannot understand the concept of law in its speculative application in science or its moral employment in ethics. Thus Weininger insists that Woman cannot be evil or anti-moral, only a-moral. The great paradox of femininity for Weininger is that W’s lack of a real self determines that all of Her acts are selfish.’ Gosh again!

“Man, has the same psychical contents as woman but in a more articulated form; while she thinks more or less in henids (granular percepts) he thinks in clear, distinct concepts linked to definite feelings which can always be removed from their objects.” W writes. The consequences of this inability to think clearly follow fast and furious: the nihilistic nature of Woman follows from her incapacity to abstract

‘In literature, the problem that Weininger addressed is precisely the one that Leo Tolstoy posed in The Kreutzer Sonata: how can there be moral relations between the sexes? It is scarcely a theme that we can recognize as a problem 100 years after the Jazz Age, which turned the tides in these matters. In Weininger’s view, only when men abstain from sexual relations with women are both truly human.’. (Gosh!)

Take him and think of him. He and think of him. With him think of him. With him and with think with think with him.

Is it almost like Sappho (erotic, cryptic, pointy):

‘Tea rose snuff box tea rose.
Willed him well will till well.
By higher buy tire by cry my tie for her.
Meeting with with said.
Gain may be hours.
There there their softness.
By my buy high.
By my softness.
There with their willow with with it out outmost lain out.’

I only not sure how it could be a portrait of Christian Berard or anyone for that matter.

What was what was what it was what is what is what is is what is what which is what is is it.

A sentence about nothing in a sentence about nothing that pale apples from rushing are best.

Remain remark taper or tapestry stopping stopped with a lain at an angle coloured like make it as stray.

English priest, Father Edward Taylor, to whom Toklas talked at great length before deciding to convert. (Taylor expressed some discomfort taking confession in a room decorated with paintings of naked women; Toklas made some small skirts and bodices from cloth and paper, and attached them to the Picassos before he arrived.)

The French people began, slowly, to recognise the atrocities their government had not only enabled but, in many cases, perpetrated.1 Many were eager to forget the fact that support for Pétain and the Armistice had been so widespread in 1940, and preferred to imagine that with the exception of outright collaborators, France had stood united against the enemy.

Lewis said:Paris literary world was dictated by a ‘Gipsy Queen’ (Stein) and an ‘Irish Exile’ (Joyce) ..Stein herself remained silent on the controversy, but Joyce replied within the pages of Finnegans Wake, which was then being serialised in transition. He denied any connection with ‘that eyebold earbig noseknaving gutthroat’ – clearly identifiable, to readers familiar with the saga, as Gertrude Stein.

She knew that her portrait had led the way to Les Demoiselles; that Picasso’s iconoclastic attack on classical ideals of female beauty had materialised, first, in the stripped-back, androgynous features he had given her, inspired by the Iberian sculptures he had seen at the Louvre in 1906. He showed his appreciation by acknowledging her as an equal. An envelope is addressed to ‘Gertrude Stein, Man of Letters’.

Schlegel:

‘A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and complete in itself like a porcupine.’

But her texts aren’t so much about that ostensible subject matter: rather, they engage with the way words work together on the page, recasting everyday experiences and perceptions in surreal mutations of language.

Yourcenar on behalf of Tommai dei Cavalieri, Michelangelo’s friend and possibly lover:

‘When men contemplate my picture, they will not ask who I was or what I did: they will praise me for having existed.”

I often look at a portrait in a gallery thinking exactly this though I’ve never articulated it to myself so well.

From the brilliant essay ‘The dark brain of Piranesi’. The passage is in the first comment due to lack of space here.

The four ‘natural environments’ which Yi-Fu Tuan believes ‘have figured prominently in humanity’s dreams of the ideal world’ are ‘the forest, the seashore, the valley, and the island’. Although suburbia tried to combine the forest, seashore and valley, it ended up recreating only the island… one that was cold, empty and isolated.

de Beauvoir: Gand Canyon or Niagara Falls: the most ingenious efforts have been made to transform a natural marvel into a kind of amusement park..… The tourist is offered every possible artificial means of taming this exuberantly natural spectacle. In the same way, people in America consume “conditioned” air…. Americans are nature lovers, but they accept only a nature inspected and corrected by man.

Rorty :In Detroit…one sees the bare bones of the cultural nightmare we Americans have dreamed for ourselves, believing, in our greedy haste, our barbaric innocence, that it was a thing we could live by and with; that human life could flourish as a kind of parasitic attachment to an inhuman, blind, valueless process, in which money begets machines, machines beget money, machines beget machines, money begets money.

A fragment from the poem ‘An jemand ganz Anderen’ translated as ‘To someone entirely different’ is in the first comment as it does not fit.

As the art critic Martin Herbert once said to me, ‘I don’t go looking for “ideas about photography” in that book; I read it for a certain kind of vulnerability.’ It’s that vulnerability that I value in Camera Lucida now, in Barthes’s writing in general, and in most or even all of the essayists I admire – no, love.

Enigma

for Hans Werner Henze from the time of the Ariosi

Nothing more will come.

Spring will never return.
Thousand-year calendars predict it for everyone.

But also summer, and everything else that has such fine names as "summery"—
nothing more will come.

"You shouldn't cry,"
says a piece of music.

Otherwise,
no one
says
anything.

Nothing seems easier, says Perec, than making (or is it writing?) a list; but it is really a complex undertaking. You are bound to forget something, and you will be tempted to give up, or let the thing tail off, and write ‘etc’ – ‘but the whole point of an inventory is not to write etc.’

‘..ability in an essay is multiplicity, infinite fracture, the intercrossing of opposed forces establishing any number of opposed centres of stillness’

It is not Brian though, but him quoting William Carlos Williams.

Enigma

So early in the evening and so late in the morning,
the room is always dark,
snow, fog replaced the reason,
how many winters already?

In the crack in the wall I saw in a moment of panic a black beetle who was playing dead.
Ta like to speak to him,
to show him a way out of this lovely house, to show him an exit, or stomp on him right away.

I learned something from him, I myself
am also playing dead, having fallen into the crack of Berlin, disappearing from the face of the planet,

(Cont in the first comment)

Ma Mussolini ha fatto anche cose buone, ‘But Mussolini also did good things’: a common phrase in Italy, increasingly so as distrust in democracy grows and social media creates fertile ground for historical revisionism. Spend enough time in the country and you will hear the words spoken, sometimes by the person you least expect. A good, kind person.

Spoken
and the light
went out,
written, and
a person crumpled
like an old dress.

I wrote a very short will when I was nine: I leave my telescope to Rupert. I thought about Rupert looking at stars their light refracted by tears.

‘A sense of my own strangeness, walking on the earth’, is how Virginia Woolf put it as she groped for what it was she wanted her writing to show. That, I think, is about as good a summing up of why we write fiction as I can imagine.