The World Is Mud-Luscious And Puddle-Wonderful*

Fig. 1. Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster - Untitled (Atlantic), 2009


'Unbeing dead isn't being alive.'

e. e. cummings

* 'The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful.' (e. e. cummings)

For Happiness Is An Allegory, Unhappiness A Story*

Fig. 1. Katsumi Watanabe - Untitled, ca. 1970 (printed 1985)


'What we seek is some kind of compensation for what we put up with.'

Haruki Murakami

*'Happiness is an allegory, unhappiness a story.' (Leo Tolstoy)

The Original Is Always Unfaithful To The Translation*

Fig. 1. Rose Farrell & George Parkin - Ladder (Pulleys, Dislocations and Counterweights, 1997 - 1998)


'In the critic's vocabulary, the word "precursor" is indispensable, but it should be cleansed of all connotations of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. His work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future.'

Jorge Luis Borges

* 'The original is unfaithful to the translation.' (Jorge Luis Borges)

Addendum:

'At this point [the end of the 1980s], we enter perhaps into that third and final moment in the history of appropriation, which we might call banality.

How is this banality to be characterised? As opposed to [the] first two moments of appropriation, it might mark the end of the idea of a history of Australian appropriation, either of writing a stylistic history of appropriation or of understanding the changes in the attitudes towards appropriation as a response to historical forces. Rather, this third stage of appropriation - the simultaneity of the same and the different, the original and the copy, the iconic and the iconoclastic - must be seen as the secret logic underlying the entire history of appropriation, what was at stake in both of those previous two periods. We pass from chronology or style to a logic of appropriation. But at the same time there is no longer anything at stake in appropriation. Even if it was only ever a fabricated or artificial distinction between those first two approaches, there were at least stylistic and emotional attachments to each of them: the first was activist, social, aggressive; the second aloof, personal, withdrawn. Now, neither of these attitudes would be possible any more. There is no longer an aesthetics or politics of appropriation, but only a rhetoric or logic: a logic that is unavoidable, irrefutable, final. We might say that the inescapabilty of appropriation has at least been grasped, the fact that it is the medium in which the practicing artist works; but there is no longer any stylistic or emotional way of making sense of this, no way of troping or transforming it artistically. Appropriation is no longer that which the artist attempts to master, but that which masters the artist; no longer a subject or theme within art, but that to which art itself is subject.'

Rex Butler

Hung Upon The Cheek Of Night Like Satan's Pearl*

Fig. 1. Monsieur Hire (Michel Blanc) in Patrice Leconte's Monsieur Hire, 1989


'Only when you are lost can love find itself in you without losing its way.'

Hélène Cixous

* 'Oh, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!
It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night
Like a rich jewel in an Ethiope’s ear,
Beauty too rich for use, for earth too dear.
So shows a snowy dove trooping with crows
As yonder lady o'er her fellows shows.'

Romeo (Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare)

Obituary: Pina Bausch - The World Moves On A Woman's Hips*

Fig. 2. Pina Bausch

* The Great Curve by Talking Heads

If On A Winter's Night A Traveller Such As Myself ... *

Fig. 1. Peter Booth - Untitled, 2006


'You enter the forest at the darkest point, where there is no path. Where there is a way or a path, it is someone else’s path. You are not on your own path. If you follow someone else’s way, you are not going to realize your potential.'

Joseph Campbell

* If On A Winter's Night A Traveller (Italo Calvino)

The Love That Dare Not Bleat - Or Bark - Its Name ...

Fig. 1. Gene Wilder and "friend" in Woody Allen's Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex But Were Afraid To Ask, 1972


'In late nineteenth-century Paris, certain maisons de tolérance specialised in exhibitions of women having sexual intercourse with dogs. For these cathouses, the Great Dane - a fashionable society dog - and the Newfoundland - which abounded in the suburbs - were the preferred canine performers.'

Marjorie Garber

The Only Empire Without Borders ... Or Civilisation

Fig. 1. Winslow Homer - Northeaster, 1895


'Generally speaking, a howling wilderness does not howl: it is the imagination of the traveller that does the howling.'

Henry David Thoreau