The Transparent Screen
joan | better than you
bush_tetra
   First, permit me to make a somewhat risky comparison: all works of art are like a window opened upon creation: inside the window there's a kind of transparent screen, across which one can see objects that are more or less deformed, undergoing changes that are more or less perceptible in their lines and colors. These changes are derived from the nature of the screen. Creation is no longer exact or real, but modified by the medium through which its image passes.  
 
 
Emile Zola in a letter to Anthony Valabrègue, 1864
 
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Easier said than done
joan | better than you
bush_tetra
Follow my example: break with the outside world, live like a bear—a polar bear—send everything to the devil, everything and yourself with it, except your own intelligence.
 
Flaubert's advice to Alfred Le Poittevin on becoming a writer
 

Stating the obvious
joan | better than you
bush_tetra
The thirteen volumes of Marcel Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu are the result of an unconstruable synthesis in which the absorption of a mystic, the art of a prose writer, the verve of a satirist, the erudition of a scholar, and the self-consciousness of a monomaniac have combined in an autobiographical work.
 
Walter Benjamin, "The Image of Proust"
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Why write?
joan | better than you
bush_tetra
The formation of words into comprehensible phrases was my way to  be private, publiclyto be a controlled exhibitionist...
- Toni Bentley, former ballet dancer for George Balanchine, on why she gave up dancing in order to write.
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The agony and the ecstasy
joan | better than you
bush_tetra
What makes us happy is the presence in our hearts of an unstable element which we contrive perpetually to maintain and of which we cease almost to be aware so long as it is not displaced. In reality, there is in love a permanent strain of suffering which happiness neutralises, makes potential only, postpones, but which may at any moment become, what it would long since have been had we not obtained what we wanted, sheer agony.
Within a Budding Grove

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Two mistresses
joan | better than you
bush_tetra
His continual visits to these two houses made, as it were, two kinds of music in his life: one wild and playful and amusing, the other solemn and almost religious; and as they were both vibrating in unison, they expanded and gradually blended, so that if Madame Arnoux so much as brushed him with her finger, immediately his desire would conjure up the other woman, if only because his chances of success in that direction were less remote; in Rosanette's company, if something happened to touch his heart, he at once remembered his True Love.

-- A Sentimental Education
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Hughes on Duchamp's "Large Glass"
joan | better than you
bush_tetra
One might suppose, from reading what has been written about it, that the Large Glass was the Grand Arcanum of modern art: it may be that no single work in the entire history of painting has evoked more cant, jargon, jibberish, and Jungian psycho-babble from its interpreters. Manifestly, the Glass must be a rich field for interpretation, because nothing on its surface is accidental (apart from the accepted accidents, like the dust that Duchamp allowed to accumulate there and then preserved with fixative, or the network of cracks that appeared in the twin panes after a trucking accident). Everything is there because Duchamp wanted, or put, it there. "There was nothing spontaneous about it," he remarked in 1966, "which of course is a great objection on the part of aestheticians. They want the subconscious to speak by itself. I don't I don't care. So the Glass was the opposite of all that."

So what's the Glass all about? A machine: or rather, a project for an unfinished contraption that could never be built because its use was never fully clear, and because (in turn) it parodies the language and the forms of science without the slightest regard for scientific probability, sequence, cause and effect. The Large Glass, carefully painted and outlined in lead wire on its transparent panes, looks explicit. But if an engineer were to use it as a blueprint he would be in deep trouble since, from the viewpoint of technical systems, it is simply absurd: a highbrow version of the popular "impossible machines" that were being drawn, at the time, by Rube Goldberg. The notes Duchamp left to go with it, collected out of order in the Green Box, are the most scrambled instruction manual imaginable. But they are deliberately scrambled. For instance, he talked about the machine in the Glass running on a mythical fuel of his own invention called "Love Gasoline," which passed through "filters" into "feeble cylinders" and activated a "desire motor" -- none of which would have made much sense to Henry Ford. But the Large Glass is a meta-machine; its aim is to take one away from the real world of machinery in to the parallel world of allegory. In the top half of the Glass, the naked Bride perpetually disrobes herself; in the bottom section, the poor little bachelors, depicted as empty jackets and uniforms, are just as perpetually grinding away, signaling their  frustration to the girl above them. It is a sardonic parody of the eternally fixed desire Keats described in his Ode on a Grecian Urn [...]

In fact, the Large Glass is an allegory of Profane Love--which, Marchel Duchamp presciently saw, would be the only sort left in the twentieth century. Its basic text was written by Sigmund Freud in The Interpretation of Dreams, 1900: "The imposing mechanism of the male sexual apparatus lends itself to symbolization by every sort of indescribably complicated machinery." But to Duchamp, who had reason to know, the male mechanism of the Large Glass was not a bit imposing. The Bachelors are mere uniforms, like marionettes. According to Duchamp's notes, they try to indicate their desire to the Bride by concertedly making the Chocolate Grinder turn, so that it turns out an imaginary milky stuff like semen. This squirts up through the rings, but cannot get into the Bride's half of he Glass because of the prophylactic bar that separates the panes. And so the Bride is condemned always to tease, while the Bachelors' fate is endless masturbation.

The Shock of the New
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