‘Perhaps the truly dangerous classes are not so much the uncivilised ones thought to undermine society from below, but rather the migrants who move at the borders between classes, individuals and groups who develop capabilities within themselves which are useless for the improvement of their material lives and which in fact are liable to make them despise material concerns.’
~ jacques rancière, ‘good times or pleasure at the barricades’
a review of enrique vila-matas’ never any end to paris
The book, or lecture, tells of the ‘farcical garret life’ of a writer ensnared in the error of becoming a writer. Becoming, perhaps, Vila-Matas, or else his nameless namesake, the lecturer, an old man immersed in the ‘irony’ of his ‘not having been aware of irony as a young man’. In a Borgesian take on the problem of types and tokens, the place where these identities overlap is the very place they diverge. The protagonist labours absurdly over his first novel, The Lettered Assassin, a project whose preposterous aim is ‘to kill its readers’. In reality, Le asesina ilustrada (1977) was the second of Vila-Matas’ novels. Do the two books coincide? Such questions are raised but never resolved, which is why Never Any End to Paris resembles an edge or an opening, not onto anything outside itself, but onto literature, a leap from a sheer drop, located within the book’s written limits. In this sense, the text may best be read as its own invention, with no prior knowledge of the life of its author. The true world the book opens onto is one where a writer called ‘Enrique Vila-Matas’ never existed. Let alone Hemingway. Let alone Paris.
read the rest at 3:AM Magazine
‘There is an underground literature here that no one knows and that is probably vaster than the visible: it was created in poignant leisure hours, often after a miserable day at the shop or the office. Manuscripts pile up in this diligence without effort, long novels and tomes full of accumulated autodidacticism.’
‘Raphael without hands would never have become a great artist but, since he was nonetheless Raphael, perhaps an even more faithful remembrance of ourselves.’
~ both from ernst bloch, traces
(photo from ‘demolished’ by rachel whiteread)
a review of mckenzie wark’s the beach beneath the street, and an interview with the author
If the spirit of an age is to be recalled and made “current,” then that currency can’t be crudely cashed out in a linear logic of actors and actions, causes and cases in point. No, we need a new model of memory, one that keeps its objects perpetually “in play,” not isolating “prominent figures” from the movement that moved them, or parsing out concepts in pockets of studious usefulness. Situations are fleeting and changeable things, and “they call for a different kind of remembering.”
read the interview at 3:AM Magazine
