'Close reading is a genre that turns quotations into evidence for well-crafted arguments made beautifully.'

Stardust on the audio.

'A life without speech and without action… is literally dead to the world; it has ceased to be a human life because it is no longer lived among men.'

'Translation, then, does two things and relates to language in two ways. It redirects the arrow that exists on a social, interpersonal plane, running from one person, duo, or community to another. The old audience is replaced with a new audience (speakers of another language). In this case, the language of the translated text is different than the original language: for example, it is English instead of Russian. At the same time, translation re-creates the arc, fashioning a new text that incarnates "the same" movement, but starting off from the baseline of a different language. In this sense, the language of the translated text does the same thing—moves in the same sens—as the original text. This is how I would unpack the universally acknowledged truth that a translation has to be "the same as but different than" the original: different arrow, same arc.'

’There is a characteristic myopia of the project. Repetition of a sequence of actions according to a set procedure is often central and one of its effects is to neutralize the teleology of continuous narrative. But repetition has its positive aspects as it focuses attention on minute variations. This allies the project to a kind of knowledge linked to process—Perec’s ‘émergence’(emergence). Repetition fosters a different sort of attention by numbing customary activities. Its temporality is that of progressive ‘tuning in’ to a particular level of existence, a new mode of attention that is responsive to the uneventful, to what is initially hidden by habit. Projects often succeed in making visible what is already there, not hidden but lying on the surface. By diverting attention from a goal to the carrying out of a repeated, preordained programme, the project creates its own intermediate spatio-temporal zone. In so doing, it generates attention to the present, to the unresolved matter of what is still in process (the process may be the spectator’s current flow of awareness). The project is a frame, but nothing that comes to fill that frame can be said to complete or realize the project, which always remains open and unfinished. Yet within its framework a shift, essentially a shift of attention, takes place. The project brings us into proximity with something that might have seemed familiar, but which we now acknowledge more fully. In this sense we can see at work in the project the interface of alienation and appropriation that is central to thinking about the everyday.’

'This interaction has certain aspects that we will leave aside, for example the traditional links of social time to religious beliefs and prescriptions. We shall devote ourselves to only the rhythmic aspect of everyday time. The study of everyday life has already demonstrated this banal and yet little-known difference between the cyclical and the linear, between rhythmed times and the times of brutal repetitions. This repetition is tiring, exhausting and tedious, while the return of a cycle has the appearance of an event and an advent. Its beginning, which after all is only a recommencement, always has the freshness of a discovery and an invention. Dawn always has a miraculous charm, hunger and thirst renew themselves marvelously … The everyday is simultaneously the site of, the theatre for, and what is at stake in a conflict between great indestructible rhythms and the processes imposed by the socio-economic organisation of production, consumption, circulation, and habitat. The analysis of everyday life shows how and why social time is itself a social product. Like all products, like space, time divides and splits itself into use and use-value on the one hand, and exchange and exchange-value on the other. On the one hand it is sold and on the other it is lived.'

'Fated to suffer; revealed to be brute to the core, our being pulsing to the same beat as the stirrings of the polyp and the sap that rises in plants. Philosophy has always seen itself as being in the business of discovering truth. The riddle of existence, in Schopenhauer's view, had been solved. Yet after philosophical truth has been achieved, one is entitled to ask: where to? Or again: can this truth be lived, and enter fruitfully into our mode of living? To this question, Schopenhauer's answer took two forms, both of which appeared to modify the above view of the relationship of the human mind to the world, suggesting that the light of awareness—whose importance appeared to have been all but extinguished once assimilated into the rhythms of mindless being—had not entirely lost its place and its significance. And it was a significance all the more numinous given the view of reality that framed it, lending to the operations of the mind an aspect salvific in kind.'

'Nietzsche's resistance to decadence is a kind of asceticism—or we might better speak of an askesis—that can be understood in musical terms. The aim of Nietzsche's decadence-resisting askesis is the attunement of the soul with life. In its most literal sense, decadence simply means "falling down." But one can also read decadence musically, as a "de-cadence" in the sense of a loss of rhythm.'

A catastrophic hard drive failure has cut me off from most of my music for weeks now. Although it's not resolved yet, I'm back up, and I could at least start rebuilding. I'm stranded between different devices and computers old and new, and a lot of what I'm missing now is still there. A lot of what I might have lost for good can be gotten as easily as before. The only thing I stand to lose is the memories, or rather the record, the facts, that would be a spur to remembering—which, as years of making year-end lists have told me, is not necessarily something I will be able to do on my own, without the digital analogue to flipping through the shelves to see where your eye lands. The mood is oddly hopeful, though, like a blue sky, since I do sometimes feel a burden from all that culture, a need to know it better, make sense of it, to make good on having known it somehow, so that it's as if I am suddenly excused from many tasks, and free to choose new ones, or none. But already my empty new computer is acquiring its own library, sprouting like mushrooms. A desire to hear one new record led me back to one old one, several new releases led to more, a curiosity bender that started with looking up just one artist mentioned in a video led to a whole lot of them for good measure; and yes, a couple properly ceremonial re-christenings, the first, 'Top Billin' and elseqs 1–5. But mostly I haven't listened to any of it anyway, which is what keeps me hesitant to plunge back into anything permanent, certainly not before I know or decide whether the sky will remain blue. In any case, the odd devices around still have their satellite caches of music from before, and I mostly have reverted to what was on them, in a kind of recovery mode of my own, as if on a sojourn, traveling light. For a few weeks I listened to nothing but Skee Mask, and then it's been a couple weeks of nothing but Dots & Loops, over and over. I suppose I've played it a thousand times in my life. I suppose I'll play it a thousand more.