Palmyra

Knowledge has two forms : it is either intuitive knowledge or logical knowledge ; knowledge obtained through the imagination or knowledge obtained through the intellect ; knowledge of the individual or knowledge of the universal ; of individual things or of the relations between them : it is, in fact, productive either of images or of concepts.

– Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic, p. 1

Art is expression of impressions, not expression of expression.

– ibid, p. 13

Twenty Days of Turin

by Giorgio De Maria

Edit- one word I forgot to mention is creepy.

It’s pretty fitting that I unknowingly chose to photograph this passage, because I checked out this book out of relative spontaneity. I was leaving the library and I was right by the table of February releases. As I zipped up my jacket and got ready for the Artic Wind outside, I read the titles on the table, and before I knew it, I was physically browsing through the pages of the books. I picked up Twenty Days and I was instantly hooked by the writing. I read the book jacket and it was a winner.

The mystery is dark, anxious, and psychological. It’s officially under the ‘Magical Realism’ title, but I think ‘Magical (sur)realism’ is more fitting. The writing sucks you right in. It’s clear, clean, precise, and to the point. All the characters are dynamic and clearly so. The exchanges are made transparent to the readers, so there isn’t much reading in between the lines. If something is ambiguous, uncertain, or unknown, the readers are told so, instead of alluded to.

What I truly love about this book is that you have no idea what’s going to happen next, the character’s thoughts and actions are always interesting; it does not get boring. The narrator only communicates details of his life that pertain to the mystery of those Twenty Days in Turin, when the brutal and inhumane murders took place, after the founding of the Library. These murders were witnessed by the residents of Turin, but the town had been suffering from mass insomnia, and so at night, when these murders occurred, they were all out of it. Those who will speak of the Library (and the murders) can only remember non-human, metallic, searing scream(s). Except for the sister of one of the murder victims– she recalls the victim having a dream of a dried up lake. The Library was a space opened up by two youngsters, and instead of having published books, the youngsters encouraged the residents of Turin to bring in their own writings, diaries, whatever, for others to read. So the Library hosted only these writings, and residents read each others’ works which could apparently be depraved and terrible. For a fee, the reader could get information on the author, which would be a fellow Turin resident.

There is a relationship between the grisly murders and the Library, which encouraged the citizens to communicate with each other, but that relationship is left for speculation; along with the screams. The screams are first just low noises and then they turn into words and sentences, where the voices describe what they see. The role of the scream/noises/voices is eerie and hard to place as well, but it is felt viscerally.

De Maria’s ability to express the nuances of anxiety and fear in society makes this a true work of art. There’s nothing more I can say, because the short book (novel?) speaks for itself; except, maybe, that De Maria’s name next to Edgar Allen Poe’s is wholly justified.

It all seems like the tip of the iceberg

With Jeff Sessions confirmed, it’s like a new sheriff in town.

Stuart Elden’s articles

Rethinking the Polis Implications of Heidegger’s questioning the political

Man is everywhere a path for being, but is therefore flung out of all paths, essentially homeless, unfamiliar.

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There is a Politics of Space because Space is Political
Henri Lefebvre and the Production of Space

Lefebvre’s notion of everyday life suggests that capitalism, which has always organized the working life, has greatly expanded its control over the private life, over leisure. This is often through an organization of space.

II. The Production of Space

In recent years there has been a noticeable shift from questions of temporality to those of spatiality. As Frederic Jameson asks, “why should landscape be any less dramatic than the event?” In his work, Lefebvre suggested that just as everyday life has been colonized by capitalism, so too has its location — social space.

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Just as Lefebvre described the state as a “realised abstraction,”46 space too is a realized (in both senses of the word) abstraction. Here there is an obvious use of idealism and materialism together. Space is a mental and material construct. This provides us with a third term between the poles of conception and perception, the notion of the lived. Lefebvre argued that human space and human time lie half in nature, and half in abstraction

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I speak of an orientation advisedly. We are concerned with nothing more and nothing less than that. We are concerned with what might be called a ‘sense’: an organ that perceives, a direction that may be conceived, and a directly lived movement progressing towards the horizon. And we are concerned with nothing that even remotely resembles a system. (direct Lefebvre quote from La production de l’espace, p. 485. as cited by Elden).

Today

*The way the picture is, it could be a wine-bottle label.*

It is the pervading law of all things organic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things super-human, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law. :Louis Sullivan
– dr. Dickson Despommier, The Vertical Farm, p. 180

Nature abhors vacuum.
– ibid, p. 150