Friday, June 24, 2011

Tomorrow night (Saturday) I'm going to be reading a short story I've written about Kreuzberg at a SAND event in Kreuzberg. Full details here.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

Nietzsche on the French Revolution in Beyond Good and Evil: "Noble and enthusiastic spectators across Europe have, from a distance, interpreted their own indignations and enthusiasms into it, and for so long and with such passion that the text has finally disappeared under the interpretation."

Also: "Every morality, as opposed to laisser-aller, is a piece of tyranny against both 'nature' and 'reason'. But this in itself is no objection; for that, we would have to issue yet another decree based on some other morality forbidding every sort of tyranny and unreason."

Also: "Even treating something in a profound or thorough manner is a violation, a wanting-to-hurt the fundamental will of the spirit, which constantly tends towards semblances and surfaces, –there is a drop of cruelty even in every want-to-know.
Big fan of this diagram from the Wikipedia page on comas.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Recently I was asked by Damian Barr on behalf of the new W Hotel in Leicester Square to be one of ten writers to choose ten books each for the hotel's library. I decided not to include any prose fiction because no one pays £500 a night for a room in central London in order to sit there reading Vanity Fair (which Bret Easton Ellis picked) from beginning to end. Here's my list:

Tuesday, June 07, 2011

Lorenzo Petrantoni's cover for the UK edition of Boxer, Beetle has won one of the 2011 V&A Illustration Awards.

Monday, June 06, 2011

Now that I'm sort of weakly trying to revive my brief training in philosophy, I decided I should read the Tractatus at last, and was pleased to find that it's very short. This is my favourite statement so far:

"4.463 The truth-conditions of a proposition determine the range that it leaves open to the facts.
(A proposition, a picture, or a model is, in the negative sense, like a solid body that restricts the freedom of movement of others, and, in the positive sense, like a space bounded by solid substance in which there is room for a body.)
A tautology leaves open to reality the whole – the infinite whole – of logical space: a contradiction fills the whole of logical space leaving no point of it for reality. Thus neither of them can determine reality in any way."

One imagines a series of spaces like rooms along a corridor – some airless vacuums, others filled all the way up to the doorway with solid concrete, most in between. Hotel Borges?

Also:

"5.511 How can logical – all-embracing logic, which mirrors the world – use such peculiar crochets and contrivances (Haken und Manipulationen)? Only because they are all connected with one another in an infinitely fine network, the great mirror."