questions

I find it very precarious for a culture only to be able to measure performance and never to be able to credit the questions themselves ... As the questions go up, the performance level goes down—and that's natural, since people don't yet know how to act on those questions, they're stumbling around in a fog—whereas when performance goes up the quality of the questions tends to go down.

robert irwin

in lawrence weschler's seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees

sandcast

lee simmons's grandioso, the door at 77 wimpole street.

what to read and why

... it's good when your conscience receives big wounds, because that makes it more sensitive to every twinge. I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.

franz kafka to oskar pollak (27.1.1904)

the benefits of pouncing

above—autumn: the pig slaughter; below—the numbering at bethlehem. pieter brueghel the younger, in "the bad shepherd," until 16 january 2015 at christie's on new bond street.

aesthetic value

Theorists are apt to vex themselves with vain efforts to remove uncertainty just where it has a high aesthetic value.

donald francis tovey, essays in musical analysis, vol. 3 (1936).