Michael Rizzo

"A hard full day, even full of nonsense, acquits me of nonfeasance, satisfies my conscience." #wirrn

*Epigraph to Jorge Semprun’s LITERATURE OR LIFE, my pristine “Used” copy of which is manifestly “No Longer Property of King County Library System.”

“Whoever wishes to remember must trust to oblivion, to the risk entailed in forgetting absolutely, and to this wonderful accident that memory then becomes.”—Maurice Blanchot*

“This gnostic conception is incompatible with the much more widespread one fostered by those for whom praxis primarily means transforming the world into an internment camp, thereby carrying History to its triumph.” #wirn

“The idea of creating a magazine in order to get an armband seems to me to correspond to the only conception of praxis suited to Benjamin: an act that opens the possibility of emerging from an internment camp, which is then History itself….

“‘In the beginning was the Press and later came the World.’…The World, its substance, is, from an industrial standpoint, a by-product; from a neo-Platonic standpoint, it is an emanation of the press. Facts issue from opinions by superfetation.” #wirn

“Instead, it took a genuine member of the *Herrenklub* of Berlin, a ferocious Germanophile like Julius Evola (he was never enrolled in the Fascist Party, which he despised for its ‘feminine’ softness), to arrive at the real conclusion, which could be only one: Stirner was a Jew.” #ibid

“The ‘unfathomable’ characters of Orson Welles tells us more about Stirner than whole bookshelves of studies on the Young Hegelians.” #wirn

“…the strolling of the schizophrenic, introduced by Georg Büchner in LENZ, doused with metropolitan poison by Baudelaire, unraveled with amiable despair in Robert Walser.” #wirn

“And the ‘lack of fidelity’ sounded like a rousing virtue for someone who, like Rönne, felt oppressed by sincere and truthful citizens, purveyors of public opinion. ‘The Conquest’ and ‘The Journey’ are variations of an archetype that is the polestar for the modern:…

I’ve only ever been fired from a job.

“‘To do things without knowing what they are’: This is how Adorno at Darmstadt described ‘the form of every artistic utopia today’: translating in his pathos Samuel Beckett’s dry ‘dire cela, sans savoir quoi….’” #wirn

How’s the Vila-Matas? I just ordered my copy.

“…remaining anonymous, part of a corps, a wolf pack.” #wirn

“The Equals took pleasure not so much in *pleonexía*, the original sin of lusting for power but, and they were unique in this, in playing police. For it was a more subtle and lasting pleasure: they could feel that other people’s lives depended on their decisions, while at the same time…

Finally trying out ChatGPT; I thought perhaps two long-hoped for books (an English translation of Javier Marías’s EL SIGLO and a biography of Ivan Gold) would be within its —and, consequently, my—reach. Alas; I guess I’ll revisit the project a few (hundred, probably) iterations from now.

“‘…no longer reads philosophical texts and is still silent in algorithms? Then perhaps it might once again be said: “I threw my life at all the winds in heaven, but I kept my thought. It is little—it is all, it is nothing—it is life itself.”’” #wirn

“‘Thought: go and scatter it, tear it to pieces, so that it will be reminded of its furtive and lethal existence. O Literature, how many unfortunate functions were attributed to you, as to a fickle woman, eager for new clothes: couldn’t you, every now and then, give hospitality to that being that…

“But Busby Berkeley’s remark was true at Versailles long before Hollywood: ‘There is no comeback for a has-been.’” #wirn

“In 1908, during twelve weeks of visionary experience, the first post-historical city appeared to Alfred Kubin: its name was Pearl.” #wirn

I only knew of one “The Delinquents,” so this had me confused for a moment.

“[It] allows us to see much more than death in the death of Kleist; we take notice not just of his exit but of his entrance—his entrance among the living, with whom, during his life, Kleist was never able to realize such strong connections as came to be established following his suicide.” #ibid

“The death of Werther was ‘fictional,’ that of Kleist was ‘real.’ The difference, though, is relative. Both are symbolic deaths in the sense that Jean Baudrillard uses the term symbolic: as something that dissolves the rigid differentiation between the real and imaginary….

“I don’t know if Mishima ever read Kleist. It is likely that he did; manifold Japanese translations of MICHAEL KOLHAAS are available, and apart from Hungary, the only country to publish the complete works of Kleist in translation—including his correspondence—is Japan.” #ibid

“It is certain that they did not want to imitate Werther—but what is equally certain is that they could not not imitate Werther.” #ibid

“…On the day before the double suicide, they referred to themselves as ‘two happy balloonists,’ who, like Eduard and Ottilie…finally have broken free from the world’s sphere of affinity.” #wirn

“Kleist was immersed in the works of Goethe. Purportedly, before the double suicide with Vogel, they both were reading ELECTIVE AFFINITIES….

“According to Michelet, the fiercest royalists were not perhaps the nobles, nor the priests, but the hairdressers.’ The slogan of the age—‘Return to nature’—had mortally wounded them. ‘Everything was moving toward a horrifying simplicity.’” #wirn

“‘…do you think we might perhaps discover their inner law, after a few centuries of observations?’” #ibid

“In [de Maistre’s] view, one fact alone remained unchanged in the history of the universe: the spilling of human blood. Once I even found myself thinking he was mad, when he asked, fixing me in the eye: ‘If we had records of massacres in the same way that we have meteorological records,…