ironedorchid:

Nietzsche Typescript, written on his writing ball: A Poem. Copyright: The Goethe and Schiller Archive, Weimar, Germany

The poem in English translation:

“THE WRITING BALL IS A THING LIKE ME: MADE OF IRON
YET EASILY TWISTED ON JOURNEYS.
PATIENCE AND TACT ARE REQUIRED IN ABUNDANCE
AS WELL AS FINE FINGERS TO USE US.”

(Friedrich Nietzsche, on February 16th 1882)

link

Amazing.

ironedorchid:

Friedrich Nietzsche’s typewriter, a Malling-Hansen Writing ball, model 1878. Photo taken by Dieter Eberwein.

© The Goethe and Schiller Archive, Weimar, Germany.

Hat tip to Burke from Bleak Theology for alerting me to its existence.

Of course this was Nietzsche’s typewriter. I mean, of course it was.

wehadfacesthen:

William Burroughs, 1960s

via youruniverseislovelyhubble

unbornwhiskey:

Don DeLillo: Cosmopolis

Don DeLillo has written one book and he hasn’t finished it. It’s sort of about capitalism and language and a kind of unchecked patterning of daily life, a code through which things are drawn into understanding. Then, the biological misshapes that disrupt and overrun this understanding. Waves and streams, glossing, weaving in and out of view. But lately, after reading The Body Artist and this, I think the Great DeLillo Work is about presence and absence—a thing is erased from existence, leaving impression, a material shadow. You leave your jacket on a barber’s chair, it is gone, not only there and away, but away from you, ringing you in unclaimed air. The layout of Manhattan helps. A man literally travels west, to an edge. An unknowable separation, a prehistoric, magnetic drift of land masses. There is a pattern, a system, a palm device which has worked for you up to this rupture. The patience that arrives in you, Christ, when you have met the edge of a system. Everything is slowed, and you are slower. You can predict the small migrations of a cigarette. And out, beyond the rupture? Unplanned space.

Reinterpreting Susan Sontag

readingmarksonreading:

     The first page of David Markson’s copy of The World of Franz Kafka by Various (Ed. J. P. Stern):

     On which Markson wrote as an inscription:
     “Markson
     Nyc, ‘81”

—

     “A grace to say before reading the Oresteia?
     Before Kafka?”
     - Markson, This Is Not A Novel, pg. 16.

     “Malcolm Lowry, seemingly serious himself, told a friend he once prayed to Kafka:
     And he answered my prayer.”
     - Markson, The Last Novel, pg. 116.

     “Ha! There is old Kafka, leading his orchestra. He must have been a splendid fellow, Kafka. I prayed to him once, and he answered my prayer.”
     Being the words that, according to pg. 219 in the Appendix of Markson’s Malcolm Lowry’s Volcano: Myth Symbol Meaning, Lowry had said to Markson.

     “An information bureau of the human condition, Theodor Adorno called Kafka.”
     - Markson, This Is Not A Novel, pg. 49.

     “As if written illegally, under fear of the police.
     Bertolt Brecht said of Kafka’s fiction.”
     - Markson, Vanishing Point, pg. 43.

     “Like a naked man among people wearing clothes.
     Milena Jesenská perceived him.”
     - Markson, Vanishing Point, pg. 43.

     He must have been a splendid fellow, Kafka.