Tracing Romanticism

An account — travelogue — of my recent sentimental journey through Schwaben and Schwarzwald was published in the online journal Mustekala on 12-12-12, both in Finnish and in English, as slightly different versions.

How do you sleep at night?

There is no pillow as filthy as a clear conscience.

Image from Wikipedia.

René Char, « Aucun oiseau... »

« Aucun oiseau n’a le cœur de chanter dans un buisson de questions. » (René Char)

»Kein Vogel, der singen möchte in einem Gebüsche von Fragen.« (Nachgedichtet von Paul Celan)

“No bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions.” (Translated by Susan Sontag)

Kafka and Celan on "writing as a form of prayer"

"'Schreiben als Form des Gebets': An Impossible Form of Apostrophe? : 'P. S' on a fragment by Kafka as adopted by Celan." My article with that impossible title is also online now (PDF, 6 MB). It appeared five years ago in the volume edited by Päivi Mehtonen, Illuminating Darkness: Approaches to Obscurity and Nothingness in Literature (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters, 2007), 187–207.

The article contains, as its most important ingredient, my reading of Celan's poem "Wirk nicht voraus", different from another discussion of the same poem in my doctoral dissertation (see below) and more detailed.

"... et notre vrai moi n'est pas tout entier en nous"

"Notre plus douce existence est relative et collective, et notre vrai moi n’est pas tout entier en nous." – "Rousseau" in Rousseau juge de Jean-Jacques.*

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*Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau juge de Jean-Jaques [sic]. Dialogues, texte présenté par Michel Foucault (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1962), 156.

My article on Celan and Heidegger

My article on the encounter between Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger, entitled "'Undecidably Equivocal': On 'Todtnauberg' and Forgiveness", is now also available online. It was originally published in the volume The Event of Encounter in Art and Philosophy: Continental Perspectives, co-edited by Kuisma Korhonen and myself, in 2010 by Gaudeamus Helsinki University Press.

Many have no speech (2)

A voice breaks apart from voicelessness, which is not always silence, which is not always absence of sound or noise and need not even be an absence of voice; the voicelessness in which “many have no speech” can not always be “given voice”. Sometimes it is the breaking apart that must be heeded, an irruption, eruption, interruption.

¡El viva!

via Jari Jammu Hilden

My PhD thesis Counter-figures now in Google Books

Counter-figures: An Essay on Antimetaphoric Resistance. Paul Celan's Poetry and Poetics at the Limits of Figurality (diss., 2007, 398 pp.) is now available also via Google Books, free of charge.

Testing, testing...

This video gets stuck at 1m56s at its original address; let's see if it streams better as embedded... It appears to do so!

I was just listening to Peeter Uuskyla and Peter Brötzmann's wonderful duo album, Born Broke, and went YouTubeing for more of Uuskyla's drumming.

The Beauty and the Beast, or the Beasty and the Beaut

Beauty itself is either

• the most beautiful, or
• not beautiful at all.

The good itself is either

• the best, or
• no good.

But why "either – or"? Why not "both – and"?

Ceci n'est pas un ...

Cf. René Magritte's painting Ceci n'est pas une pomme.

The font is Type-Ra by Junkohanhero.

This quote from Magritte was inspired by the exhibition – which I've so far only read about – Text Art – Poetry for the Eye in Tampere, Finland.

See also my blog in Finnish.

Roswell Rudd a.k.a. The INcredible Honk!