Index Cards

Genet disdained bourgeois pretension, as did Walser, who lived an almost Gandhian simplicity.

Genet often claimed that the happiest years of his life were those spent in the reformatory and in prison: “Prison isn’t prison, it’s escape, it’s freedom. There you can escape the trivial and return to the essential.”

I am willing to do this as best I can but I will take no responsibility about doing it wrong.”

Here Malcolm puts her own artful spin on Benjamin’s famous allusion to the camera’s ability “with its devices of slow motion and enlargement” to reveal hidden and unseen truths: “It is through photography that we first discover the existence of [the] optical unconscious, just as we discover the instinctual unconscious through psychoanalysis.”

Now that photo is all over the internet, completely out of my control.

“We are all so overwhelmed by culture that it is a relief to see something which is done directly, without any intention of being good or bad, done only because one wants to do it.”

“visible wretchedness is counterbalanced by a hidden glory.”

I begin to wonder if it’s not just the modernist paradigm kicking in, that a metadiscourse is always more satisfying: painting about painting, photographs about photography, and writing about writing.

“The dullest, most inept and inconsequential snapshot, when isolated, framed (on a wall or by the margins of a book), and paid attention to, takes on all the uncanny significance, fascination, and beauty of R. Mutt’s fountain