commonplace – Stephen's Notebook

· September 29, 2019 · 1 minute to read

“Gilles Deleuze in Negotiations: We’re riddled with pointless talk, insane quantities of words and images. Stupidity’s never blind or mute. So it’s not a problem of getting people to express themselves but of providing little gaps of solitude and silence in which they might eventually find something to say. Repressive forces don’t stop people expressing themselves but rather force them to express themselves; what a relief to have nothing to say, the right to say nothing, because only then is there a chance of framing the rare, and ever rarer, thing that might be worth saying.”

Quoted from How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy By Jenny Odell

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Stephen Pieper

· May 26, 2019 · 1 minute to read

For the enjoyment of a faintly literary melancholy there is no place like a train. One sits back, effortlessly casting away the tired landscape of an undesired world. Every sight is succulent food for bitterness: those suburbs like trenches with the wireless entanglements above them, the pillar boxes, the concrete, the sap heads of red London angling into the green country, the jab of a builder’s advertisement, some creamy-domed cinema, eight municipal trees. Beauty one wipes out of the mind before it can soak there and stain all, as one wipes tears from the eyes; but the ugly things, what a vicious pleasure they give, for they enhance the exquisite bitterness of one’s loneliness.

V.S. Pritchett, Marching Spain