The Latest:

1
…Culture should be nothing but a sweet rhetorical effusion , an art of using words to bear witness to a transient moistening of the soul. Yet this old romantic couple, the heart and the head, has no reality except in an imagery of vaguely Gnostic origin, in these opiate-like philosophies which have always, in the end, constituted the mainstay of strong regimes, and in which one gets rid of intellectuals by telling to run along and get on with the emotions of the ineffable.
Roland Barthes from “Blind and Dumb Criticism” in Mythologies. There is something to that—the heart and the head—and how it relates to comics comes from the fact that the heart of comics is within its presentation as a visual medium, the head is my dumb-ass mucking up all those pictures with speech and captions and thoughts. In many ways, my favorite literary medium provides a method of display to how we think, imagine, and see in our dreams. Within comics we can do anything, but like life there are intrinsic rules to presentation. If you play with those rules—the panels—you can display anything. In fact, most of the great comics creators will say that true excellence in the graphic narrative comes when you’re not inhabiting the word count, panel progression, or page count. You’re doing whatever the hell you like. In many ways, I’m in no way prepared to take those risks, but I think there is truth to the saying that one must understand the rules before one tries to break them. I’m just trying to tell a story.
Roland Barthes
comics
writing
1
What proves the wonderful singularity of the writer, is that during the holiday in question, which he takes alongside factory workers and shop assistants, he unlike them does not stop, if not actually working, at least producing.

from “The Writer on Holiday” by Roland Barthes in Mythologies. 

I’ve thought about this constantly; how this is bred out of a desire to always be working. When I would come home from the city, I always took it as an opportunity to actually work—work on things that I care about, that I didn’t work on as much as I’d like to in New York. I will admit, that is part of the reason why I’m here now—to be in place where I can write, and also have my own apartment, and a small social life and be able to do the things that I would like to do that I would not have the ability to do in New York, because I’m scrambling just to keep a roof over my head. But yes, I’ve never felt like I’m truly on holiday and I think that’s probably why I like writing so much, that it’s something I do every day because I must and that I have to put in that level of work every day, otherwise it feels like a wasted day. It’s not a chore, and it’s not a luxury either, inevitably the thing that I’ve chosen to do is a thing that I will never stop doing and in that sense I will never stop working, because I can’t imagine anything else happening.

“…that it is quite ‘natural’ that the writer should write all the time and in all situations. First, this treats literary production as a sort of involuntary secretion, which is taboo, since it escapes human determinations: to speak more decorously, the writer is the prey of an inner god who speaks at all times, without bothering, tyrant that he is, with the holidays of his medium. Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop.”

Ah yes, the bug. “Now it has you,” as Kathleen once said. I wonder what people who do write, but don’t consider themselves writers like Mills, think about this sort of thing.   

roland barthes
on writing
2
I have two work spaces, one in Paris, the other in the country. Between them there is no common object, for nothing is ever carried back and forth. Yet these sites are identical. Why? Because the arrangement of tools (paper, pens, desk, clocks, calendars) is the same. It is the structure of the space which constitutes its identity. The private phenomenon would suffice to shed some light on structuralism: the system prevails over the very being of objects.

Roland Barthes from his autobiography. 

I wonder about this kind of thing all the time. Does the place actually change the structure of writing? Does it really change? My friend Rick said something last weekend that touches on this—that I seem more level, calmer, and focused in the things I post when I’m home. I thought about this for awhile because there is something about having an opportunity to write and create at home. Place does make a difference in that your mentality shifts. That’s really at the core of why I’m going home: I’ll be able to do what I care about up there, because the place keeps me level. Whereas here I’m like a chicken with its head cut off. Too much stimuli.

roland barthes
city vs country
lit
On writing
the last nyc days
2
Continuing my obsession with Roland Barthes, here is a photo of him being held by his mother. The photo is titled “the Winter Garden Photograph,” from Camera Lucida, his book length discussion on photography. “Around 6 PM: the apartment is warm, clean, well lit, pleasant. I make it that way, energetically, devotedly (enjoying it bitterly): henceforth and forever I am my own mother. The more I read him the more I think about how much I obsess over my writing, the source of it, where it comes from and how it relates to my family. I wonder what strand of DNA, from what side of my family, this Bug comes from. Before my grandmother passed away, it had been related to me via my Dad’s sister that their father (my grandfather, Murray) was an obsessive letter writer. That would be the Russian side of the family, which explains quite a bit as I’ve noticed Russians are exceptionally literate and humanistic, to the point of being depressing. (No pun intended—I’ll be making this joke until I die; sorry). Just before I went home for the summer, my grandmother passed away and I was planning on interviewing her for a family genealogy book, so that we have something as to where we come from. The book is really just for my family’s consumption, to know who we were before the DiTraglias met the Press family, so that we may better understand ourselves. I think this is the sort of thing children should do, and now I regret the fact that I never took the opportunity to talk to my grandmother more about where we’re from.  

Continuing my obsession with Roland Barthes, here is a photo of him being held by his mother. The photo is titled “the Winter Garden Photograph,” from Camera Lucida, his book length discussion on photography.

“Around 6 PM: the apartment is warm, clean, well lit, pleasant. I make it that way, energetically, devotedly (enjoying it bitterly): henceforth and forever I am my own mother.

The more I read him the more I think about how much I obsess over my writing, the source of it, where it comes from and how it relates to my family. I wonder what strand of DNA, from what side of my family, this Bug comes from. Before my grandmother passed away, it had been related to me via my Dad’s sister that their father (my grandfather, Murray) was an obsessive letter writer. That would be the Russian side of the family, which explains quite a bit as I’ve noticed Russians are exceptionally literate and humanistic, to the point of being depressing. (No pun intended—I’ll be making this joke until I die; sorry). Just before I went home for the summer, my grandmother passed away and I was planning on interviewing her for a family genealogy book, so that we have something as to where we come from. The book is really just for my family’s consumption, to know who we were before the DiTraglias met the Press family, so that we may better understand ourselves. I think this is the sort of thing children should do, and now I regret the fact that I never took the opportunity to talk to my grandmother more about where we’re from.  

roland barthes
photography
mom
family
7
The whole of speech is epitomized in this expendability of words, in this froth ceaselessly swept onward, and speech is found only where language self-evidently functions like a devouring process which swallows only the moving crest of the words. Writing, on the contrary, is always rooted in something beyond language, it develops like a seed, not like a line, it manifests an essence and holds the threat of a secret, it is an anti-communication, it is intimidating.
Roland Barthes, from Writing Degree Zero, which is just this heady meditation on writing and it is exactly my kind of thing. This book is full of gems, and I feel a little summer obsession reading coming on with him. 
roland barthes
On writing
lit
2
Roland Barthes. I picked up A Barthes Reader today after getting into a discussion with some of my Wolfe Institute co-workers. Almost instantly, I felt like I just took down a massive chocolate shake, which really only happens when I have a chocolate shake, and when I find something within myself in relation to a great writer. Susan Sontag, in her introduction, writes:  “Throughout his late writing Barthes repeatedly disavows the, as it were, vulgar roles of system-builder, authority, mentor, expert, in order to reserve for himself the privileges and freedoms of delectation: the excerise of taste for Barthes means, usually, to praise. What makes a role a choice one is his unstated commitment to finding something new and unfamiliar to praise.”  This is something that I’ve exercised for a while, to put it simply—as one’s mother might tell us—if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all. In my waning days here in New York City, I find myself trying to celebrate and go forth with as much energy as possible. There is barely any time left. Enjoy your life, Sontag seems to be saying, pay attention to it.  When I started reading this introduction there was a girl who got on the train with me, she had a black backpack and on it, stenciled in pink, “Cupcakes are the new black.” She was going through Poets & Writers Magazine with a pen, constantly working. We never stop working do we? Expanding, learning, seeing where we can put our thoughts.  “Writing is Barthes’s perennial subject—indeed, perhaps no once since Flaubert (in his letters) has thought as brilliantly as passionately as Barthes has about what writing is. Much of his work is devoted to portraits of the vocation of the writer: from the early debunking studies included in  Mythologies of the writer as seen by others, that is the writer as fraud, such as “The Writer on Holiday,” to more ambitious essays on writers writing, that is, the writer as hero and martyr, such as “Flaubert and the Sentence,” about the writer’s “agony of style.” Barthes’s wonderful essays on writers must be considered as different version of his great apologia for the vocation of the writer. For all his admiration for the self-punishing standards of integrity set by Flaubert, he dares to conceive of writing as a kind of happiness…” All of this puts me back to where I started here in New York, when Miller told me to “get a notebook and write down everything you see here,” because before I know it—I’ll stop paying attention. Like this renews my sense of celebration, of taking note and the joy in my life here. Now that I’ve figured what I enjoy, I’m going to go away and spread it around, see what can be done with it in a place I love. Saying, “We’re only alive once! Do what we love! Write about it! And then share it and see if you can help someone get to this point!” Chappelle has it right, “It’s a celebration, bitches!”  

Roland Barthes.

I picked up A Barthes Reader today after getting into a discussion with some of my Wolfe Institute co-workers. Almost instantly, I felt like I just took down a massive chocolate shake, which really only happens when I have a chocolate shake, and when I find something within myself in relation to a great writer. Susan Sontag, in her introduction, writes: 

“Throughout his late writing Barthes repeatedly disavows the, as it were, vulgar roles of system-builder, authority, mentor, expert, in order to reserve for himself the privileges and freedoms of delectation: the excerise of taste for Barthes means, usually, to praise. What makes a role a choice one is his unstated commitment to finding something new and unfamiliar to praise.” 

This is something that I’ve exercised for a while, to put it simply—as one’s mother might tell us—if you don’t have anything nice to say don’t say anything at all. In my waning days here in New York City, I find myself trying to celebrate and go forth with as much energy as possible. There is barely any time left. Enjoy your life, Sontag seems to be saying, pay attention to it. 

When I started reading this introduction there was a girl who got on the train with me, she had a black backpack and on it, stenciled in pink, “Cupcakes are the new black.” She was going through Poets & Writers Magazine with a pen, constantly working. We never stop working do we? Expanding, learning, seeing where we can put our thoughts. 

“Writing is Barthes’s perennial subject—indeed, perhaps no once since Flaubert (in his letters) has thought as brilliantly as passionately as Barthes has about what writing is. Much of his work is devoted to portraits of the vocation of the writer: from the early debunking studies included in  Mythologies of the writer as seen by others, that is the writer as fraud, such as “The Writer on Holiday,” to more ambitious essays on writers writing, that is, the writer as hero and martyr, such as “Flaubert and the Sentence,” about the writer’s “agony of style.” Barthes’s wonderful essays on writers must be considered as different version of his great apologia for the vocation of the writer. For all his admiration for the self-punishing standards of integrity set by Flaubert, he dares to conceive of writing as a kind of happiness…”

All of this puts me back to where I started here in New York, when Miller told me to “get a notebook and write down everything you see here,” because before I know it—I’ll stop paying attention. Like this renews my sense of celebration, of taking note and the joy in my life here. Now that I’ve figured what I enjoy, I’m going to go away and spread it around, see what can be done with it in a place I love. Saying, “We’re only alive once! Do what we love! Write about it! And then share it and see if you can help someone get to this point!” Chappelle has it right, “It’s a celebration, bitches!”  

roland barthes
lit
On writing
Daybook
the last nyc days
susan sontag