blogging from Hangzhou, China
leylop photolog
leylop photo albums

In this ideal text the networks are many and interact, without any one of them being able to surpass the rest; this text is a galaxy of signifiers, not a structure of signifieds; it has no beginning; it is reversible; we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach, they are indeterminable...; the systems of meaning can take over this absolutely plural text, but their number is never closed, based as it is on the infinity of language.—
Roland Barthes
It's as though arguing for invention and its fragile, wondrous efficacy was indelicate, wasn't quite nice. And even though arguing for it wouldn't harm or taint invention's marvels (we all know novels are made-up things; it's part of our pleasure to keep such knowledge in our minds), still I always feel queasy doing it—not like a magician who reluctantly shows a rube how to pull a nickel out of his own ear, but more like a local parish priest who upon hearing a small but humiliating confession from a friend, lets the friend off easy just to move matters on to higher ground.—Richard Ford
Wallace Stevens wrote once that 'in an age of disbelief...it is for the poet to supply the satisfactions of belief in his measure and his style'. And that takes in how I feel about invention—invented characters, invented landscapes, invented breaks of the heart and their subsequent repairs.