Notes

看了Places and politics in an age of globalization (2001)的Arif Dirlik一篇Place-Based Imagination: Globalism and the Politics of Place.當中在提到Jean Chesneaux, Brave New World (1992)的paradigm of HK to describe the contemporary global economy as "an off-ground economy" (23)
Dirlik加了個注,表現他到底對香港好像的確比較熟點

... The people of HK, in spite of the "off-groundedness" of the HK economy, have in recent years shown a remarkable awareness of place consciousness, which goes against both the colonial regime and the nationalistic rhetoric of the Beijing regime. The class aspect of this awareness is not to be ignored, as the nationalistic rhetoric of the Communist Party of China in this case seeks to disguise an alliance, unprecedented in its explicitness, between the state and transnational capital (Chinese and non-Chinese) against an emergent civil society that unites around the idea of HK as place of daily life.
...(p.44 note 24.)

Notes

Boris Pasternak, Letters, “INTERPRETATION,” The New Yorker, June 24, 1996, p. 110

It is every critic's right to detail the impression produced on him by a work of art--in his preferred or customary manner... But I don't believe that the peripheral details of interpretation are as important as Mr. Wilson thinks. Rather, their relative unimportance has a special, deliberate meaning for me. This unimportance is central to my language--the real tongue of my thought.
.. .
I was attracted by the unusualness of the usual. The supreme pleasure consists in capturing the taste of reality, in successfully rendering the atmosphere of being. Which is the ambience, the surrounding whole, the total environment.
But there is a paradox. While I pondered the problem of capturing this sense of circumambient reality in art, the outcome was , if not diametrically opposed to the masterpieces of the 19th century, ay least significantly different from them.
My sense of reality--the whole--has always been this: that there is a purpose, an end...a reached sending... Whatever the cause, reality has been for me like a sudden, unexpected arrival that is intensely welcome. I have always tried to reproduce this sense of being sent, of being launched.
...
Behind and beyond all these highlighted and emphasized trifles (even in their sharpened magic), and in addition to the described human fates and historical events, there is an effort in my novels to represent the whole sequence (facts, beings, happenings) as a great moving entity... a developing, passing, rolling, rushing inspiration. As if reality itself had freedom of choice... Hence the reproach that my characters were insufficiently realized. Rather than delineate, I was trying to efface them. Hence the frank arbitrariness of the "coincidences." Here I wanted to show the unrestrained freedom of life, its very verisimilitude contiguous with improbability...

Notes

A Poet of the Threshold
Paul Gray
Time 16/10/1995 p.71
As an Irish Catholic, he has concerned himself with analysis of violence in Northern Ireland - with the express reservation that he wants to aviod the conventional terms." That reservation has made all the difference in his art. It is hard to imagine a less overtly political poet than Heaney, 56, or one who has more thouroughly purged his language of commonplace and banal. "Poetry is more a threshold than a path," he once wrote.
Death and suffering cannot be countered by polemics ...
tribute to human complexities ... The intensity of Heaney's poetry stems largely from a Roman Catholic temperament that has been baffled by doubt.
"My language and my sensibility are yearning to admit a kind of religious or transcendent dimension," ... "But then there's the reality: there's no heaven, no afterlife of the sort we are promised and no personal God."

Notes

Waiting for the Barbarians (1904)
By Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933)
translated by Edmund Keeley

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?

Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.

And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

notes

...The artist of today, therefore, proves to be not only a simple consumer, but a consumer of consumption - and thereby the author of new forms of critical consumption behaviour.

(sources unknown, have to seek)

notes

真正意義上的藝術市場的建立將會使我們{中國的}現代藝術史從實質上獲得世界意義 - 黃專 (藝術.市場/1992-第6期/頁29)

只有中國人才能促進中國藝術市場的建立 - 葉永青 (藝術.市場/1992-第6期/頁65)

Notes
所有藝術作品，都必然有一表面，也就是表達心意狀態的外在動作、有節律的談話、或符號象徵，以及一個由藝術家的深意(fuller intention)和觀眾的反應二者共同構成的更深刻的內部。…如果沒有語言的模糊性，交流是否還可能。──羅森(Stanely Rosen)〈金蘋果〉

Notes
Rrose Selavy -- mark of turn of interest from the mechanical to the optical (159)

Notes
To move it, is to destroy it! – Richard Serra upon Tilted Arc