does anyone here read walter? i'm nothing without what illuminations gave me. i feel like B's critique of the fetish of historical progress is the most poetic and pertinent. not least at the moment because of iraq...
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Re: Benjamin
Mon, June 7, 2004 - 1:32 PMAaahh... Benjamin is great, but I haven't picked him up from my bookshelf since college. I really should re-read some of his stuff. -
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Re: Benjamin
Mon, June 7, 2004 - 1:49 PMi have been thinking about he achieves so much in a lyrical style that prefigues pretty much all of the concerns of our current horrific global situation... -
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Re: Benjamin
Mon, June 7, 2004 - 1:52 PMsorry. i just realised that i replicated my first point in different words. well, at least i'm consistent! i wrote a paper recently using the theses on the philosophy of history to read Kurt Vonnegut -
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Re: Benjamin
Tue, June 8, 2004 - 2:04 AMNow I want to read the fragments of "Arcades-Project", "Passagen-Werk", about the commercial galleries in Paris, but what serves him to think about many others items in later capitalism and the evolution of concepts like "flâneur", etc. -
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Re: Benjamin
Tue, June 8, 2004 - 2:11 AMit's amazing that he spent ten years wandering through paris, formulating a sensitive reading of capitalism through the shopping arcades! -
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Unsu...
Re: Benjamin
Fri, November 17, 2006 - 3:37 AMI'm wondering if you're familiar with Aragon's Paris Peasant?
Apparently it excited him (Benj.) to no end and was the spark that lead to his radical "reading" of public space, contributing particularly to his formulations of New Nature and so on.
Paris Peasant is quite a lovely book if not a German book.
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Re: Benjamin
Thu, June 24, 2004 - 5:38 PMI haven't but I would like to. What do you think I should start with? -
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Re: Benjamin
Sun, June 27, 2004 - 6:18 AMilluminations is good place to start because it has most of the major essays collected in it including 'the storyteller', and 'theses on the philosophy of history' (both great)
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Unsu...
Re: Benjamin
Tue, June 29, 2004 - 7:59 PMI got to lead a discussion on Benjamin’s "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" once for a grad level sociocriticism course I took in college. What a nightmare - the discussion, not the essay. I recommend the essay. -
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Re: Benjamin
Mon, July 5, 2004 - 3:11 AMI've read about an opera by the british composer Brian Ferneyhoug, "Shadowtime", based on Benjamin. Somebody are interest in show it? Paris, London, .... -
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"Unpacking my Library"
Fri, May 13, 2005 - 12:01 PMSorry, this isn't really an answer to the last reply...but hey, nobody's been here for a while. I was staring rather blankly at my bookshelves the other day and it made me think of B's essay in Illuminations, "Unpacking my Library," which I hadn't read in at least a couple of years.
It's funny, though. I've moved every single year since I was 18, and every year, I take one day/afternoon to unpack my own library. Although I've played with a few different ways to organize them, I usually (and especially in the course of the year) resign myself and my library to a rather boring, albeit user-friendly, alphabetical system. Many of my friends have strangely elaborate systems for lining their shelves- some by categories, some chronologically (sometimes by publication date, sometimes even by the date the work was acquired), etc.
I think Benjamin was on to something that, until then, very few scholars paid much attention to, und zwar the very special relationship between a collector and his/her books. It's true, though- I used to go to a free library on the Rhine in Mainz every day to see what some old prof might have left and every new acquisition was a new treasure, waiting to be read and then take its place, whereever it might be, on 'the shelves.' There was a certain childish glee to it.
Alright, before I quatsch on forever, maybe I should put a question out there. Bejamin wrote: ,,To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves." (the Arendt translation, 64) I guess I have a double question -What do you guys think Benjamin meant by this and what is the true freedom on your own shelves? -
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Re: "Unpacking my Library"
Tue, May 17, 2005 - 9:58 PMAlright, Isaac, I guess I’ll try to answer your questions.
,,To a book collector, you see, the true freedom of all books is somewhere on his shelves."
Personally I understand the quote as the freedom to explore many different worlds, realities, viewpoints and experiences without ever having to go anywhere. At the same time as you collect other people’s opinions and stories you create your own as well, because the books that a true collector chooses will inevitably reflect something about their own personality. It’s the freedom to access a part of your own personality by reading a specific book, das dich an dich selbst erinnert. ;-)
The freedom on my book shelf is organized by genre, in chronological order and by primary and secondary sources. But I still have fun putting the Anarchist cookbook right next to my Veggie and Tofu cookbook. ;-) -
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Re: "Unpacking my Library"
Tue, May 24, 2005 - 1:59 PMI organize my books simply by author because, for me, it is difficult to organize by genre. For example, what genre would you place Kafka's works in? It's easier for me to find my books by author, and once I find the book, I can then figure out its genre. -
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Re: "Unpacking my Library"
Tue, May 24, 2005 - 2:59 PMI would place Kafka with European Modernists. -
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Re: "Unpacking my Library"
Thu, May 26, 2005 - 10:32 AMInteresting. When would this genre begin and end? And what do you mean by European? This is actually a very general and broad statement. -
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Re: "Unpacking my Library"
Thu, May 26, 2005 - 11:10 AMI'm just saying that's where I'd put it in my shelf, not that one can or should demarcate some kind of truly-existent literary genre with such-and-such characteristics.
I do think that European Modernism is a pretty unproblematic category, generally speaking. It would include figures like Conrad, Joyce, Beckett, Kafka, late Yeats,and Mann. Characteristics include formal experimentation, radical subjectivity, attention to the unconcsious, and an often mytho-poetic character. Themes include problemes of meaning and identity, alienation, fragmentation, anomie, the city, et cetera.
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Re: "Unpacking my Library"
Sat, May 28, 2005 - 11:57 AMfunny, i think you should put Kafka on a shelf so high that you have to wait forever for somebody to show up to get it down for you!
but then if we were to organize books by their themes and plot elements we might be truly f*ked. Would b funny though... -
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Re: "Unpacking my Library"
Sun, May 29, 2005 - 12:07 PMhm...the helplessness that would define that situation would also be ironically Kafkaesque...
I don't think Benjamin would agree, if you mean that the person organizing the books would be screwed. However, if you mean the rest of us, then yes, we would definitely be screwed. Have you ever been slightly or even utterly confused at a friend's filing system? I have. I think what Benjamin had in mind was that each individual's system is its own dialectic, ultimately in an ever-advancing pendulum of order and disorder. So, one might indeed have all of his/her books arranged in some strange thematic system, but its only one of the many steps from order to disorder and back again in this dialectic. Benjamin could give a shit whether someone else got it. After all, it was HIS relationship. -
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Re: "Unpacking my Library"
Sat, June 4, 2005 - 3:24 AMwow i can't believe somebody resurrected this ancient thread.
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Re: "Unpacking my Library"
Fri, June 24, 2005 - 1:14 PM"Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus. Ja. Sie steht also noch nicht auf den Regalen, die leise Langeweile der Ordnung umwittert sie noch nicht. Ich kann auch nicht an ihren Reihen entlang schreiten, um im Beisein freundlicher Hörer ihnen die Parade abzuhehmen. Das alles haben Sie nicht zu befürchten. Ich muss sie bitten, mit mir in die Unordnung aufgebrochener Kisten, in die von Holzstaub erfüllte Luft, auf den von zerrissenen Papieren bedeckten Boden, unter die Stapel eben nach zweijähriger Dunkelheit wieder ans Tageslicht beförderter Bände sich zu versetzen, um von vornherein ein wenig die Stimmung, die ganz und gar nicht elegische, viel eher gespannte zu teilen, die sie in einem echten Sammler erwecken." [Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus: Eine Rede über das Sammeln, DENKBILDER, S. 88]
Two years of darkness - can we relate to that? Kafka probably could.
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