Note: we commit ourselves to the ongoing care of outside places. Picture a cemetery. [1]
Note: instead of a spiritual after-life we have expanded our secularised mechanisms of care not just to museums and libraries, but also to cemeteries and places of historical significance. More on the bookmark.
Quote: ‘… he is capable of listening to a house, a street, a town as one listens to a symphony, an opera.’ [2]
Note: is this why I pace back and forth in my studio. More on the bookmark.
Quote: ‘But then – if we are taking our time and stay to look at the town as a whole, walk around it in the cool and quiet of the evening when the shops are shut, and the traffic has gone home, and we can really see its contours and its bone-structure – other questions begin to arise’. [3]
Note: I’m caring for (and caring about) my studio. It is here that I most often notice what is stored around me. More on the bookmark.
Quote: ‘Municipal “epigraphy”, as it is called, represented a kind of civic glasnost, the opening up of the affairs of the city to all its citizens’. [4]
Note: cities once inscribed entire archives on the walls of their theatres and temples. More on this bookmark.
Note: my best ‘archival’ moment is when I enter the studio each morning and a rapid assimilation of the previous day’s work occurs.
Note: the street rushes towards speeding motorists. The thrill of speed is curiously attached to immobile things. Houses and trees, Proust says, leap aside like anxious pedestrians. [5]
Note: precisely so. More on this bookmark.
References:
[1] Boris Groys. 2022. Philosophy of Care. London: Verso, pp32-33.
[2] Henri Lefebvre. 2004. Rhythmananalysis: space, time and everyday life. London: Continuum, pp87-88.
[3] W. G. Hoskins. 1970. The Making of the English Landscape. London: Penguin Books, p270.
[4] Greg Woolf. 2022. ‘Twinned cities: The relationship between two ancient civic communities’. The Times Literary Supplement, December 2, 2022. No. 6244. p30.
[5] Sara Danius. 2001. ‘The Aesthetics of the Windshield: Proust and the Modernist Rhetoric of Speed’. Modernism/modernity, Volume 8, Number 1, January 2001, p115.