Nico Mara-McKay » Quotes

Nuts to Kafka

Nico — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 16:21:55 +0000

Cracking a nut is really not an art form, and so no one will dare to call an audience together and entertain it by cracking nuts. If he does it nevertheless, and does so successfully, then it must be a matter of something more than merely cracking nuts. Or it is cracking nuts, but we must have ignored some aspect of this art form because we mastered it too well and it took this new nutcracker to reveal its true nature to us, and it can even help his demonstration if he is a little less proficient at nutcracking than the rest of us.

– Franz Kafka, from “Josefine, the Singer, or The Mouse People”, in Metamorphosis and Other Stories, translated by Michael Hofmann

I have such a crush.

Nuts to Kafka

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A little evil

Nico — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 16:01:35 +0000

INTERVIEWER

A large number of Americans today hold the notion that god and the devil are at work in their daily lives.

MAILER

I think they are. Not in a controlling sense – I don’t believe that the devil seizes you and you’re gone forever. But can you say that you’ve never had a fuck where you didn’t feel evil for a little while?

INTERVIEWER

A little angelic, maybe.

MAILER

No. A little evil. And I think that’s the answer.

Text extracted from an interview with Norman Mailer conducted by Andrew O’Hagan for The Paris Review, collected in The Paris Review Interviews, Volume III. You can read the full interview here.

The lithograph is Vampire II, by Edvard Munsch. I purchased a print while visiting the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in 2008. It hangs in my office above my reading chair.

A little evil

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James Joyce on Treasure

Nico — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 05:02:24 +0000

He drew forth a phrase from his treasure and spoke it softly to himself:

–A day of dappled seaborne clouds.

The phrase and the day and the scene harmonised in a chord. Words. Was it their colours? He allowed them to glow and fade, hue after hue: sunrise gold, the russet and green of apple orchards, azure of waves, the greyfringed fleece of clouds. No, it was not their colours: it was the poise and balance of the period itself. Did he then love the rhythmic rise and fall of words better than their associations of legend and colour? Or was it that, being as weak of sight as he was shy of mind, he drew less pleasure from the reflection of the glowing sensible world through the prism of a language manycoloured and richly storied than from the contemplation of an inner world of individual emotions mirrored perfectly in a lucid supple periodic pose?

–Excerpted from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

James Joyce on Treasure

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Bertrand Russell on Beauty

Nico — Sat, 30 May 2009 18:34:22 +0000

Even where none of the parts of a good whole are bad, or a bad whole good, it often happens that the value of a complex whole cannot be measured by adding together the value of its parts; the whole is often better or worse than the sum of the value of its parts. In all aesthetic pleasures, for example, it is important that the object admired should really be beautiful: in the admiration of what is ugly there is something ridiculous, or even sometimes repulsive, although, apart from the object there may be no difference in the value of the emotion per se.

And yet, apart from the admiration it may produce, a beautiful object, if it is inanimate, appears to be neither good nor bad. Thus in themselves an ugly object may be respectively just as good as a beautiful object and the emotion it excites in a person of good taste; yet we consider the enjoyment of what is beautiful to be better, as a whole, than an exactly similar ejoyment of what is ugly.

If we did not we should be foolish not to encourage bad taste, since ugly objects are much easier to produce than beautiful ones.⁽¹⁾

- Bertrand Russell, “The Elements of Ethics” in Philosophical Essays

Bertrand Russell on Beauty

Footnotes:

p. 47

Related Posts:

“Vicious Beauty” published in The Found Poetry Review