follow, through

over the weekend my yin and i drove to Miami, yin-in-law in tow, to join some friends at a gallery opening in Little Havana. we had been there once before, some months ago when summer vacation was a forecast rather than a memory.

but this is beside the point.

the point is that one of our friends called me out on the lack of follow through regarding my summer reading list. i have not, as promised, offered a review of all the titles on the list; and, while the reasons for this are multifarious and (sometimes) nefarious, it can generally be boiled down to one simple explanation: i haven't read them all yet.

in spite of this fact, today is the first day of autumn and what was my summer reading list has now metamorphosized into a list of incomplete tasks. this in being the case, and in lieu of a full reckoning, here is my (incomplete) list of favorite quotes from books i read this summer.

Favorite Quotes, in (approximate) chronological order,
From Twelve Books I Read This Summer

1) Committed by Elizabeth Gilbert:

"This is the singular fantasy of human intimacy: that one plus one will somehow, someday, equal one."


2) Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis by Jacques Lacan:

“What makes the value of the icon is that the god it represents is also looking at it. It is intended to please God. At this level the artist is operating on the sacrificial plane—he is playing with those things, in this case images, that may arouse the desire of God.”


3) Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki:

“Do not think you will necessarily be aware of your own enlightenment.”


4) The Sublime Object of Ideology by Slavoj Žižek:

“The post-structural position constantly repeats that no text could be totally non metaphysical… however, every text, however metaphysical, always produces gaps which announce breaches in the metaphysical circle: the points at which the textual process subverts what its ‘author’ intended to say.”


5) Last Nights of Paris by Phillipe Soupault:

The rue de Medicis along which we were strolling at a fair pace is sad around ten-thirty at night. It is the street of everlasting rain.


6) Enragés and Situationists by René Viénet:

"Those who talk of revolution and class struggle with no explicit reference to daily life, without understanding the subversive character of love and the positive aspects of refusal, have a corpse in their mouth."


7) The Elephant Vanishes by Haruki Murakami:

"I met her near the end of September. It had been raining that day from morning to night—the kind of soft, monotonous, misty rain that often falls at that time of year, washing away bit by bit the memories of summer burned into the earth. Coursing down the gutters, all those memories flowed into the sewers and rivers, to be carried to the deep, dark ocean."


8) The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat by Oliver Sacks:

"If God, or the eternal order, was revealed to Dostoievski in seizures, why should not other organic conditions serve as ‘portals’ to the beyond or the unknown?"


9) Threshold of the Visible World by Kaja Silverman:

“The aesthetic text can help us do something collectively which exceeds the capacity of the individual subject to effect alone.”


10) Hear the Wind Sing by Haruki Murakami:

"The bloom of summer came home to me after all these years. The tidewater smell, the cry of distant steam whistles, the touch of girls’ skin, the lemon scent of hair rinse, the evening breeze, fond hopes, summer dreams…
Even so, everything was ever so slightly off, as if little by little the tracing paper had slipped irretrievably from the lines of summers past."


11) Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord:

"The revolutionary project of a classless society, of an all-embracing historical life, implies the withering away of the social measurement of time in favor of a federation of independent times — a federation of playful individual and collective forms of irreversible time that are simultaneously present. This would be the temporal realization of authentic communism, which “abolishes everything that exists independently of individuals."


12) After the Quake by Haruki Murakami:

"Junpei closed his eyes and thought about the long stretch of time that had passed through him. He did not want to think of it as something he had merely used up without any meaning."

well put.