MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

If, driven by an old compulsion, we were to define what the gods were to the Greeks, we might say, using the principle of Occam’s razor, everything that takes us away from the ordinary sensations of life. “With a god, you are always crying and laughing,” we read in Sophocles’ Ajax. Life as mere vegetative [...]

Lindon asked me, one day, if I knew what this new literary movement could be called. Back then, I had dodged the question, but now, eighteen years later, I think I can answer it. It took me quite some time, about twenty years of reflection, but I found the answer. The answer is in the [...]

On the one hand, everyday life is to be castigated for its relentless monotony and deathly tedium. For instance in Nadja, Breton envisages everyday life as the vortex that will obliterate the marvellous: “She was sucked back into the whirlwind of ordinary life continuing around her and eager to force her, among other concessions, to [...]

All these are but memories that delude and inflame, all are desires of the night, but Georgette had understood that, to be beautiful and desired, she must identify herself with the night, with the quotidian mystery. Soupault, Philippe. Translated by William Carlos Williams. Last Nights of Paris. Exact Change, 1992. p.50. (my emphasis) Bonus quote: [...]

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact. They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye. [...long [...]

The latest Quarterly Conversation has an interview with Belgian novelist Jean-Philippe Toussaint, who happens to be one of my favorite contemporary authors (though I seem to have only posted about him once): MR: Critics comment on your interest in the minutiae of daily experience. Do you feel that you have a particular interest in minutiae? [...]

How many people turn on the radio and leave the room, satisfied with this distant and sufficient noise? Is this absurd? Not in the least. What is essential is not that one particular person speak and another hear, but that, with no one in particular speaking and no one in particular listening, there should nonetheless [...]

The everyday is situated at the intersection of two modes of repetition: the cyclical, which dominates in nature, and the linear, which dominates in processes known as “rational.” The everyday implies on the one hand cycles, nights and days, seasons and harvests, activity and rest, hunger and satisfaction, desire and its fulfillment, life and death, [...]

Ed Champion interviewed Alison Bechdel for his Bat Segundo show (listen to it here) and among other interesting statements is this (slightly edited, mostly for excess verbiage from thinking on her feet) during a discussion of comics and the everyday: “The comic strip is the definition of quotidian: it comes out everyday, you read it [...]

The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker (1986). Vintage, 1990 (latest edition). 144 p., $11.95. Sometimes I buy books at used bookstore and then forget I have them. I forgot I even owned this book until I read something about in online and realized it was on my shelf. Am I glad I read this? Yes. What [...]

In a search for the title and author of a particular book I remember reading about, I ended up in my copy of Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction by Ben Highmore (Routledge, 2002), where my skimming turned to pages on Surrealism (always a favorite for me): “Surrealism is about an effort, an energy, [...]