MadInkBeard | Derik A Badman

Il faut que je vous fasse un aveu: je suis absolument en faveur du plagiat. Je crois que si on veut arriver à une nouvelle renaissance des arts et des lettres, le gouvernement devrait encourager le plagiat (…) Je ne plaisante pas car les très grands auters n’ont pas fait autre chose que d’être des [...]

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 [...]

Je dessine mon écriture et j’écris mes dessins. [I draw my writing and I write my drawings.] Hugo Pratt. Quoted in Harry Morgan’s Principes des littératures dessinées (Edition de l’An 2, 2003).

A theme is an existential inquiry. And increasingly I realize that such an inquiry is, finally, the examination of certain words, theme-words. Which leads me to emphasize: a novel is based primarily on certain fundamental words. It is like Schoenberg’s “tone-row.” In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the “row” goes: forgetting, laughter, angels, litost, [...]

Duchamp: “I found some common points between chess and painting. Actually when you play a game of chess it is like designing something or constructing a mechanism of some kind by which you win or lose. The competitive side has no importance, but the thing itself is very, very plastic, and that is probably what [...]

“All books come from other books, especially when they are drawn from real life.” -Harry Mathews [This was on the wall at the exhibit "Composing: Harry Mathews' Words and Worlds" in the University of Pennsylvania Library. I was there earlier today, more on it later.]

“You know it makes one feel rather good deciding not to be a bitch.” “Yes.” “It is sort of what we have instead of God.” -Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises.

“The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit… the arbitrariness of the constraint only serves to obtain precision of execution.” -Igor Stravinsky

“Literature remains alive only if we set ourselves immeasurable goals, far beyond all hope of achievement.” -Italo Calvino

Le Lionnais: A writer appears on earth — let’s pass over his conception and other details — and what does he do? He reads previous writers and starts intersecting. If he doesn’t, he’s an original creator. Latis: We certainly know that originality is the opposite of culture.” Oulipo Compendium, 186-87. (translated transcript of a meeting [...]