2 excerpts, from books to return to 🅰 “I’m not that into theater” 🅱 “feverish selfishness, and shit.”

I’m not that into theater. I think its prevalence is just a way of opposing the advance of technology. However, I’ve always thought that covering and uncovering the stage with a curtain is an unbeatable innovation. It’s the trembling of the cloth from the light touch of the air and nervous last-minute adjustments. I used to go to the theatre often, just to feel the rush when the curtain reveals its secrets. But lately, plays haven’t offered even that trepidation. They merely switch the lights on and off, which has nothing to do with that unhurried premonition that art requires.

– Rodrigo Blanco Calderón, The Night, translated by Noel Hernández González & Daniel Hahn, Seven Stories Press, UK, 2021, 69-70

. . . recalls Badiou’s praise of the theatrical institution of the interval . . . and who can go past

I’m not that into theater. I think its prevalence is just a way of opposing the advance of technology.

. . . considering this?

Don’t breach proletarian morality for any reason. Stand firm on your class positions. He turned his head slightly, … in the direction of the corpses and the birds. The toucan buzzards screamed, they were claiming their priority in the pecking order for the eye sockets of the cadavers … [over] the less-noble birds, the deformed poultry.

…

The birds were surrounding them, fighting, pushing and shoving each other on the stomachs and faces of the corpses, less than ten meters away, agitating their tousled, deplumed, very ugly wings. Some of the losers hopped up and down out of the way; others came back belligerently, only to get pecked by the strongest ones. All of them exhaled the smell of wet down feathers, feverish selfishness, and shit.

– Antoine Volodine, Melvido’s Dreams, translated by Gina M. Stamm, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2024,109

. . . brings to mind Loren Eiseley’s word, scapulomancy. . . I come back again and again to Volodine’s Post-Exotic books, something turns me on, something turns me off