Ransen's Blog

 Oddly I found myself reading three books one after another and each one had a monochrome cover. The Temple by George Herbert, 1633   Breakfast At Tiffany's by Truman Capote, 1958 Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker, 1984 The only one I read to completion was Breakfast At Tiffany's , it was the only readable one. Although the Daily Mail newspaper thinks it is romantic, it is about a prostitute living off rich male admirers. The Temple is a collection of religious poems, and was interesting and moving in parts. But about 33% of the time I had no idea what he was talking about, the English language has changed so much over time. I'll continue to dip into it now and then. Very very Christian. Blood and Guts in High School I stopped reading after 20 pages, rude and crude drawings notwithstanding. It seems to be a novel of serial abuse and bad sex. It looked like the whole book would have the same tone throughout and tell the same episode again and again, so I stopped...

 I never ever explain my artworks, creations, stuff, whatever you want to call them. It reduces the scope of the work, it puts a filter in front of the viewer, it is unnecessary.  Others have put it better years ago:  The job of the artist is always to deepen the mystery. - Francis Bacon   Labelling takes attention away from the content . - Iris Häussler     Why embrodier what excludes commentary? An image explained is no longer an image . - E M Cioran   Interpretation is the revenge of the intellectual upon art. - Susan Sontag   When looking at art, saying nothing is always better than saying something. - Ludwig Wittgenstein And I think the same goes for novels. When an author makes a book tour to promote his novel, and starts to explain origins, and says "I wrote this novel because...",  "I wanted to show...", "this character represents" and so on, all he or she is doing is ruining the magic of a work of fiction. Now the reader can...

 I've heard some fishermen say that fish don't feel pain because if they did we would hear them scream. The error of this "logic" of this is clear. They don't have the biological apparatus to scream. They may well feel pain but it is not expressed in a way most people can understand. I was thinking about this and then wondered what error(s) of logic I make in my own life,  behaviour, or thought.

 "The War Against Cliché" is a book by Martin Amis. I like the idea, to be used maybe for at least one set of artworks. So, no crescent moons, no smiling suns, no twinkling stars, no sitting cats, no grinning skulls...      

 What he says is rubbish. But he stared at me like one who knows the truth and knows that all the world denies him. Small angry eyes. Quite unpleasant. Quite disturbing,

 When I was at school in the 1970s there was a program on the BBC for pupils called "Use Your Head" with Tony Buzan. It was about how to improve your memory and learning skills and went beyond the "write the same thing down 100 times" type of technique. Buzan gave more interesting and fun memory techniques. I bought the book: I did use the techniques in the book and it did help me learn. And I got interested in memory techniques. Decades later I bought a book by Frances Yates... Frances Yates University College London 1924  ..."The Art of Memory": (Yates confessed that she was not interested in learning and using the memory techniques, which I found strange) I cannot remember exactly why I bought the book, but it got me interested in Giordano Bruno.   On the 17th of February 1600 Bruno was killed by the Catholic Church because of his beliefs .  Killed because of his beliefs . He certainly had some (what we would consider now) strange beliefs, as well as s...