The First Sentence and the Last Word

(2014)

Related project: la première phrase et le dernier mot

Work in progress.

Reading/writing project which consists of taking the first sentence and the last word of every book published in English in my library. The resulting words are then reconstructed, rewritten, recycled into a new text without adding or removing any of the words. Punctuation is not kept however. The sources (author, title) are footnoted.

A version based on the books in my library published in French was published by  Le Quartanier  (Montréal, 2004). An excerpt is featured in Against Expression, eds. Craig Dworkin and Kenneth Goldsmith, Northwestern University Press, 2011, pp. 428-430.

Face-to-face, is that you? The task of the modern explorer is auditory. In the tradition it from this or at later. It was my Stockholm, I’d gone to have some supper, usually in this book whenever adventurous participants are found. First in every, single, one, first, two, two, three, third eighteenth period—but where is the fourth now? Inaccuracy and indifference of yesterday, years, century, today, always a very cold February night. I can recall, at least, a contact involving coupled humility before our guests and hosts, undiscovered night people. Dear ground, I am going to discuss a hazardous way and weighing with old friends. I see every person in mediated experiments, we with other we. In the social world the term ‘art’ lives in neglected conferences, philosophical investigations, hazard lectures, truth encounters. Realisations are accept deep, but then, onto and, of with and this paper is to up in phenomena. Petey? Was, ie. perhaps not so current. If I believe in untrodden meaning, then any venture must point to certain paths in opposition to current doctrines. Stile and saying walk on. New truths respect phenomena which have been out of character, remember the spirit took on its I as yet described. Light these some (as they once were) about sense-perception. By my Timaeus, of, of, of kind my dream—or, the that date have a venture either or. (1)

(1) the first sentence and the last word of Stewart Home The Assault on Culture, Simon Frith Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music, Konstatin Raudive Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electroinc Communication With The Dead, Erving Goffman Interaction Ritual, Harold Pinter The Birthday Party, Don Idhe Sense and Significance, Martin Heidegger Poetry, Language, Thought, J.L. Austin Sense and Sensibilia, Plato Timaeus, Donna Williams Nobody Nowhere.

 

For thousands of years, you noise. Until you asked sound to make music, a system of symbols where there is so much silence and so much happens. External to the use of instruments, knuckle and thumb, the gesture of the head, the body, and the limbs, which constitute expression held together by incomprehensible motives. This is an ethnographic theme. The voice endured among the central remote possibilities of oratory social space, that is, I believe, a speaker produced through cultural memory. The Kaluli people of Guinea explored music as photoelectric, film, mechanical mediums. I am, I maintain, I am, I heard—a sound synthetic system. Father, me recently why that afraid of. Of part chance, this is a man’s personal book of it. All sounds that can be heard, measured, reach perception and relate understanding to environments. We exist and study the management of dimension. Tell some, that to make avaliable for any musical disposition the supposed choice, that take will of of and, for be of deep down in the sea. Be wood. Relate light. The chase comes out of music. Easier rhetoric into the other manner and and, and and and the the, in like as of of, those of his great built of and arose informally. You will continue and increase the production of words world words, the complexity of elegant divisions, the countenance of personal electrical talents, and public purposes. Quick millions, a spray of richness will aid the efforts of invention. For me dearest New Papua America. (2)

(2) the first sentence and the last word of Steven Feld Sound and Sentiment: Birds, Weeping, Poetics, and Song in Kaluli Expression, Edward T. Hall The Hidden Dimension, John Cage Silence, Paul Celan Collected Prose, Brian Massumi A User’s Guide to Capitalism & Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guatarri, Franz Kafka letter to His Father, Robert Smithson The Collected Writings, Aaron Williamson Hearing Things, Gilbert Austin Chironomia or A Treatise on Rhetorical Delivery, H.J. Habraken The Structure of the Ordinary: Structure and Form in the Built Environment.

 

To perform, from the outside, looks like the path of an impulse inexplicably restless. To study it is perhaps not meaningless, but would measure the phenomena as science and reason without knowing it. A fiction. But, you may say, by the mechanical of curiosity, anyone would forward a method of categorization. Same in Clarence’s third house in Long Bellmore, in which one’s own room voices its will, think living in that Island of are and able. It is a sad and serious duty to compass nature and truth while estranged. I have this word “I”, it is its limit, like sound through the air, a persistent pattern of inclusions and exclusions. The Freud of suffering that in the lives of certain individuals occur. We arrive at melancholy and infatuation by what is expressed by the whole, at least enough for the reader. Him chapter, book widely, him onward, or final. At every step the conversation pauses and half recedes, within a time span that should make little sense in the context of enthusiastic dogmatics. What has that got to do with average American living? The view of eighteenth or even nineteenth century science is about differing forces on else’s grounds, not about a “movement,” but a retrogressive desire to dare the atomic age to abide to the beyond. The principle pleasure in idiosyncratic public participation is not merely in speaking or willing the movement of place, because this is precisely within the larger issue of truth. Others part from personal prejudice for the benefit in when who which meaning. There no precise for certain except and should be carried, not merely chiefly and from collects the carries. The course you are beginning should mean much more you, than have meant. We asked you to speak about women and—not a wise man; he state its the few who every scientific has its definite, its, and thereby its harmonious blending the whole as well its legitimate, pious wish that ennobles the man by the solution read this normal describes, wrote he. (3)

(3) the first sentence and the last word of Wilhelm von Humboldt On Language, Evan Eisenberg The Recording Angel: The Experience of Music from Aristotle to Zappa, Cathy Caruth Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History, Lucy Lippard Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object, Garrett Stewart Reading Voices: Literature and the Phonotext, Lyman Fort Speech For All , Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own, Soren Kierkegaard The Concept of Anxiety, Julien Offray de la Mettrie Man A Machine, Jacques Derrida Speech and Phenomena.

 

Once an angry man, I was born cross-eyed impossible, opened a path which, as we know, the whole of phenomelogy has followed through his own orchard thing. Life, but the blows that do the dramatic side the work—that come, or seem to, outside—the ones you remember and blame things on, tell about, don’t show their effects all at once. Dream in moments of weakness, dragged his father along the ground, opening a passage for themselves to admire escape. A relatively new area of historical research has developed, which might be described as a social history, a social of, or social history. The of the the big sudden blows come from false standards of measurements: the wide realm of the beautiful, your friends. Platonic dialogue Phaedrus describes Phaedrus, whom he, him Socrates gates of the city to the banks of the Ilissus. In the last few years, fast and always, communication of silence emerged as a force. Self-revelation, it is the impression that people commonly use—that they seek and them in others, and that they underestimate what is of true value in life result. The present course of lectures deals with ‘Aesthetic’. Their subject is, of course all language is a process of breaking down. And, more particularly, their province is Art – yeah we may restrict it, indeed, to how speaking lets architecture lure the logical investigations of history beyond the encounters of power, success and wealth. Fine Art ages in the early 1950s (1900-1901), a new neighborhood, the “teenager,” a class which Karl Marx hadn’t predicted, in was America. The category consisted of Negroes, Jewish people and lots of Chinese. (4)

(4) the first sentence and the last word of Gertrude Stein The Making of Americans, F. Scott Fitzgerald The Crack-Up, Peter Burke The Art of Conversation, Ernst Cassirer Language and Myth, Sigmund Freud Civilization and Its Discontents, G.W.F. Hegel Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, Dan Graham Two-Way Mirror Power, Louis Armstrong In His Own Words, R. Buckminster FullerUtopia or Oblivion, Jacques Derrida Speech and Phenomena.

 

It may naturally be asked to evaluate the prohibition against the word “I”. Was it Vienna, 1933-1934? Some seismic upheaval within the minds of suppression philosophers? And this we briefly answer. A curious restriction, these long-incarcerated posterity patients must attain control over this disquieting feature of theoretical life. That since so much has been said on the light, it can hardly be multiply repetitions by again going over the same ground. In the sixth year of six months, behind the tall mirror, light itself be marked dead, by bunch. That what we say one night, subject to systematic Americans, Chaos never died annual. Again his characteristic preoccupation was: how come I get stuck with this dumb intention? And mean may have a direct and deep what we can say and mean is an idea which many find at sea! Proposing to treat a man’s social status philosophically is not completely unlike the oppressive frame of gun world cataclysm—an exhibition to which the patients themselves were not invited. Lighter her a dream takes her which hangs in colours in a mahogany on the wall of her stone room. The a of paintings with the theme, as if had sensed their doctors and nurses. Ordinarily, games of critical occupation of text engage our attention whether desirable or, frankly, for the most part already known. First in the those literary should of Oulipo where, for example, entire text written with the not of the letter ‘e’. (5)

(5) the first sentence and the last word of H.D. Tribute to Freud, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe Theory of Colours, Esther Newton Mother Camp, Adrian Piper Decide Who You Are, Stanley CavellMust We Mean What We Say?, Herman Melville Typee, Unica Zürn The Man of Jasmine, Hakim Bey T.A.Z., J.G. Ballard The Atrocity Exhibition, Allen S. Weiss The Aesthetics of Excess.

 

In the beginning was the catastrophe. The walking Greeks had no tongues. So there’s such a single term to express what we mean by the word—“life”. Big, bold, raw word, wall, world. Let’s start with pleasure system face. What do, lack of commitment Abstract Pop, weaving, Expressionism, observing, mild disdain, storytelling problems, early years, eyes and America have in common? A kind of faith in the rain outside, common singing symbols, and the cliché philosopher machine. Internationally internationally, paper paper, papier-machine, see see, we we, think think—the things themselves. It was a mute time to burn. The moment he opens his thisthat. What it means to come to know when we express what we go to deep-seated “something.” One gravest figure of our day is well-dressed American “opinions” refer to a triumphed Art phenomenon that became current when natural. Departs from the inside of the ourselves formulae: I would bed you. Women look implicated. The common two of a set from a drawing is an our man. The typing to the writing of they printer. In for a long London tea thing with her, as is. Try to turn paper to room. Go at lives, patience. (6)

(6) the first sentence and the last word of Giorgio Agamben Homo Sacer, Jacques Rancière The Flesh of Words, Camilla Griggers Becoming-Woman, Tim Ingold Lines: A brief History, Mary Douglas Natural Symbols, Jaques Derrida Paper Machine, Martin Heidegger What is Called Thinking?, Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451, Marcel Proust In Search of Lost Time: Volume 1 Swann’s Way, Lucy R. Lippard Pop Art, Maurice Merleau-Ponty The Visible and the Invisible, Greil Marcus Lipstick Traces.

 

You are about to begin reading Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a Calvino listened to critical theory for inarticulate gurgling. Nothing is self-evident. We tend to not nor not. Sacred sham art in profane uninvited animal chords explicate the contemporary progress neither confusing nor confused. If seeing relates to measures of Giant play Steps before words, the rhythmic relation could agree on valuable thought spaces. Sight always hated the night. Life observers regard reducing hitting self-evident. The belligerents would mine anything nonetheless. This is the world in which sense realized that descending is higher in appearances. An other recent music has work on land and me and I could see time move for the first take. 1-2-3-4-5 – 1-2 – 1-2-3-4-5 is the speech pattern of seven beautiful things introduced in world wonderful. Desirable modern Italo encouraged great Chinese traveler because more considerable knowledge manifest its right to inner virtue. Concerning another flower series which comes by the place between one kind of existent more than either even exist. I forget when debates have critical accuracy anymore. Its the it and is its of which a to of it I them but me. The I through I to a we all and more, but so. Of its or as it. It be that but there is also fence curling. (7)

(7) the first sentence and the last word of Theodor W. Adorno Aesthetic History, Jonathan Culler On Deconstruction, Italo Calvino If on a winter’s night a traveler, John Berger Ways of Seeing, Ludwig Wittgenstein Culture and Value, Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness, Trinh T. Minh-ha Woman Native Other, Leif Elggren Genealogy, William Faulkner The Sound and the Furry, Peter Szendy Listen, David P. Brown Noise Orders, Aristotle On the Soul.

 

Dear Any Theory, Everyone is dangerous on a ship. I regret everything that I am unable to publish. Imagine the lover’s productive stupidity as music. Madonna stopped at the sculpture of the cash coffins crucifix dispenser to draw a picture. Curse coincidences. That alley awareness is complicated by a series of strange Romanesque poems. Two war wage ways to wage war. Two follows artistic recipe—nonetheless intractable voice of fire. I found sciences myself attending a profound garden party at Revue Westminster. Abbey, ago a vanquishable object, as if the principle of rebirth favouring futurity was reduced to banal temptation or solitude money. How to object to your humanities into arts censorship. This suggestion naturally in principal and is most viewed by us with suspicion. Sir simple sect is his end subject, owe some unreal expression, i.e. we still circumscribe years of our assimilated time. Nouvelle as arising from illiberal interest of Française party. Or on Dupont the way car drives is not symptomal. In a manner perhaps the most important it is in a but, in a it. By interpretation and by experiment. The on is as if it were knew an that would be the meaning give rise from that, but rather that we hear in his what is a critical bowling. Not regarded by its contemporaries as a work, nor drink standing in a life may seem to be the obvious theoretical statement or statement theoretical to you. A out. Pierre Cimabue out. (8)

(8) the first sentence and the last word of Jean-Jacques Rousseau Politics and the Arts, Antonin Artaud Anthology, David Graeber Debt: The First 5000 Years, Marc Augé Non-Places, André Malraux Museum Without Walls, Casey O’Callaghan Sounds, Avery Gordon Ghostly Matters, Michel Serres The Five Senses, Gregory L. Ulmer Heuretics, Avital Ronell Stupidity, Roland Barthes A Lover’s Discourse.