from the bedside table

In addition to the wonderful little monograph on Marcel Duchamp's 3 Standard Stoppages by Herbert Molderings, Kunst als Experiment (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2006), I am currently reading two books on my train rides.

Friedrich Glauser, Wachtmeister Studer (Zurich: Diogenes, 1989): Originally published in 1936, this is the first detective novel to chronicle a case of Commissioner Studer by the Swiss author. On page 107, it initiates a theme that is a flash of real brilliance, the sort that one imagines led Bertholt Brecht and Ernst Bloch to champion the genre:

Wo hatten die Leute ihre Stimmen gelassen? Waren sie vom Radio vergiftet worden? Hatten die Gerzensteiner Lautsprecher eine neue Epidemie verursacht? Stimmenwechsel?

[Where did the people leave their voices? Were they poisoned by the radio? Did the loudspeakers in the small town of Gerzensteiner create a new epidemic? Change of voice?]

Hugo Ball, Flight out of Time (Berkeley: UC Press, 1996. Trans. Ann Raimes): Although I turned to Ball's diary for my work, it is really more like a fellow traveler through a life often riddled by disorientation, despair at the state of all things cherished and now sullied, and a lack of discipline. Here are my favorite items from the year 1915:

"It does not matter if I stay here or not. There must still be people here who have time, who are not yet 'compulsive'; who are not made of paper and wind and who do not confuse business cycles with life and their interests with fate. The atmosphere is enough for me. I do not need any exchange, any direct contact." (18)

"It is better to forget and forget again; to let things drop and not make a fuss if one can forget. But who really has the strength for that? Who can be so filled with divine things that the assault can do him no harm? Who has closed and guarded his heart and imagination so tightly that no venom can get in and undermine them?" (33)

"I notice that I am falling into a slight madness that comes from my boundless desire to be different." (35)

"I do not expect anything good to happen here. I arrived here with a toothache. The rain was drumming on the roofs, and the room I was shown is as bleak as an operating room in a third-rate hospital. One always thinks it cannot get any worse. But life is inexhaustible in its levels and nuances of discomfort. So I will get myself candles, cotton, and alcohol." (40)