listless entropic snapshots.

I was in Germany last month. In between Munich and Nuremberg we visited the small town of Eichstatt to see the buildings of Karljosef Schattner.

I got out of bed at 6am to take these photos. A rare occurrence. 

There is some graffiti on the building in the first photo that says: "alles so schön bunt hier!" which, with very slight help from The Internet, I have translated as "everything here is so beautifully colorful!" I assume it's some critique of Modernist architecture. 

A little bit late in posting this but... vive le tour!

Cover of Julien Gracq's A Dark Stranger, 1951.

I've recently been dipping into an anthology of twentieth century Scottish poetry. This 1958 poem by Norman MacCaig entitled Half-built Boat in a Hayfield- with its musings on entropy, the unfinished, beginnings and ends- acts as a nice accompaniment to my recent trip to the north-west...

A cradle, at a distance, of a kind:

Or, making midget its neat pastoral scene,

A carcass rotted and its bones picked clean.

  Rye-grass was silk and sea, whose rippling was

Too suave to rock it. Solid in the sun,

Its stiff ribs ached for voyages not begun.

  The gathering word was not completed yet.

The litter of its own genesis lay around,

Sunk in the bearded sea, or on the ground.

  As though evolving brilliances could show

In their first utterances what would end as one

Continuous proclamation of a sun.

  Only when these clawed timbers could enclose

Their own completing darkness would they be

Phoenixed from It and phoenixed into She.

  And fit then, as such noticing reveals,

To split her first wave open and explore

An illustration depicting Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel Slaughterhouse Five. The drawing aims to echo the non-chronological narrative, the omniscient Tralfamadorian way of seeing. Here is some accompanying text I wrote:  

All this happened, more or less.

As a prisoner of war, Kurt Vonnegut Jr survived the February 1945 firebombing of Dresden. This experience forms the basis of his best known work, Slaughterhouse Five.

Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.

Bookended by chapters narrated by Vonnegut himself, the novel follows the writer’s semi-autobiographical alter ego, Billy Pilgrim, as he travels haphazardly through time, experiencing events from the past, present and future in non-chronological order.

Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day.

As the narrative flits between decades, we learn simultaneously of Billy’s childhood, his uneasy married life, his experiences of war, his optometry career, and his time spent as a zoo exhibit on the planet Tralfamadore.

Billy Pilgrim says that the Universe does not look like lots of bright little dots to the creatures from Tralfamadore. The creatures can see where each star has been and where it is going, so that the heavens are filled with rarefied, luminous spaghetti.

As omniscient beings, the Tralfamadorians dismiss any notion of free will, knowing instead that all moments in time have always been and will always be. Hence, the creatures and subsequently Billy assume an almost fatalistic worldview.

Now, when I myself hear that somebody is dead, I simply shrug and say what the Tralfamadorians say about dead people, which is “So it goes”.

The acquiescent refrain of “so it goes” appears frequently throughout the novel, employed as a memento mori after any allusion to death. Through use of this device the often humorous tale expresses a subtle pathos, conveys a strange melancholic mix of existentialism and determinism, highlights the senseless inevitability of war, and suggests the only order in a nonsensical world is humanity’s proclivity towards death and destruction.

"... the hole was oriented as much toward the building's environs as it was to its interior, directing one's gaze toward the massive structure encroaching from behind: the hi-tech behemoth that was soon to become the Centre Georges Pompidou. 

The hole recalled the structure of a telescope from outside the building, a periscope from within. Oriented at a forty-five-degree angle from the street, it enabled pedestrians to peer up and through its telescopic form, radically juxtaposing the ascension of one era's architecture at the expense of another's disintegration."