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Day: 9 February 2011

Moscow: The Kremlin and the Moscow Evening Traffic

You have probably heard about Moscow’s atrocious traffic jams. I have to visit my house 30 mins earlier because I must allow for the fact that it may take me 10-20 mins longer to get from my house to the closest tube by bus. In my district we don’t suffer from a lack of buses. In fact, after 7 years there are two or three extra buses connecting my district with the metro stations and/or other districts. But we do suffer from the abundance of cars, lorries, and trucks, and when they organise a perfect traffic jam you cannot help but learn the lesson… and take extra time to get to where you need to go.

The embankment in the photo was photographed shortly before 9pm on Wednesday and doesn’t look too crowded, but I can promise you a photo in the broad daylight that will show exactly how dense the traffic can be here.

And you can also see the Kremlin wall, the Presidential Palace, the Archangel Cathedral, and the Ivan the Great Bell Tower and Belfry.

Quotes: Jean Dubuffet on Reading

This is not a book that one can read – if reading means to start at the first page and to finish on the last. Here it does not end. One can use this book their entire life. One can also read it from end to the start. It has no sense; one can make of it whatever they want. This is a book to use like they use a Persian rug. Or like a talisman, or a crystal ball. It is of a permanent usage. Wherever one opens it, he is immediately transported into your homologous, parallel world where he finds that there are no more things small or large, light or heavy, corporeal or rational, there is no more departure or arrival, no more space empty or full.

Jean Dubuffet, a French painter and sculptor.

The French original, an extract from Dubuffet’s letter to Claude Simon on the latter’s Triptyque:

C’est un livre qu’on ne peut pas lire – si lire est commencer à la première page et finir à la dernière. Ici on ne finit pas. On peut faire usage du livre une vie entière. On peut le lire aussi en remontant de la fin au commencement. Il n’a pas un sens, il en a autant qu’on veut. C’est un livre à utiliser comme un tapis de Perse. Ou encore comme un talisman, une boule de cristal. Il est d’un usage permanent. A tout endroit qu’on l’ouvre on est imméditament transporté dans votre monde parallèle, votre monde homologue, où se trouvent abolis le petit et le grand, le léger et le lourd, le corporel et le mental, le départ et l’arrivée, le vide et le plein.
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