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[typewritten text pasted into book]

May 2, 69

THEORY OF FILM by Siegfried Kracauer p. 72

"Inadvertently he thus equates life with the street. The street in the extended sense of the word is not only the arena of fleeting impressions and chance encounters but a place where the flow of life is bound to assert itself. Again one will have to think mainly of the city street with its ever-moving anonymous crowds. The kaleidoscopic sights mingle with unidentified shapes and fragmentary visual complexes and cancel each other out, thereby preventing the onlooker following up any of the innumerable suggestions they offer. What appears to him are not so much sharp-contoured individuals engaged in this or that definable purpose as loose throngs of sketchy, completely indeterminate figures. Each has a story, yet the story is not given. Instead, an incessant flow of possibilities and near-intangible meanings appears. This flow casts its spell over the flâneur or even creates him. The flaneur is intoxicated with life in the street-life eternally dissolving the patterns which it is about to form."

[Phrase in Margin:] flaâneur n. Fr. one who idly saunters without destination or aim; a lounger; a stroller

P. 73

It (the street) remains an unfixable flow which carries fearful uncertainties and alluring excitements.

p. 304

"The small random movements which concern things common to you and me and the rest of mankind can indeed be said to constitute the dimensions of everyday life, this matrix of all other modes of reality. It is a very substantial dimension. If you disregard for a moment articulate beliefs, ideological objectives, special understandings and the like, there still remain

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the sorrows and satisfactions, discords and feasts, wants and pursuits, which mark the ordinary business of living. Products of habit and microscopic interaction, they form a resilient texture which changes slowly and survives wars, epidemics, earthquakes, and revolutions. Films tend to explore this retexture of everyday life, (the street) whose compositions varies according to place, people and time."

'For anyone with "a passion for actuality" there are times when the camera seems preferable to any other medium...'

Marianne Moore Reader p 187

Brooklyn has given me pleasure, has helped to educate; has afforded me, in fact, the kind of tame excitement on which I thrive. same as above p 192

from article "Brooklyn from Clinton Hill"

"it is a privilege to see so much confusion" from the Steeple Jack

Marianne Moore