10's, Week 6

10 "Verbal Photographs":

• A brown leather glove lies alone in a puddle in a parking lot, abandoned unknowingly.
  
• A corner of white Frigidaire appliances glow green with the numbers "10:16."
  
• A large brown truck that reads "UPS" in gold letters, waits at the end of the long, icy driveway.
  
• Two twenty-something guys with tousled brown hair sit next to each other in armless brown leather chairs with their heads down, reading in front of a wall of books in the "Biography" section of Borders.
  
• The murky brown mud oozes a lighter brown liquid, while holding the shape of shoes previously there.
  
• A grey-brown squirrel climbs the porch banister flaking with white paint, and hunches over a pile of peanuts on the rail surface.
  
• A pile of boots, gloves, and ice skates sit by the front door, icy and melting.
  
• A brown liquid drips in a steady flow from the top of the machine into the clear glass pot, giving off steam.
  
• The rusty "Peninsular Paper Co." sign sits behind a frozen river of ice and snow, snow gathering on the tops of each letter.
  
• A man in light blue jeans, a red puffy coat, white sneakers, and a green and yellow beanie that reads: "Vernors" races across the street in the slush of yesterday's snow.
  

10 "Treasures":

• "Every lover is mad, we are told. But can we imagine a madman in love? Never--I am entitled only to an impoverished, incomplete, metaphorical madness: love drives me nearly mad, but I do not communicate with the supernatural, there is nothing of the sacred within me; my madness, a mere irrationality, is dim, even invisible; besides, it is entirely recuperated by the culture: it frightens no one." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  

• "I-love-you has no usages. Like a child's word, it enters into no social constraint; it can be a sublime, solemn, trivial word, it can be an erotic, pornographic word. It is a socially irresponsible word." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "In the manner of what happens in singing, in the proffering of I-love-you, desire is neither repressed (as in what is uttered) nor recognized (where we did not expect it: as in the uttering itself) but simply: released, as an orgasm. Orgasm is not spoken, but it speaks and it says: I-love-you." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "I love you. Je-t'aime/I-love-you. The figure refers not to the declaration of love, to the avowal, but to the repeated utterance of the love cry." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "Like desire, the love letter waits for an answer; it implicitly enjoins the other to reply for without a reply the other's image changes, becomes other." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "No answer. Mutisme/silence. The amorous subject suffers anxiety because the loved object replies scantily or not at all to his language (discourse or letters)." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "The slightest amorous emotion, whether of happiness or of disappointment, brings Werther to tears. Werther weeps often, very often, and in floods. Is it the lover in Werther who weeps, or is it the romantic?" --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "Why? Pourquoi/why. Even as he obsessively asks himself why he is not loved, the amorous subject lives in the belief that the loved object does love him but does not tell him so." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense: it might be called an anterior immediacy. The image is perfectly adapted to this temporal deception: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already (again, always) a memory (the nature of photography is not to represent but to memorialize)." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse
  
• "When two subjects argue according to a set exchange of remarks and with a view to having the 'last word,' these two subjects are already married: for them the scene is an exercise of a right, the practice of a language of which they are co-owners; each on in his turn says the scene, which means: never you without me, and reciprocally. This is the meaning of what is euphemistically called dialogue: not to listen to each other, but to submit in common to an egalitarian principle of the distribution of language goods." --Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse