Fly, fly, empty as
a word
I accept the pleasure
of the body
Possibly it is to
feel a fine
lord, a proud eye, an
excellent jacket, stuff, an unruffled company,
an old rifle whose shake is unavoidable,
giving beneath a profession, seeing
above a salary
The creatures scream, your face scarlet
with importance
Know, know
Smoothly, torquise snow
sleeps, like a work
What would the fact
watch without skin to swing?
Absurd and gifted
Stiller than a shore
More evil than a string
More distinct than a being
More glittering than wilderness
More attentive than a skin
A leg so
heavy that the foot
talks
I am distinct in
the face of
all that is not satanic
A heart too motionless is no heart
at all
"Yes, I thought, if I were a human skin lampshade who might or might not have been constructed by a doomed Jewish shoemaker at the behest of a mad red-haired woman on a horse, and then found sixty years later by a dope fiend in an abandoned house after the worst storm in United States history, there could be worse places to return to the earth than inside the gates of the Dispersed of Judah." --Mark Jacobson, The Lampshade (2010)
Ironic shit becomes more and more deadpan and hard to distinguish from the real stuff. You get points by being able to tell one from the other. At the limit, there will literally be no difference whatsoever between the two types of things. Those who can still tell them apart win.
Of course, there will be no way for mere mortals to distinguish someone who can detect literally undetectable differences between the ironic and the non-ironic from someone who can't. But those who can will be able to." --Fists O'Fury
"And Kaesong is one of the most talked about geomantic cities..." (Hong-key Yoon, p. 10)--a phrase which sets me to dreaming, Calvino-like, of things that might be; he also introduces the phrase "iconographic warfare" (loc cit), which has applications today.
Bruce Sterling's closing remarks at the latest SXSW: "If you want to know what the worst-case scenario is for us, what would happen if Austin conclusively lost? Waco. Waco, Texas. The defeated Austin. Waco, Texas used to be the 'Athens of the Southwest.' That was its name. Waco was an intellectual center of education, of science, art, culture, and radical publishing.
Yes, in Waco — but the fundies got Waco. They just took it down. They won conclusively. Waco went down with all hands."
And: "If I'm going to properly mourn something, I will cry about centuries of paper-based literature being disrupted and dis-intermediated. My subculture world I loved so well: xeroxed fanzines, science fiction monthly magazines, publishing houses, independent bookstores, newspapers, magazines, libraries, novels.
I wrote 'em. I really liked novels... As it happens, I recently wrote a new novel. Funniest novel I ever wrote. It's an ebook, you can go and look for it if you want. It doesn't make much difference if you do or you don't. We just don't live in a world where novels can be important in the way that novels used to be important.
Nobody reviews them. There are no paper periodicals that talk at great length about paper novels to people who spend their lives reading paper.
The bookstore chains have been disrupted. They are collapsing. I am a novelist. I myself don't go into bookstores very much now. They have become archaic, depressing places. They are stone cliff houses. They are half abandoned.
If I don't go in there, certainly my readers are not going to go in there. I know where the readers went. They’re all on the internet, or in social media, just like me."
