pylons for Cylons

<-London (via wikipedia)

"What distinguishes us from our predecessors is our offhandedness with regard to Mystery. We have even renamed it: thus was born the Absurd..." --E M Cioran, All Gall is Divided (1952; tr Howard 2012)

"Gravity's Rainbow is just so beautiful because it's very multidimensional. I really like books that you can kind of hear as much as think about, that are so graphic and visual. I wanted to make an opera of that book, actually, and I wrote to him and asked him if that would be OK (I actually found him; he's quite reclusive). And he wrote me this funny letter. He said, 'You can do it, but you can only use banjo.' " --Laurie Anderson

"Skepticism is the elegance of anxiety." --Cioran, op cit

<-from On Beyond Zebra (via wikipedia)

Who is Cleo Birdwell?

"A philosophical vogue is as irresistible as a gastronomic one: an idea is no better refuted than a sauce." --ibid

"To understand The Donna Reed Show (1958-1966) as representative of some kind of 1950s reality would be the equivalent of someone going to our theaters and concluding that vampires walk the streets of Seattle." --Jessica Crispin

"Even Cioran, who praised friends for being “marginal” and was accustomed to suicidal phone calls that came in the middle of the night, requiring hours of consolation, found Celan hard to take." --Benjamin Ivry

(via, via Sheri Morgan on Fb)

Black Angel's Death Song. Beck weighs in.

"Stanley Elkin’s A Bad Man is set in a prison. Before writing the novel, Elkin had never visited a prison or researched was it was like to be in prison. After he published the novel, he had the opportunity to teach creative writing to convicts in a prison. So finally he had a chance to see what a real prison what like. His comment: 'I like my prison better.' " --Thomas Ligotti