"By hand-setting and letterpress printing each of Borges' footnotes, I continued the exploration of printed matter and duplication; I was making hrönir. The book also includes a set of AZERTY translated footnotes that are the result of the confounding Dutch keyboard. All of the translations were created by watching Dutch- and Flemish-subtitled American television shows." --Abra Ancliffe
"Now for the Pharisees, they say that some actions, but not all, are the work of fate, and some of them are in our own power, and that they are liable to fate, but are not caused by fate. But the sect of the Essen[e]s affirm, that fate governs all things, and that nothing befalls men but what is according to its determination. And for the Sadducees, they take away fate, and say there is no such thing, and that the events of human affairs are not at its disposal; but they suppose that all our actions are in our own power, so that we are ourselves the causes of what is good, and receive what is evil from our own folly." --F. Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Bk. XIII., Ch. 5, sect 9.
"Zoopoetics is a new movement in literary theory and practice that treats nonhumans as individuals with agency, as conscious world-having individuals worthy of moral consideration." --Gabriel Gudding
"Alexander Ellis, the British philologist, mentions that a girl in Chicago was being raised to speak Volapük. Her name was Corinne Cohn; she was the daughter of Henry Cohn, a professor of Volapük, and in 1888 she was six years old.
There's no record of what became of Corinne. I imagine her speaking Volapük with her father at the kitchen table, after dinner. She chews on the end of her braid, and tells him, tears in her eyes, how no one understands her, no one but him! Only the problem is that even he doesn't understand everything she says. Corinne has invented new Volapük expressions, new idioms to describe what it's like to be a 12-year-old girl in Chicago, an experience for which old Father Schleyer had absolutely no words. For a few years, until she gives it up for boys and boat rides on Lake Michigan, Volapük is a living language." --Paul LaFarge
"In the end, a lot of this stuff made its way into The Grasshopper King, which in some sense is about the question: 'What if a real language worked the way people who invent languages want languages to work, and what would happen to you if you tried to speak that language?' " --Jordan Ellenberg on his blog
Though these intelligent predators no longer took an active part in killing their food, they still relaxed by watching nonstop depictions of slaughter & violence; they could not imagine a story without violent conflict; & their only concept of peace was a quiet battlefield where one side has annihilated another.
"I remember evacuating for Katrina, stuck in a traffic jam at 3 AM the Saturday before it hit, and listening to the local AM station take calls from people who were on the fence about evacuating. (The year before, the city had emptied out for a false alarm, and a lot of people who had evacuated from what turned out to be a gusty sprinkle were reluctant to do it again.) We were somewhere in the Florida panhandle, but the reception was crystal clear...this was WWL, "The Big 870," transmitting at 50,000 watts across the South.
Finally, after the nth call from someone with the means to evacuate but not the inclination, the meteorologist blew up:
"Listen to me, this isn't like last year. This is one of the strongest, most aggressive storms I've ever seen. For all intents and purposes, this isn't even a hurricane...it's a tornado the size of the Gulf Of Mexico and it's headed right for us. You want to know what to do? Here it is: get in your car, tune to this station, and start driving north. When you can no longer get our signal, it should be safe to stop." --Ian A.T. on Metafilter
"... to read the entire history of philosophy, premised on Presence, as an immunological response to media. ...Why this horror of mediation? Why this horror of the material?" --Larval Subjects
"...an aesthetic that was countercultural in 1965 was becoming mainstream by 1968, and was still rippling through the world of graphic design in the early 1970s." --feuilleton
"Of all the French Catholics, I admire the horror writer Petrus Borel, also known as The Lycanthrope, who said he was a papist because he couldn’t be a cannibal." --Ligotti, ibid
"Not the least proof of Poe's genius is that he abandoned this genre of writing as soon as he had mastered it. --CAS, on detective stories" --@MrKittyFluff
"An aching heart is but a steppingstone" --Helen Steiner Rice
"In my favorite games, a Fallout 2 or a Project Nomad, for example, I never really cared about 'winning,' or anything skill-based, I just wanted to look around and explore and experience the fictional world." --Jacob Bakkila, the inventor of Horse_eBooks
"Years later he [Kawabata] revealed that he had not only read the Japanese translation of Ulysses but also had bought a copy of the English text and compared the two." --5 Modern Japanese Novelists
"Much as dust self-appoints itself into clumps in one corner rather than another, so the idea that the reality is realer over the horizon reels us in." --Tibor Fischer
"Hunger is my native place in the land of the passions." --Hammarskjöld
A science fiction novel in which corporations are people, & human beings aren't.
Scents and Sensibility. " Perfumery has a lot to do with this process of courting the edges of unrecognizability, of evoking sensations that don't have names, or of mixing up sensations that don't belong together."
A copy of Mein Kampf in German. From 1936. On the one hand, only another valuable, rare book. Such as is occasionally encountered in our business. On the other...if there was ever a real Necronomicon, this is it.
I've read it. It's verbose, abstract, cliché-ridden; the very definition of "unreadable". I suspect not many of his followers read it either. It wasn't this that drove the Götterdämmerung. It's more like the poetry of Mao, the paintings of Dubya: a byproduct. Maybe you could tease out some of his psychosis from what it says, & what it doesn't say--but written words were obviously not his weapon of choice.
I wouldn't want to sell this to a Neo-Nazi. (But who else would want it for $100?) Maybe it should be donated--like to the Holocaust Museum. The case has been made that Lucretius's poem was another deadly-paginated object, a relic with hidden explosive powers, almost an entity with an entity's volition. This is not such a book.
"The first bowl moistens my lips and throat; The second bowl breaks my loneliness; The third bowl searches my barren entrails but to find therein some five thousand scrolls; The fourth bowl brings out light perspiration, and so troubling affairs in my life all disperse through my pores; The fifth bowl cleanses my whole body; The six bowl opens up a channel to reach the immortals; The seventh bowl I dare not drink, or I would seem to have wings and take flight to paradise in a light breeze." --Lu Tong
Dream. Wake up. Pour cream in patterns in coffee.
Dream. Wake up. Pour cream in patterns in coffee.
Burn your tongue on another sip.
Burn your tongue on another sip.
Wake up in coffee, in cream. Burn another sip.
Pour patterns on your tongue. Dream.
Drive to work two miles over the speed limit.
Drive to work two miles over the speed limit.
Don’t notice the poppies on the side of the road.
Don’t notice the poppies on the side of the road.
The poppies on the side of the road
don’t notice the speed limit. Drive over two miles to work.
Watch the clock on the wall. It ticks a slow minute.
Watch the clock on the wall. It ticks a slow minute.
Avoid the smiling woman in a blue dress with buttons.
Avoid the smiling woman in a blue dress with buttons.
Watch the wall, the clock; the woman in a dress with buttons.
A slow, blue minute ticks on, smiling. Avoid it
with patterns on the cream wall. Work
two miles over the speed limit. Pour a minute
in coffee. Watch it. Avoid another sip.
Dream in blue buttons on a dress. Drive into
the slow poppies on the side of the road, the woman.
Notice your tongue ticks, smiling. Burn the clock. Don’t wake up."
"Carl Theodor Dreyer's 1932 film Vampyr presupposes such a reality coexistent with our own, pushing and pulling against the grain of the ordinary; a reality in which death permeates every cubic centimeter, warping light into darkness and suffocating every vestige of hope, a reality as porous as dream and as terrifying." --Blake Collier writing on Mockingbird
A copy of the 2015 Best American Poetry, with its now-notorious "yellowfaced" entrant. I am more excited by the mention of a "sonnet-ghazal" (i have written) in the intro.
My didgeridoo story. A correspondent in the 80s sent me a cassette which included some didgeridoo music. This fascinated me, not least because i could subsequently find scarcely any mention of the thing anywhere. --And then, somewhat later, i had been contacted to find a performance venue for some travelling improvisatory musicians who were coming to Dallas. I found a house, & contacted as many people as i could. So we were sitting there beginning, when in walked: one didgeridoo. Two didgeridoos. Three didgeridoos.
Reading: a cli-fi noir (Depth), set in a New York City where the ocean covers everything up to the 20th storey or so. Occasional satirical touches (reminiscent of Grey--that is, Jon Armstrong's!), such as pseudo-cigarettes that clear up your sinuses, make your teeth whiter, but are just as addictive as the old kind. Also, in the "mainland United States" it's a federal offense for women to wear pants...
