I think writers like old cities and are made very nervous by new cities.
Capitalism arose and took off its pajamas. Another day, another dollar. Each man is valued at what he will bring in the marketplace. Meaning has been drained from work and assigned instead to remuneration.
One of the pleasures of art is that it enables the mind to move in unanticipated directions, to make connections that may be in some sense errors but are fruitful nonetheless.
MTV has severely compromised surrealism, perhaps ruined it forever.
It is difficult to keep the public interested. The public demands new wonders piled on new wonders. Often we don’t know where our next marvel is coming from. The supply of strange ideas is not endless.
Some people’, Miss R. said,’run to conceits or wisdom but I hold to the hard, brown, nutlike word. I might point out that there is enough aesthetic excitement here to satisfy anyone but a damned fool.
Doubt is a necessary precondition tomeaningful action. Fear is the great mover in the end.
The world is sagging, snagging, scaling, spalling, pilling, pinging, pitting, warping, checking, fading, chipping, cracking, yellowing, leaking, stalling, shrinking, and in dynamic unbalance.
I am never needlessly obscure I am needfully obscure, when I am obscure.
No man’s plenum, Mr. Quistgaard, is impervious to the awl of God’s will.
A process of accretion. Barnacles growing on a wreck or a rock. I’d rather have a wreck than a ship that sails. Things attach themselves to wrecks. Strange fish find your wreck or rock to be a good feeding ground; after a while you’ve got a situation with possibilities.
You may not be interested in absurdity,” she said firmly, “but absurdity is interested in you.
Of course we did everything right, insofar as we were able to imagine what “right” was.
Hubert complains that the electric wastebasket has been overheating. I haven’t noticed it but that’s what Hubert says and Hubert is rarely wrong about things that don’t matter. The electric wastebasket is a security item. Papers dropped into it are destroyed instantly. How the electric wastebasket accomplishes this is not known. An intimidation followed by a demoralization eventuating in a disintegration, one assumes. It is not emptied. There are not even ashes.
It seemed to proclaim itself a mystery, but one there was no point in solving – an ongoing low-grade mystery.
The first thing I did was make a mistake. I thought I had understood capitalism, but what I had done was assume an attitude -melancholy sadness- toward it.
The trouble with capturing one is that that original gesture is almost impossible to equal or improve upon.
The mind carries you with it, away from what you are supposed to do, toward things that cannot be explained rationally, toward difficulty, lack of clarity, late-afternoon light.
The snow is coming,” she said. “Soon it will be snow time. Together then as in other snow times. Drinking busthead ’round the fire. Truth is a locked room that we knock the lock off from time to time, and then board up again. Tomorrow you will hurt me, and I will inform you that you have done so, and so on and so on. To hell with it. Come, viridian friend, come and sup with me.
I have to admit we are mired in the most exquisite mysterious muck. This muck heaves and palpitates. It is multi-directional and has a mayor.
Truth, as Bergson knew, is a hard apple, whether one is throwing it or catching it.