"All his adult life he was on the run from addiction, debt and the waves of grief and regret that periodically flooded his life."
– Brian Dillon, writing about Thomas De Quincey
"And so they went on, hoping to write something that they would not regret, but continually regretting and therefore growing continually more and more blue-in-the face."
– Laura Riding, Experts Are Puzzled
“I am proud of this writing, although some of it I find too earnest. I wish the seriousness had been tempered with play, and the didacticism softened with humour.”
– Yaniya Lee, Selected Writing on Black Canadian Art
Those who do know history are doomed to endlessly dissect it.
Trying not to repeat history is a repetition of others who have tried not to repeat history in the past.
Those who don’t know history are doomed to think that things are worse now than they were before.
“That’s all,” he said. “I sit at my desk and smoke and play hearts online and when I’ve got a deadline I write. Otherwise, it’s just my thoughts, which are self-consuming.”
- Peter Schjeldahl, in Ada Calhoun’s Also a Poet: Frank O'Hara, My Father, and Me
"Performance is ephemeral, but the performances we remember also exist because we remember them. The very fact we remember them is a testament to their value." radicalcut.blogspot.com/2024/07/exce...
Democracy was a lie capitalism told the world in order to win the propaganda war against communism. Now that communism is gone the lie is no longer necessary.
"We agree that we don’t want the world that exists, but do we want the same world? And a lot of politics, a lot of the humorlessness of the political, comes when you realize that the people who share your critique don’t share your desire.”
— Lauren Berlant
"It’s hard for me to know that you’re really enjoying the moment, that you’re really happy, if I don’t hear that you know that it’s temporary."
- Fusilier
“We are sick and tired of living in debt and slavery,’ the Rakalovsk peasants had their chairperson write. ‘We want space and light.”
- China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution
"Sometimes our dreams shared characters, the same characters would leave one dream and enter another. We would talk about these dream people, try to describe them to each other, try to ensure they were actually the same figures." radicalcut.blogspot.com/2024/06/exce...
“I’m going to write something tremendous, I tell myself, yet at the same moment I am afraid of it, and in this moment of fear I have already failed and can no longer begin.”
- Thomas Bernhard, Extinction
I don't really think of myself as a poet anymore. But, nonetheless, at semi-regular intervals I still seem to post "poems" at A Radical Cut In The Texture Of Reality: radicalcut.blogspot.com/search/label...
"I feel that man should not have thrown himself into this amazing adventure that is history. Everything that he does turns against him because he wasn’t made to do something, he was made solely to look and to live as the animals and the trees do."
– E.M. Cioran
“If you rehearse nine days a week, you become very good at rehearsing; if you play nine dates a week, you become very good at playing live.”
– Chris Spedding
"...despite all my longing for collaboration, I cannot deny the incredible charge I get from seeing my own singular name printed on a giant poster or on the cover of a book. For me, every time this happens, I feel a little bit like my ego is on cocaine..." radicalcut.blogspot.com/2024/06/an-e...
“The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out. There’s no innocence. Either way, you’re accountable.”
- Arundhati Roy
I’m going to once again attempt to spend some time reading some books I already have (but haven’t yet read) instead of continuing to acquire new books (and then only reading the newest ones.) It is astonishing to me just how difficult I find it to do so.
“If I were asked for a definition of myself, I would say that I am the one who waits; I investigate my surroundings, I interpret everything in terms of what I discover, I become sensitive.”
– Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
