Yoko Tawada: The Emissary

On his youth, Yoshiro had prided himself of always having an answer ready when someone asked who his favorite composer or designer was, or what kind of wine he preferred. Confident in his good taste, he had poured time and money into surrounding himself with things that would show it off. Now he no longer felt any need to use taste as the bricks and mortar fora structure called «individuality».


Adults arrogantly talked about whether food tasted good or not, as if a gourmet sensibility put you in a superior class of people. Poison often had no taste at all, so no matter how finely honed your palate, your taste buds weren’t going to save your life.


Being able to see the end of anything gave him a tremendous sense of relief. As a child he had assumed the goal of medicine was to keep bodies alive forever; he had never considered the pain of not being able to die.

Tim Lawrence: Love Saves the Day: A History of American Dance Music Culture, 1970-1979

Elizabeth Taylor: Palladian

His head felt as if someone were doing knitting in it. Nothing was simple. He believed that he loved Cassandra tenderly; but marriage is not simple. It brought with it, Nanny had reminded him, so many complications which were beyond his energies. Tinty stood before him, and Tom, Nanny with her talk of refrigerators and change, the thought of beginning a new life in that fast-crumbling house, of leaving a smouldering and rank corner of earth to sons, perhaps, and then engaging servants, spending money, laying down wine, planting and clearing. In the library last night, no one, nothing, had stood between him and Cassandra. Now so much interposed. She was a child merely, to be led into so dark, so lonely, a wilderness as his heart. For her, so much unravelling of people, so much sorting out of possessions would have to be done. He might draw her to him and ease the passion which lay under her silence, lead her into the circle of ice which encompassed him: but the obstacles were still outside, where the world was, and even within him, there was Violet.

Timothy Morton: Being Ecological

Arguments for the radical cognitive change required to fix ecological catastrophe.

The idea of sustainability implies that the system we now have is worth sustaining... There is a lack of attention to what is being efficiently sustained.


Bataille gave a name to this smooth functioning myth: the restricted economy. A restricted economy is one in which the dominant theme is efficiency: minimum energy throughput. The Earth is finite, and economic flows must be restricted to its finite size and capacities. So much ecological ethics, politics, and aesthetics is based on the economy of restriction.


Things are mysterious, in a radical and irreducible way.


Being ecological includes a sense of my weird inclusion in what I’m experiencing.


We’ve been thinking that we are on top of things, outside of things or beyond things, able to look down and decide exactly what to do, in all sorts of ways for about 12,000 years.

Kenneth Cook: Wake in Fright

Urban school teacher trapped in rural hell, strongly reminiscent of Joseph Roth's Legend of the Holy Drinker.

"First time in The Yabba?"


In the remote towns of the west there are few of the amenities of civilization; there is no sewerage, there are no hospitals, rarely a doctor; the food is dreary and flavourless from long carrying, the water is bad; electricity is for the few who can afford their own plant, roads are mostly non-existent; there are no theatres, no picture shows and few dance halls; and the people are saved from stark insanity by the one strong principle of progress that is ingrained for a thousand miles east, north, south and west of the Dead Heart - the beer is always cold.


Peculiar trait of the western people, thought Grant, that you could sleep with their wives, despoil their daughters, sponge on them, defraud them, do almost anything that would mean at least ostracism in normal society, and they would barely seem to notice it. But refuse to drink with them and you immediately became a mortal enemy. What the hell? He didn’t even want to think about the west or its people and their peculiarities. Let them be. Once he was in Sydney, who knew, he might never come back.


When you travel by road in the west you travel with a cohort of dust which streams up from your tyres and rolls away in a disintegrating funnel, defining the currents of air your vehicle sets in motion … And the heat is unthinkable, no matter how widely the windows are open, and the sweat streams off your body and into your socks, and if there are a number of people in the car their body stenches mingle disagreeably.


Grant felt a little conspicuous in his safari jacket.

Karl Ove Knausgaard: The End

Final chapter in Knausgaard's exploration of contemporary biographical fiction, mixing the quotidian with deep psychological probings and a lengthy analysis of Hitler and Nazism.

Perhaps because I have always had such a weak ego, always felt myself inferior to all others, in every situation … I am inferior to the female assistant in the shoe shop when I go in to buy shoes, she has me in her hands, so to speak, full of an authority to which I yield. But the worst for me are waiters, since their role is so obviously to serve and be there to please.


‘The clown wasn’t there, daddy!’ Vanja said. ‘He didn’t go to his own birthday party.’

The children had each been given a party hat and sat around a table drawing a picture for the clown’s birthday. They were then given a glass of pop and a hot dog and a piece of cake, which they ate in silence. They asked the staff when the clown was coming, he would be there soon, they were told. Then they played for a while, without the clown or any great enthusiasm as they didn’t know one another and despite encouragement from the staff. Vanja didn’t want to join in, she sat on Linda’s lap and kept asking when the clown would be coming and why he wasn’t there already. Finally the party was over, they trooped out, over to the stage where all the other children were sitting waiting for the clown, who did finally make an appearance, performing his standard routine with one exception, he collected the drawings from the children who had been at his party.

Vanja didn’t understand this. How could the clown not turn up for his own birthday party?

We couldn’t of course tell her the truth – that the bloody tour operators didn’t give a shit about the kids and didn’t want to waste resources on them – so we said that Coco, which was the clown’s name, had been pleased with the drawings, and the cake had been good, hadn’t it?

Junzo Shono: Evening Clouds

Quotidian episodes of family life in the outskirts of Tokyo.

"There's no telling what you can learn by keeping your ears open"


"Of all the things we come to know in this world, there is ultimately nothing that does not pass on."