Takehiko Fukunaga: Flowers of Grass

A man this ill is certain to die before long. This reality - this sole reality now available to me - is the only life I've been given. After a long period of self delusion, that's the unpleasant truth I've had to accept. I'll never wake up until I die, which is bound to happen soon. My experience of life doesn't deserve to be called living. My thirty years - college until graduation, then a job for a while, then the army, and finally this sanatorium - have run their dreary, futile course. I can neither change the past nor embrace the future. I have no present or future, only a past.

Jon Savage: England's Dreaming

“Sid was really f*cked up. Really drunk. He played for a while without his guitar plugged in. He played for a while with a fish. I think somebody threw it up there, a bass or something. People seemed pissed at him. He’d spit on the audience; they’d spit on him. That’s what you did. There was this element of, ‘You paid to see us play?’”
- The Austin Chronicle

"The band gave their most spirited performance of the American tour in San Antonio. Johnny Rotten came out wearing a T-shirt depicting two homosexual cowboys, and Sid greeted the crowd with some very unkind remarks. The audience hurled anything onstage that they could get their hands on. Items of choice were spit, popcorn, beer cups, cans, hot dogs, whipped cream, bottles, and pies. Steve and Paul did their best to hold the show together while Sid and Johnny took every possible opportunity to insult and infuriate the crowd. Sid removed his leather jacket to reveal “Gimme A Fix” scrawled on his chest. Johnny blew snot into the crowd, and he snarled and screamed the whole night. Steve promptly broke a string during the first number, and he later used his guitar as a weapon against threatening audience members. At one point Sid Vicious tells the crowd, ‘You cowboys are all a bunch of f*cking faggots!’ When a young cowboy attempts physical retaliation, Vicious hits him with his bass. The show is stopped for several minutes while the cowboy is taken away by police. He later denounces the Pistols as “sewer rats with guitars” on TV."
- Randy's Rodeo

"Next to the Sex Pistols, rock and roll and that hall of fame is a piss stain. Your museum. Urine in wine. We're not coming. We're not your monkeys. If you voted for us, hope you noted your reasons. You're anonymous as judges but you're still music industry people. We're not coming. You're not paying attention. Outside the shit-stream is a real Sex Pistol."

- Steve Jones

More here.

Enrique Vila-Matas: Dublinesque

He believes that if talent is demanded of a literary publisher or a writer, it must also be demanded of a reader. Because we mustn’t deceive ourselves: on the journey of reading we often travel through difficult terrains that demand a capacity for intelligent emotion, a desire to understand the other, and to approach a language distinct from the one of our daily tyrannies… Writers fail readers, but it also happens the other way around and readers fail writers when all they ask of them is confirmation that the world is how they see it

Marcel Proust: Swann's Way

“Let us be grateful to the people who make us happy; they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
“Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer's work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader's recognition in himself of what the book says is the proof of the book's truth.”
“We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us.”
“If a little dreaming is dangerous, the cure for it is not to dream less, but to dream more, to dream all the time.”
“People do not die for us immediately, but remain bathed in a sort of aura of
life which bears no relation to true immortality but through which they
continue to occupy our thoughts in the same way as when they were alive. It
is as though they were traveling abroad.”
“People who are not in love fail to understand how an intelligent man can suffer because of a very ordinary woman. This is like being surprised that anyone should be stricken with cholera because of a creature so insignificant as the common bacillus.”
“We do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world. The lives that you admire, the attitudes that seem noble to you, have not been shaped by a paterfamilias or a schoolmaster, they have sprung from very different beginnings, having been influenced by evil or commonplace that prevailed round them. They represent a struggle and a victory.”

Carl Cederstrom and Peter Fleming: Dead Man Working

We have always known that capitalism accumulates value by subtracting social value, experienced as alienation, disenchantment and dehumanization. But what has now become clear is the sheer pointlessness of our daily endeavours. A quest without end or rationale, slowly poisoning almost every aspect of our lives on the job and even afterwards when we think the daily grind is over. But, of course, it is never over.

Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

Work and life become inseparable. Capital follows you when
you dream. Time ceases to be linear, becomes chaotic, broken
down into punctiform divisions. As production and distribution
are restructured, so are nervous systems. To function effectively
as a component of just–in-time production you must develop a
capacity to respond to unforeseen events, you must learn to live
in conditions of total instability, or ‘precarity’, as the ugly
neologism has it. Periods of work alternate with periods of
unemployment. Typically, you find yourself employed in a series
of short-term jobs, unable to plan for the future.

Samuel Beckett: The Expelled and Other Novellas

As long as I kept walking I didn't hear them, because of the footsteps. But as soon as I halted I heard them again, a little fainter each time, admittedly, but what does it matter, faint or loud, cry is cry, all that matters is that it should cease. For years I thought they would cease. Now I don;t think so any more. I could have done with other loves perhaps. But there it is, either you love or you don't.

Peter Ackroyd: London: The Biography

It was also remarked by Grosley that "melancholy prevails in London in every family, in circles, in assemblies, at public and private entertainments. The merry meetings, even of the lowest sort, are dashed with this gloom." Dostoevsky observed the "gloom" which "never forsakes" the Londoner even "in the midst of gaiety." The wine sold in London taverns was also considered "to occasion that melancholy, which is so general." Even the theatre was held responsible for the unhappy distemper; one traveller described how the son of his landlord, after being taken to see Richard III, "leaped out of bed and, after beating the wainscot with his head and feet, at the same time roaring like one possessed, he rolled about the ground in dreadful convulsions, which made us despair of his life; he thought he was haunted by all the ghosts in the tragedy of Richard the Third, and by all the dead bodies in the churchyards of London."

Everything was blamed except, perhaps, for the onerous and exhausting condition of the city itself...

The whole universe may be found within a grain of London's life. The "gate of heaven," in St. Bartholomew the Great, was located beside the shambles of Smithfield. But if it is a sacred city, it is one which includes misery and suffering. The bowels of God have opened, and rained down shit upon London.

The most abject poverty or dereliction can appear beside glowing wealth and prosperity. Yet the city needs its poor. What if the poor must 'lie, or be deprived, in order that the city might live? That would be the strangest contrast of all. Life and death meet and part; misfortune and good fortune shake hands; suffering and happiness inhabit the same house. "Without Contraries," Blake once wrote, "is no progression." He reached this truth by steely observation of the city. It is always ancient, and forever new, that disparity or disjunction itself creating a kind of ferment of novelty and inventiveness. It may be that the new protects the old, or the old guards the new, yet in the very fact of their oneness lies the secret of London's identity shining through time...

London goes beyond any boundary or convention. It contains every wish or word ever spoken, every action or gesture ever made, every harsh or noble statement ever expressed. It is illimitable. It is Infinite London.

Ian Sinclair: Lights Out for the Territory

Walking is the best way to explore and exploit the city; the changes, shifts, breaks in the cloud helmet, movement of light on water. Drifting purposefully is the recommended mode, tramping asphalted earth in alert reverie, allowing the fiction of an underlying pattern to reveal itself. To the no-bullshit materialist this sounds suspiciously like fin-de-siècle decadence, a poetic of entropy — but the born-again flâneur is a stubborn creature, less interested in texture and fabric, eavesdropping on philosophical conversation pieces, than in noticing everything. Alignments of telephone kiosks, maps made from moss on the slopes of Victorian sepulchres, collections of prostitutes' cards, torn and defaced promotional bills for cancelled events at York Hall, visits to the homes of dead writers, bronze casts on war memorials, plaster dogs, beer mats, concentrations of used condoms, the crystalline patterns of glass shards surrounding an imploded BMW quarter-light window, meditations on the relationship between the brain damage suffered by the super-middleweight boxer Gerald McClellan (lights out in the Royal London Hospital, Whitechapel) and the simultaneous collapse of Barings, bankers to the Queen. Walking, moving across a retreating townscape, stitches it all together: the illicit cocktail of bodily exhaustion and a raging carbon monoxide high.

John Szwed: Space is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra

"I really prefer mythocracy to democracy. . . . Reality equals death, because everything which is real has a beginning and an end. Myth speaks of the impossible, of immortality. And since everything that's possible has been tried, we need to try the impossible."

"God calls the chosen by means of lightning bolts, shafts of sunlight, moving stars and celestial music, where the elect are dressed in robes and lifted to heaven by railroads, ladders and chariots."

Mark Fisher (ed): The Resistible Demise of Michael Jackson

As we know from previous experience, certain figures transcend the usual human script: John Lennon, Bill Clinton, Princess Diana, and now Jackson. They radiate some analysis-defying “x” factor, crowd magick, mass appeal. This ability to be consistently forgiven. Failings and fallings and flaws overlooked. Look at Lennon – heroin addiction, support for the IRA, weird foreign missus, dabbling in avant-garde conceptual art, breaks up The Beatles... what more could he do to lose the love of his popular audience? But he remains the Lads’ favorite pop star, bar none: the love never goes. He preaches anti-materialism and mass togetherness but holes up inside therapy-occluded privation with only stock market deals and a freezer full of furs to keep him warm: they love him more. Puts out god-awful AOR sludge. Still the adoration increases.

Do we really need to adumbrate Michael’s own perplexing choices? The myriad ways in which he would seem to be the exact opposite of anything like contemporary black pride? His almost luminous propensity for bad faith and bare-faced lies? His progressively less urgent or pleasing or interesting music? The jacked-up psychopathology of Hubris: I AM THE KING. I AM THE KING.

- Ian Penman

Georges Simenon: The Man Who Watched Trains Go By

"There isn't any truth, you know?"

Edouard Leve: Suicide

I've never heard a single person, since your death, tell your life story starting at the beginning. Your suicide has become the foundational act...

You don't make me sad, but solemn . . . I take advantage on your behalf of things you can no longer experience. Dead, you make me more alive...

You suffered real life in its continuous stream, but you controlled the flow of fictional life by reading at your own rhythm . . . As a reader, you had the power of a god: time submitted to you.

You died because you searched for happiness at the risk of finding the void... Your suicide was the most important thing you ever said.

Georges Perec: W, or The Memory of Childhood

Thus ends the novice's first day. The following days will be spent thus. To begin with he does not grasp. Novices a little more senior than he sometimes try to explain, to tell him what goes on, how things work, what he must do and what he mustn't do. But usually they can't do it. How can you explain that what he is seeing is not anything horrific, not a nightmare, not something he will suddenly wake from, something he can rid his mind of. How can you explain that this is life, real life, this is what there'll be every day, this is what there is, and nothing else, that it's pointless believing something else exists or to pretend to believe in something else, that it's not even worth your time trying to hide it, or to cloak it, it's not even worth your time pretending to believe there must be something behind it, or beneath it, or above it? That's what there is, and that's all... wherever you turn your eyes, that's what you will see, you will not see anything else, and that is the only thing that will turn out to be true.

James Joyce: Ulysses

There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim, let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself that they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the most various circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel and harp soothe his senses or amid the cool silver tranquillity of the evening or at the feast at midnight when he is now filled with wine. Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies under her wrath, not for vengeance to cut off from the living but shrouded in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Television

However peremptory one may be in one’s admiration, one must remain modest in denigration. We must not make virtue of ignorance, in other words, or misunderstanding, or the inability to be charmed or to love (now there was a thought that did me proud, I told myself, hurrying past all that crap as fast as I could).

John Gray: The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek (New York Review of Books)

Whether or not Marx’s vision of communism is “the inherent capitalist fantasy,” Žižek’s vision—which apart from rejecting earlier conceptions lacks any definite content—is well adapted to an economy based on the continuous production of novel commodities and experiences, each supposed to be different from any that has gone before. With the prevailing capitalist order aware that it is in trouble but unable to conceive of practicable alternatives, Žižek’s formless radicalism is ideally suited to a culture transfixed by the spectacle of its own fragility. That there should be this isomorphism between Žižek’s thinking and contemporary capitalism is not surprising. After all, it is only an economy of the kind that exists today that could produce a thinker such as Žižek. The role of global public intellectual Žižek performs has emerged along with a media apparatus and a culture of celebrity that are integral to the current model of capitalist expansion.

In a stupendous feat of intellectual overproduction Žižek has created a fantasmatic critique of the present order, a critique that claims to repudiate practically everything that currently exists and in some sense actually does, but that at the same time reproduces the compulsive, purposeless dynamism that he perceives in the operations of capitalism. Achieving a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision, Žižek’s work—nicely illustrating the principles of paraconsistent logic—amounts in the end to less than nothing.

Alain de Botton: How Proust Can Change Your Life

Like every obstacle in the way of possessing something... poverty, more generous than opulence, gives women far more than the clothes they cannot afford to buy: the desire for those clothes, which creates a genuine, detailed, thorough knowledge of them.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint: Running Away

We walked up and down the streets of this little square of the city, which didn't lack charm, even importance. Glum, hands in pockets, he dragged his feet alongside of me through streets lined with hundred-year-old cypresses, a grumpy, morose expression on his face at all times... His disinterest, it seemed, could only be rivalled by my own indifference.

Ian Buruma: Tony Judt: The Right Questions

This is typical Tony Judt, a commitment to an idea of public good and community, laced with nostalgia. He recalls the Green Line buses of his childhood in 1950s London with equally deep fondness: “They made of me an English boy, perhaps just as much as school did.” Recounting the sad story of the decline of public transport that connected boys like him to the public lives of their countries, Judt hoped, “might be an instructive way to think through what has gone wrong in countries like America and Great Britain.”

...The other option was Zionism, especially in its socialist form. Judt was keenly attracted to Zionism at a time when he actually seemed to be comfortably settled in a corner of British society. He was the product and beneficiary of postwar educational reforms in Britain. Along with the welfare state came excellent free schools for gifted children from low-income families. Bright grammar school boys, such as Judt, were usually the first in their families to go to Oxford or Cambridge. As he explains: “We were thus the very epicenter of a great sociological shift and yet we did not, I think, feel like outsiders.” Judt was a student at King’s College, Cambridge, where John Maynard Keynes and E.M. Forster had taught. “I felt and behaved, I think, as though this were my Cambridge, and not the Cambridge of some alien elite that I had been mistakenly permitted to enter.”

Yasunari Kawabata: The Master of Go

Go came to Japan from China. Real Go, however, developed in Japan. The art of Go in China, now and three hundred years ago, does not bear comparison with that in Japan. Go was elevated and deepened by the Japanese... It is clear that in Go the Japanese spirit has transcended the merely imported and derivative.

Perhaps no other nation has developed games as intellectual as Go and Oriental chess. Perhaps nowhere else in the world would a match be allotted eighty hours extended over three months. Had Go, like the No drama and the tea ceremony, sunk deeper and deeper into the recesses of a strange Japanese tradition?

... That this extraordinary man was born in China and lived in Japan seemed symbolic of a preternatural bounty. His genius had taken life after his remove to Japan. There had been numerous examples over the centuries of persons distinguished in one art or another in a neighbouring country and honoured in Japan. Wu is an outstanding modern example. It was Japan that nurtured, protected, and ministered to a genius that would have lain dormant in China.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Master was fond of eels

Roger Nicholls: Ravel Remembered

Alain de Botton: A Week at the Airport

At the Blink beauty bar, I felt anew the relevance of the traditional religious call to seriousness voiced in Bach's Cantata 106:

Set thy house in order,
For thou shalt die,
And not remain alive.

Gert Jonke: The Distant Sound

My publisher, you reply, of course knows that I'm not composing anything anymore, and has therefore commissioned me to make the most detailed notes of all my analytical thoughts about both the future of music and the music of the future, by describing how and why I no longer compose anything; he thinks that by writing down all my thoughts about a music that is, at least today, still not able to be composed, I will at some time start composing again of my own accord, without noticing it myself, and someday I will suddenly be in the position to compose that music that has not yet even touched the farthest reaches of the imagination, which is why until then he has commissioned me to write the definitive account of all my thoughts about the world of sound, and thus to write nothing more or less than my theoretical life’s work, for whose closing, final completion, however, I intend to need all the time remaining to me until the end of my life.

Edward St Aubyn: At Last

'That's one of the problems with reincarnation: who is being reincarnated if there are more people now than the sum of the people who have ever existed?' said Henry. 'It doesn't make any sense.'

'It only makes sense if lumps of raw humanity are raining down on us for their first round of civilization.'

Edward St. Aubyn: Mother's Milk

What else is there to do but read too much into things? What a poor, thin, dull world we'd live in if we didn't. Besides, is it possible? There's always more meaning than we can lay our hands on.

David Markson: Wittgenstein's Mistress

... Doubtless none of these was a book which had been translated from English, however, where I have the largest familiarity with writers, but had been written in German to begin with.

Which is scarcely to say that I am not familiar with certain German writers also, on the other hand.

Certainly I am familiar with Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance.

Well, or with Goethe.

Although by saying I am familiar with either of these writers I do not necessarily mean that I am extraordinarily familiar with them.

As a matter of fact by saying that I am familiar with them I do not even necessarily mean that I have read a solitary word that either one of them ever wrote.

Actually the sum total of that familiarity may well extend no further than to my reading of the backs of the jackets of phonograph records.

Such as the back of the jacket on Thus Spake Zarathustra by Richard Strauss, for instance.

Don Delillo: The Angel Esmerelda

Its almost unbelievable when you think of it, how they live there in all that ice and sand and mountainous wilderness. "Look at it" he says. "Huge barren deserts, huge oceans. How do they endure all those terrible things? The floods alone. The earthquakes alone make it crazy to live there. Look at those fault systems. They're so big, there's so many of them. The volcanic eruptions alone. What could be more frightening than a volcanic eruption? How do they endure avalanches, year after year, with numbing regularity? It's hard to believe people live there. The floods alone. You can see whole discoloured areas, all flooded out, washed out. How do they survive? Where do they go? Look at the cloud buildups. Look at the swirling storm center. What about the people who live in the path of a storm like that? It must be packing incredible winds. The lightening alone. People exposed on beaches near trees and telephone poles. Look at the cities with their spangled lights spreading in all directions. Try to imagine the crime and violence. Look at the smoke pall hanging low. What does that mean in terms of respiratory disorders? It's crazy. Who would live there? The deserts, how they encroach. Every year they claim more and more arable land. How enormous those snowfields are. Look at the massive storm fronts over the ocean. There are ships down there, small craft, some of them. Try to imagine the waves, the rocking. The hurricanes alone. The tidal waves. Look at those coastal communities exposed to tidal waves. What could be more frightening than a tidal wave? But they live there, they stay there. Where could they go?

-------------------------------------------

This is civilization, I thought, the thrust of social and material advancement, people in motion, testing the limits of time and space. Never mind the festering stink of burnt fuel, the fouling of the planet. The danger may be real but it is simply the overlay, the unavoidable veneer. What I was seeing was also real but it had the impact of a vision, or maybe an ever present event that flares in the observer's eye and mind as a burst of enlightenment.

Edward St Aubyn: Some Hope

It seems people spend the majority of their lives believing they're dying, with the only consolation being that at one point they get to be right.

---

As the drugs had worn off, a couple of years earlier, he had started to realize what it must be like to be lucid all the time, an unpunctuated stretch of consciousness, a white tunnel, hollow and dim, like a bone with the marrow sucked out. ‘I want to die, I want to die, I want to die,’ he found himself muttering in the middle of the most ordinary task, swept away by a landslide of regret as the kettle boiled or the toast popped up.

Flann O"Brien: The Third Policeman

The particular death you die is not even a death (which is an inferior phenomenon at best) only an insanitary abstraction in the backyard[...]

---

Joe had been explaining things in the meantime. He said it was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round. In shape it is circular and by nature it is interminable, repetitive and very nearly unbearable.

Per Petterson: Out Stealing Horses

'Not in my life, I'm not,' and then I started to weep, for I had known that this day would come, and I realised that what I was most afraid of in this world was to be the man in Magritte's painting who looking at himself in the mirror sees only the back of his own head, again and again.

Thomas Pynchon: Inherent Vice

They stood in the streetlight through the kitchen window there’d never been much point putting curtains over and listened to the thumping of the surf from down the hill. Some nights, when the wind was right, you could hear the surf all over town.

Jeffrey Eugenides: The Marriage Plot

No-nonsense US family-relationship comedy-drama in the Zoe Heller/Claire Messud/Jonathan Franzen mold. Immensely readable in parts, particularly those featuring Leonard, apparently inspired by David Foster Wallace, and his decline into manic depression. Heroine Madeline however was a charmless drip, as was third wheel and author-inspired Mitchell Grammaticus, his surname reminding me of one of the most vapid and overrated novels Ian McEwan's Saturday. Once Leonard left the stage it was a drag, and the ending offered little satisfaction. This has been said already by reviewers but the use of such blandly straightforward narrative structure to question avant-garde writing only shows this technique to be the tired cliche it is.