Tom McCarthy: Satin Island

Forget family, or ethnic and religious groupings: corporations have supplanted all these as the primary structure of the modern tribe.

For anthropologists, even the exotic’s not exotic, let alone the everyday.

If people were to tell other people everything about themselves, we’d live in a dull world.

We require experience to stay ahead, if only by a nose, of our consciousness of experience—if for no other reason than that the latter needs to make sense of the former, to (as Peyman would say) narrate it both to others and ourselves, and, for this purpose, has to be fed with a constant, unsorted supply of fresh sensations and events.

The first move of any strategy of cultural production, he’d say, must be to liberate things – objects, situations, systems – into uselessness.

Italo Calvino: If On A Winter's Night A Traveller

If one wanted to depict the whole thing graphically, every episode, with its climax, would require a three-dimensional, or, rather, no model: every experience is unrepeatable. What makes lovemaking and reading resemble each other most is that within both of them times and spaces open, different from measurable time and space.

“The stimulus of reading is indispensable to me, and of meaty reading, even if, of every book, I manage to read no more than a few pages. But those few pages already enclose for me whole universes, which I can never exhaust.”

What harbor can receive you more securely than a great library?

You're the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst.

To fly is the opposite of traveling: you cross a gap in space, you vanish into the void, you accept not being in a place for a duration that is itself a kind of void in time; then you reappear, in a place and in a moment with no relation to the where and when in which you vanished.

Lovers' reading of each other's bodies (of that concentrate of mind and body which lovers use to go to bed together) differs from the reading of written pages in that it is not linear. It starts at any point, skips, repeat itself, goes backward, insists, ramifies in simultaneous and divergent messages, converges again, has moments of irritation, turns the page, finds its place, gets lost. A direction can be recognized in it, a route to an end, since it tends toward a climax, and with this end in view it arranges rhythmic phases, metrical scansions, recurrence of motives. But is the climax really the end? Or is the race toward that end opposed by another drive which works in the opposite direction, swimming against moments, recovering time?

“The book I'm looking for,' says the blurred figure, who holds out a volume similar to yours, 'is the one that gives the sense of the world after the end of the world, the sense that the world is the end of everything that there is in the world, that the only thing there is in the world is the end of the world.”

Iain Sinclair: London Overground: A Day's Walk Around the Ginger Line

Walkers navigate by sound. Drifting towards the Thames with no purpose beyond getting away from the construction dust and promotional screech to the east, I found myself eavesdropping on the climactic moan of the Overground. If the traffic ditch of Kingsland Road played like a gurgle of peristaltic juices recovering from a monster kebab, the Overground was a 14-hour sigh of mounting, but never-quite-satisfied sexual bliss. The heartbeat of the new London might be revealed, I felt, by tracking the acoustic footprints of the railway for a single day: Haggerston to Wapping, Clapham Junction, Imperial Wharf, Willesden Junction, Hampstead Heath and home again. The 33 stations of this perverse pilgrimage, stitched together in ways that had never been possible before, had their own microclimate. The arches beneath the elevated tracks, oil pits dealing in MOT certificates, mysterious lock-ups and rehearsal spaces for bands without names, were being rapidly upgraded to fish farms offering meditational aids to keep money-market buccaneers on an even keel, Japanese restaurants and artisan bakeries operated by downsizing hedge-fund managers. The word “artisan” signalled the change in demographic. A humble medieval craftsperson is upgraded to a purveyor of ethical coffee in a space that tries to look like a newly excavated ruin.

The intriguing aspect of London Overground, beyond parasitical clusters of new-build flats with their bicycle-rack balconies, beyond early-morning gyms and proliferating coffee outlets, was the fact that the system worked. Trains arrived every few minutes, carriages were nicely appointed in colours reminiscent of Penguin books in their pomp. Freshly carved neural pathways made it possible to ride from Dalston to Denmark Hill; to visit Goldsmiths college by way of New Cross Gate; to see where William Blake was married or where Freud died. Any commute, for the honeymoon period before the line caught on, was a rare London pleasure.

A walk around this accidental remapping of London in a single day; that’s what it had to be. If it could be managed. And if Andrew Kötting, the filmmaker and performer, could be persuaded to join me. As foil, informant, partner in absurdity. The journey would be potentially endless, linking prisons, football stadiums, waste-disposal plants, cemeteries and reservoirs of memory. Andrew’s anecdotes of Deptford would sustain us until we arrived at Angela Carter’s Clapham and the location for JG Ballard’s Millennium People in Chelsea Harbour. We must plod on, day into night, waiting to see if a shapely story would emerge

Joshua Cohen: Book of Numbers

The best thing about search is you always find what you want. The worst thing about search is you never find what you do not want.


As for yours truly, I’ve been sitting with my laptop atop a pillow on my lap to keep those wireless hotspot waveparticles from reaching my genitals and frying my sperm, searching up—with my employer’s technology—myself, and Rach.


My necessities were books. I read a book at school, another to and from school, yet another at the beach, which was the closest escape from my father’s dying. Though when I walked alone it was far. Though I wasn’t allowed to walk alone when younger—so young that my concern wasn’t the danger to myself but to the books I’d bring, because they weren’t mine, they were everyone’s, entrusted to me in return for exemplary behavior, and if I lost even a single book, or let even its corner get nicked by a jitney, the city would come, the city itself, and lock me up in that grim brick jail that, in every feature, resembled the library.


No one around me was doing anything, even making conversation. They were all just perfectly inert, laid out prone or supine as if submitting to autopsy or dissection. Only the dead or the lowest of species can bask, I’m convinced.


Everything has a beginning, or needs one, and if the beginning’s identifiable but not dramatic enough, it needs to be deidentified—located elsewhere.


What’s privacy to the employee is security to the boss.


A people’s legitimacy is derived from its artifacts. Even a relationship isn’t a relationship unless it’s left behind its trash.

Calvin Tomkins: Duchamp: A Biography

Duchamp, who once told William Copley that he had “developed parasitism to a fine art,” was still living on practically nothing then. The rent on his 14th Street studio was still only thirty five dollars a month. He owned one suit, which he brushed and cleaned himself. When he went to spend a weekend with Teeny in Lebanon or Teeny’s friend’s house in Easthampton, where they were often invited during the summer months, he never took a suitcase. He would wear two shirts, one on top of the other, and carry a toothbrush in his jacket pocket.

"The more I live among artists, the more I am convinced that they are fakes from the minute they get to be successful in the smallest way. This means also that all the dogs around the artists are crooks. If you see the combination of fakes and crooks how have you been able to keep some kind of faith (and in what?) Don’t name a few exceptions to justify a milder opinion about the whole “art game”. In the end, a painting is declared good only if it is worth “so much.” It may even be accepted by the “holy” museums. So much for posterity… This will give you an idea of the kind of mood I am in – stirring up the old ideas of disgust. But it is only on account of you. I have lost so much interest (all) in the question that I don’t suffer from it. You still do."

"I wanted the idea to grip the mind of the viewer like a woman's vagina grips a cock."

Elena Ferrante: The Story of the Lost Child

Being born in Naples is useful for a single thing: to have always known, almost instinctively, what today, with endless fine distinctions, everyone is beginning to claim: that the dream of unlimited progress is in reality a nightmare full of savagery and death.

Electronics seems so clean and yet it dirties, dirties tremendously, and it obliges you to leave yourself everywhere as if you were shitting and peeing on yourself continuously: I want to leave nothing. My favourite key is the one that deletes.

Only in bad novels people always think the right thing, always say the right thing, every effect has its cause . . . everything at the end consoles you.

As for infidelities, he said, if you don’t find out about them at the right moment they’re of no use: when you’re in love you forgive everything. For infidelities to have their real impact some lovelessness has to develop first. And he went on like that, piling up painful remarks about the blindness of people in love.

Antonio Tabucchi: Pereira Maintains

Philosophy appears to concern itself only with the truth, but perhaps expresses only fantasies, while literature appears to concern itself only with fantasies, but perhaps it expresses the truth.

Do you still believe in public opinion? Well let me tell you public opinion is a gimmick thought up by the English and Americans, it's them who are shitting us up with this public opinion rot, of you'll excuse my language, we've never had their political system, we don't have their traditions, we don't even know what trade unions are, we're a southern people and we obey whoever shouts the loudest and gives the orders.

Elena Ferrante: The Lost Daughter

They were just like the relations from whom I had fled as a girl. I couldn’t bear them and yet they held me tight, I had them all inside me. Life can have an ironic geometry. Starting from the age of thirteen or fourteen I had aspired to a bourgeois decorum, proper Italian, a good life, cultured and reflective. Naples had seemed a wave that would drown me. I didn’t think the city could contain life forms different from those I had known as a child, violent or sensually lazy, tinged with sentimental vulgarity or obtusely fortified in defense of their own wretched degradation.

I observed my daughters when they weren’t paying attention, I felt for them a complicated alternation of sympathy and antipathy……Even when I recognised in the two girls what I considered my own good qualities I felt that something wasn’t right. I had the impression that they didn’t know how to make good use of those qualities, that the best part of me ended up in their bodies as a mistaken graft, a parody, and I was angry, ashamed.

Marius Hentea: Tata Dada: The Real Life and Celestial Adventures of Tristan Tzara

“You'll never know why you exist, but you'll always allow yourselves to be easily persuaded to take life seriously.”

“Always destroy what is in you.”

“Any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism. The rest, called literature, is a dossier of human imbecility for the guidance of future professors.”

“There is a literature that does not reach the voracious mass. It is the work of creators, issued from a real necessity in the author, produced for himself. It expresses the knowledge of a supreme egoism, in which laws wither away. Every page must explode, either by profound heavy seriousness, the whirlwind, poetic frenzy, the new, the eternal, the crushing joke, enthusiasm for principles, or by the way in which it is printed. On the one hand a tottering world in flight, betrothed to the glockenspiel of hell, on the other hand: new men. Rough, bouncing, riding on hiccups. Behind them a crippled world and literary quacks with a mania for improvement. “

“Not the old, not the new, but the necessary.”

“Thought is made in the mouth.”

“Dada is not modern at all, it is rather a return to a quasi-Buddhist religion of indifference. Dada puts an artificial sweetness onto things, a snow of butterflies coming out of a conjurer's skull. Dada is stillness and does not understand the passions.”

And on the other side for lack of sun there is death perhaps
waiting for you in the uproar of a dazzling whirlwind with a thousand explosive arms
stretched toward you man flower passing from the seller's hands to
those of the lover and the loved
passing from the hand of one event to the other passive and sad parakeet
the teeth of doors are chattering and everything is done with
impatience to make you leave quickly
man amiable merchandise eyes open but tightly sealed
cough of waterfall rhythm projected in meridians and slices
globe spotted with mud with leprosy and blood
winter mounted on its pedestal of night poor night weak and sterile
draws the drapery of cloud over the cold menagerie
and holds in its hands as if to throw a ball
luminous number your head full of poetry
― Tristan Tzara, L'Homme approximatif

DADAIST DISGUST

Every product of disgust capable of becoming a negation of the family is Dada; a protest with the fists of its whole being engaged in destructive action: Dada; knowledge of all the means rejected up until now by the shamefaced sex of comfortable compromise and good manners: DADA; abolition of logic, which is the dance of those impotent to create: DADA; of every social hierarchy and equation set up for the sake of values by our valets: DADA: every object, all objects, sentiments, obscurities, apparitions and the precise clash of parallel lines are weapons for the fight: DADA; abolition of memory: Dada; abolition of archaeology: DADA; abolition of prophets: DADA; abolition of the future: DADA; absolute and unquestionable faith in every god that is the immediate product of spontaneity: DADA; elegant and unprejudiced leap from a harmony to the other sphere; trajectory of a word tossed like a screeching phonograph record; to respect all individuals in their folly of the moment: whether it be serious, fearful, timid, ardent, vigorous, determined, enthusiastic; to divest one's church of eve ry useless cumbersome accessory; to spit out disagreeable or amorous ideas like a luminous waterfall, or coddle them—with the extreme satisfaction that it doesn't matter in the least - with the same intensity in the thicket of core's soul pure of insects for blood well-born, and gilded with bodies of archangels. Freedom: DADA DADA DADA, a roaring of tense colors, and interlacing of opposites and of all contradictions, grotesques, inconsistencies:

LIFE.

Walter Benjamin: Berlin Childhood Around 1900

It was a prophetic corner. For just as there are plants that are said to confer the power to see into the future, so there are place that possess such a virtue. For the most part, they aredeserted places - treetops leaning against walls, blind alleys or front gardens where no one ever stops. In such places, it seems as if all that lies in store for us has become the past.

Memory is not an instrument for surveying the past but its theater. It is the medium of past experience, just as the earth is the medium in which dead cities lie buried. He who seeks to approach his own buried past must conduct himself like a man digging.

Not to find one's way around a city does not mean much. But to lose one's way in a city, as one loses one's way in a forest, requires some schooling. Street names must speak to the urban wanderer like the snapping of dry twigs, and little streets in the heart of the city must reflect the times of day, for him, as clearly as a mountain valley. This art I acquired rather late in life; it fulfilled a dream, of which the first traces were labyrinths on the blotting papers in my school notebooks.

The empty grave and the heart weighed in the balance - two enigmas to which life still owes me the solution.

Alberto Moravia: Contempt

The dull, mechanical sound of the engine had now been replaced by athe irregular, echoing roar - to me a delicious sound - of waves piled upon each other and breaking in disorder.

An uncertain evil causes anxiety because, at the bottom of one's heart, one goes on hoping till the last moment that it may not be true; a certain evil, on the other hand, instills, for a time, a kind of dreary tranquility.

Because the world to-day is so constructed that no one can do what he would like to do, and he is forced, instead, to do what others wish him to do. Because the question of money always intrudes—into what we do, into what we are, into what we wish to become, into our work, into our highest aspirations, even into our relations with the people we love!

Hans Richter: Dada: Art and Anti-Art

Where and how Dada began is almost as difficult to determine as Homer’s birthplace.

Dada marches on, destroying more and more, not in extension but in itself.

Dada applies itself to everything, and yet it is nothing; it is the point at which Yes and No, and all opposites, meet; not solemnly, in the palaces of human philosophy, but quite simply, at streetcorners, like dogs and grasshoppers.

Dada is useless, like everything else in life.

Raymond Queneau: Exercises in Style

On the butt-end of a bulging bus which was transbustling an abundance of incubuses and Buchmanites from bumbledom towards their bungalows, a bumptious buckeen whose buttocks were remote from his bust and who was buttired in a boody ridiculous busby, buddenly had a bust-up with a robust buckra who was bumping into him: "Buccaneer, buzz off, you're butting my bunions!"

"History is the science of human unhappiness."

- Raymond Queneau

Dennis Busch, Robert Klanten, Hendrik Hellige (Editors): The Age of Collage Contemporary Collage in Modern Art

Lars Iyer: Wittgenstein Jr

It is possible to bathe in nonsense ... to be refreshed by it.

Ede says we should post some demotivational phrases on our Facebook pages. I can’t therefore I am. To be is to be condemned. The universe is a mistake. Hope is a kind of delirium. We don’t live even once. Dead days outnumber live ones. The use of philosophy is to sadden. Existence has never answered our questions. Death is the least of our problems.

Benwell’s too late for politics, and we are too late for politics, Ede says. Too late for the Occupation. Too late to march on the streets …

Only the tourists really understand Cambridge, Wittgenstein says. Cambridge is only there to be photographed: that’s what they grasp. Cambridge is a collective fantasy …

There’s a fire backstage, he says. The clown comes out to warn the audience. Laughter and applause. They think it’s a joke! The clown repeats his warning. The fire grows hotter; the applause grows louder. That’s how the world will end, Wittgenstein says: to general applause, from halfwits who think it’s a joke.

Max Ernst: Une Semaine de Bonté

Zadie Smith: Martha and Hanwell

... Hellish deep red ...

Jorge Luis Borges: The Mirror of Ink

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite, perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries.

You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?

I know of a wild region whose librarians repudiate the vain superstitious custom of seeking any sense in books and compare it to looking for meaning in dreams or in the chaotic lines of one's hands . . . They admit that the inventors of writing imitated the twenty-five natural symbols, but they maintain that this application is accidental and that books in themselves mean nothing. This opinion - we shall see - is not altogether false.

The certitude that everything has been written negates us or turns us into phantoms. I know of districts in which the young men prostrate themselves before books and kiss their pages in a barbarous manner, but they do not know how to decipher a single letter. Epidemics, heretical conflicts, peregrinations which inevitably degenerate into banditry, have decimated the population. I believe I have mentioned suicides, more and more frequent with the years. Perhaps my old age and fearfulness deceive me, but I suspect that the human species -- the unique species -- is about to be extinguished, but the Library will endure: illuminated, solitary, infinite, perfectly motionless, equipped with precious volumes, useless, incorruptible, secret.

The Library is a sphere whose exact centre is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.

Let heaven exist, though my own place be in hell. Let me be tortured and battered and annihilated, but let there be one instant, one creature, wherein thy enormous Library may find its justification.

The library will endure; it is the universe. As for us, everything has not been written; we are not turning into phantoms. We walk the corridors, searching the shelves and rearranging them, looking for lines of meaning amid leagues of cacophony and incoherence, reading the history of the past and our future, collecting our thoughts and collecting the thoughts of others, and every so often glimpsing mirrors, in which we may recognize creatures of the information.


Naturally, the four mathematical operations - adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing - were impossible. The stones resisted arithmetic as they did the calculation of probability. Forty discs, divided, might become nine; those nine in turn divided might yield 300.

If someone were to tell me that there are unicorns on the moon, I could accept or reject the report, or suspend judgement, but it is something I could imagine. If, on the other hand, I were told that six or seven unicorns on the moon could be three, I would declare a priori that such a thing was impossible. The man who has learnt that three plus one are four doesn't have to go through a proof of that assertion with coins, or dice, or chess pieces, or pencils. He knows it, and that's that. He cannot conceive a different sum. There are mathematicians who say that three plus one is a tautology for four, a different way of saying "four" ... But I, Alexander Craigie, of all men on earth, was fated to discover the only objects that contradict that essential law of the human mind. At first I was in a sort of agony, fearing that I'd gone mad; since then, I have come to believe that it would have been better had I been merely insane, for my personal hallucinations would be less disturbing than the discovery that the universe can tolerate disorder. If three plus one can be two, or 14, then reason is madness.

David Cannadine: The Aristocratic Adventurer

"I will not pretend that, if I had to choose between communism and nazism, I would choose communism."
Speaking in the House of Commons, autumn 1937

"I do not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes."
Writing as president of the Air Council, 1919

"It is alarming and nauseating to see Mr Gandhi, a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organising and conducting a campaign of civil disobedience, to parlay on equal terms with the representative of the Emperor-King."
Commenting on Gandhi's meeting with the Viceroy of India, 1931

"(India is) a godless land of snobs and bores."
In a letter to his mother, 1896

"I do not admit... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia... by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race... has come in and taken its place."
Churchill to Palestine Royal Commission, 1937

"The choice was clearly open: crush them with vain and unstinted force, or try to give them what they want. These were the only alternatives and most people were unprepared for either. Here indeed was the Irish spectre - horrid and inexorcisable."
Writing in The World Crisis and the Aftermath, 1923-31

"The unnatural and increasingly rapid growth of the feeble-minded and insane classes, coupled as it is with a steady restriction among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks, constitutes a national and race danger which it is impossible to exaggerate... I feel that the source from which the stream of madness is fed should be cut off and sealed up before another year has passed."
Churchill to Asquith, 1910

"One may dislike Hitler's system and yet admire his patriotic achievement. If our country were defeated, I hope we should find a champion as admirable to restore our courage and lead us back to our place among the nations."
From his Great Contemporaries, 1937

"You are callous people who want to wreck Europe - you do not care about the future of Europe, you have only your own miserable interests in mind."
Addressing the London Polish government at a British Embassy meeting, October 1944

"So far as Britain and Russia were concerned, how would it do for you to have 90% of Romania, for us to have 90% of the say in Greece, and go 50/50 about Yugoslavia?"
Addressing Stalin in Moscow, October 1944

"This movement among the Jews is not new. From the days of Spartacus-Weishaupt to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg (Germany), and Emma Goldman (United States)... this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It has been the mainspring of every subversive movement during the 19th century; and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically the undisputed masters of that enormous empire."
Writing on 'Zionism versus Bolshevism' in the Illustrated Sunday Herald, February 1920

Francis M. Naumann: Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

"The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act."

"The individual, man as a man, man as a brain, if you like, interests me more than what he makes, because I've noticed that most artists only repeat themselves."

"The chess pieces are the block alphabet which shapes thoughts; and these thoughts, although making a visual design on the chess-board, express their beauty abstractly, like a poem.... I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists."

"I force myself to contradict myself in order to avoid conforming to my own taste."

“All this twaddle, the existence of God, atheism, determinism, liberation, societies, death, etc., are pieces of a chess game called language, and they are amusing only if one does not preoccupy oneself with 'winning or losing this game of chess.”

Park Min-Gyu: Pavane for a Dead Princess

I froze. How do I describe how I felt when I first saw her? It was like how I'd feel sitting in front of my TV, eating curry and watching the same music program I watch every Saturday that features the same batch of young pop stars and R&B singers, listening to the audience clapping and the same host introducing the next artist, with everything as it should be, when, suddenly, an old middle-aged guy takes the stage and starts yodeling, "Yodel-ay-ee-yo, lay-ee-yo, lay-ee-yodel-ee!"

Patrick Leigh Fermour: Between the Woods and the Water

Scattered with poppies, the golden-green waves of the cornfields faded. The red sun seemed to tip one end of a pair of scales below the horizon, and simultaneously to lift an orange moon at the other. Only two days off the full, it rose behind a wood, swiftly losing its flush as it floated up, until the wheat loomed out of the twilight like a metallic and prickly sea.

Christophe Andre: Looking at Mindfulness: 25 Ways to Live in the Moment Through Art

Like a swimmer who stops swimming for a moment to be carried by the current. This is not passivity, but presence.

Alex Kovacs: The Currency of Paper

The consequence of a society that places money at its centre is that forms of mental and physical slavery come to dominate human life.

The vast majority of ways in which money circulates have enormously destructive consequences. Human relationships inevitably suffer as a result, becoming insipid, superficial, mechanical reductions of what is possible. Tenderness is rarely achieved on the scale it could be because individuals are trapped within the structures of employment. In the current system most human beings have little knoledge of the full spectrum of the emotional and intellectual vocabulary that the species is capable of achieving.

Any free thinking individual must do everything within their power to escape the obscene working conditions that prevail in the free-market system. This is equivalent to, and no less imperative than, for example, fleeing your country because it has descended into war.

When money is the sole objective of an action, a certain degree of idiocy is inevitable.

The horror of menial work as currently practised should not be underestimated. To spend forty hours a week or more engaged in unceasing cycles of senseless repetition, as do most human beings, is a destructive form of existence for anyone to have to endure.


... bitter flavours gathered in the back of the mouth... the constricting and malevolent influence of a society that is in essence corrupt... the ever-present likelihood of wodespread annihilation... the talk of the town that amounts to so very little... falling into a permanent state of degradation... the fashioning of a fastidious brutality... the achievement of efficiency at any price...

Juan Goytisolo: Exiled from Almost Everywhere

In order to rebuild, destruction is indispensable. To clean the air we breathe daily, we must previously have polluted it. To sell ecological products, we must first infect the world with new species of virus and bacteria.

He convinced himself he was Satie, overcome by a clearly grotesque rush of emotion to his head. He foresaw that he too would scorn traditional forms and that the trash he'd pen would adopt the rough shape of an acorn or a fig.

The level of the seas is rising, ethnic shantytowns are burning, and terrorism is spreading and istrivialised in the name of divine, inflammatory  curses and grotesque emotions all prompted by identity crises. Everything is bought and sold as in clearance sales organised by gambling addicts. 

The truth of the story is held in the words. All that would remain of him would be the dream of a derisory existence. Of a tailless shooting star, sentenced by the world's sound and fury to sudden, silent extinction.