Tomoko Shibasaki: Spring Garden

Junichiro Tanizaki: Some Prefer Nettles

Ronald E. Purser: McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality

Cixin Liu: The Supernova Era

Yoko Ogawa: the memory police

Cixin Liu: Wandering Earth

Tim Lee: Coach Fitz

Ben Lerner: The Topeka School

Michel Houellbecq: Serotonin

Shoshana Zuboff: the age of Surveillance capitalism

senji kuroi: life in the cul de sac

Gina Apostol: Insurrecto

Buying Chul Han: The Burnout Society

Dasa Drndic: Belladonna

Tara June Winch: Swallow the Air

Octavia Butler parable of the talents

Grafton tanner: bubbling corpse vapour

Octavia Butler parable of the sower

Ted Chiang: Exhalation

James Bridle: The New Dark Age

R Scott Bakker: neuropath

Graham Harman object oriented ontology

B s Johnson Christie Mary's double ebtry

Andrei bitov:

The organs of sense

Franco Berardi: Breathing

Blake Crouch:

Thomas Bernhard: Gargoyles

Rage Becomes Her

Michael Pollan: How to Change Your Mind: The New Science of Psychedelics

Otessa Moshfegh: My Year of Rest and Relaxation

Sleep felt productive. Something was getting sorted out. I knew in my heart—this was, perhaps, the only thing my heart knew back then—that when I'd slept enough, I'd be okay. I'd be renewed, reborn. I would be a whole new person, every one of my cells regenerated enough times that the old cells were just distant, foggy memories. My past life would be but a dream, and I could start over without regrets, bolstered by the bliss and serenity that I would have accumulated in my year of rest and relaxation.


Rejection, I have found, can be the only antidote to delusion.


It was proof that I had not always been completely alone in this world. But I think I was also holding on to the loss, to the emptiness of the house itself, as though to affirm that it was better to be alone than to be stuck with people who were supposed to love you, yet couldn’t.”


Oh, sleep. Nothing else could ever bring me such pleasure, such freedom, the power to feel and move and think and imagine, safe from the miseries of my waking consciousness.


On September 11, I went out and bought a new TV/VCR at Best Buy so I could record the news coverage of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers. Trevor was on a honeymoon in Barbados, I'd later learn, but Reva was lost. Reva was gone. I watched the videotape over and over to soothe myself that day. And I continue to watch it, usually on a lonely afternoon, or any other time I doubt that life is worth living, or when I need courage, or when I am bored. Each time I see the woman leap off the Seventy-eighth floor of the North Tower—one high-heeled shoe slipping off and hovering up over her, the other stuck on her foot as though it were too small, her blouse untucked, hair flailing, limbs stiff as she plummets down, one arm raised, like a dive into a summer lake—I am overcome by awe, not because she looks like Reva, and I think it's her, almost exactly her, and not because Reva and I had been friends, or because I'll never see her again, but because she is beautiful. There she is, a human being, diving into the unknown, and she is wide awake.


It was lunacy, this idea, that I could sleep myself into a new life. Preposterous. But there I was, approaching the depths of my journey.

David Keenan: This is Memorial Device

“I did it to stand up for Airdrie. I did it because of Memorial Device. I did it because later on everyone went off and became social workers and did courses on how to teach English as a foreign language or got a job in Greggs. Well, not everybody. Some people died or disappeared or went into seclusion, more like. I did it – well I was going to say I did it because back then anything seemed possible, back then being 1983 and 1984 and 1985, what I call the glory years. The glory years in Airdrie – what a joke, right? But really that would be untrue because back then everything seemed impossible.”


“…we’re looking at a time before the internet, when routine access to anything but local culture was hard work. The music papers gave you glimpses of music from all over the world, and not just music—there was also film, comics, science fiction, radical politics, all kinds of layers of pop and semi-pop and avant-garde weirdness It was a fascinating map of the wider world, full of information you wouldn’t happen on by any other route, in the 1970s especially, and certainly not from TV or the grown-up papers.”

Thomas Bernhard: Concrete

Whatever condition we are in, we must always do what we want to do, and if we want to go on a journey, then we must do so and not worry about our condition, even if it's the worst possible condition, because, if it is, we're finished anyway, whether we go on the journey or not, and it's better to die having made the journey we're been longing for than to be stifled by our longing.


Very often we write down a sentence too early, then another too late; what we have to do is write it down at the proper time, otherwise it's lost.


The only friends I have are the dead who have bequeathed their writings to me - I have no others. And I'd always found it hard to have any relationship with another person - I wouldn't think of using such an unappetizing word as friendship, a word which is misused by everybody. And even early in my life there were times when I had no one - I at least knew that I had no one, though others were always asserting that I did have someone. They said, You do have someone, whereas I knew for certain that I not only had no one, but - what was perhaps the crucial and most annihilating thought - needed no one. I imagined I needed no one, and this is what I still imagine to this day. I needed no one, and so I had no one. But naturally we do need someone, otherwise we inevitably become what I have become: tiresome, unbearable, sick - impossible, in the profoundest sense of the word.


Parents have a child, and in doing so they bring into the world a monster that kills everything it comes in contact with.


I must have made a pitiful, indeed pitiable impression on an observer, though there was none – unless I'm going to say that I am an observer of myself, which is stupid, since I am my own observer anyway: I've actually been observing myself for years, if not for decades; my life now consists only of self-observation and self-contemplation, which naturally leads to self-condemnation, self-rejection and self-mockery. For years I have lived in this state of self-condemnation, self-abnegation and self mockery, in which ultimately I always have to take refuge in order to save myself. But all the time I ask myself what I have to save myself from?


I don't belong to the masses, I've been against the masses all my life, and I'm not in favour of dogs.


We publish only to satisfy out craving for fame; there's no other motive except the even baser one of making money....


Time destroys everything we do, whatever it is.


On the one hand we can't be alone, people like us; on the other we can't stand company. We can't stand male company, which bores us to death, or female company either. I gave up male company for years because it's totally unprofitable, and female company gets on my nerves in no time.


People are always talking about it being their duty to find their way to their fellow men — to their neighbour, as they are forever saying with all the baseness of false sentiment — when in fact it is purely and simply a question of finding their way to themselves. Let each first find his way to himself! And since hardly anyone has yet found his way to himself, it is inconceivable that any of these unfortunate millions has ever found his way to another human being — or to his neighbour, as they say, dripping with self-deception.

Elfriede Jelinek: Women as Lovers

you have often seen in the cinema, erich, haven't you, that between extraordinary people extraordinary things like for example extraordinary love can arise. so we only have to be extraordinary and see what happens.


perfectly happy momma goes out into the fields. she eavesdrops on herself, in case somewhere deep inside a melody rings out or a blackbird sings, but all that she hears, is only the cancer, which saws and eats away at her.

Robert Walser: The Tanners

James C. Scott: Two Cheers for Anarchism

Gerald Murnane: A Season on Earth

After he had set the table for tea, Adrian read the sporting pages of The Argus and then glanced through the front pages for the cheesecake picture that was always somewhere among the important news. It was usually a photograph of a young woman in bathers leaning far forward and smiling at the camera.

If the woman was an American film star he studied her carefully. He was always looking for photogenic starlets to play small roles in his American adventures.

If she was only a young Australian woman he read the caption ('Attractive Julie Starr found Melbourne's autumn sunshine too tempting to resist. The breeze was chilly, but Julie, a telephonist aged eighteen, braved the shallows at Elwood in her lunch hour and brought back memories of summer') and spent a few minutes trying to work out the size and shape of her breasts. Then he folded up the paper and forgot about her. He wanted no Melbourne typists and telephonists on his American journeys. He would feel uncomfortable if he saw on the train one morning some woman who had shared his American secrets only the night before.

Will Eaves: Murmur

Pain is memory with witness or corroboration. It isn't real to anyone else, and that is what allows torturers, including governments, to be torturers. They can pretend it isn't happening because it isn't happening to them.

Nathalie Leger: A Suite for Barbara Loden

“I used to hide behind doors. I spent my childhood hiding behind my grandmother’s stove. I was very lonely.’ Later, still in Positive: “I’ve gone through my while life like I was autistic, convinced I was worth nothing. I didn’t know who I was. I was all over the place, I had no pride.”

I also discover that she liked “Journey to the End of the Night” by Céline, “Nana” by Zola, “Breathless “by Godard, Maupassant’s short stories and Andy Warhol’s films.


The iconic woman of the 70’s is nothing but a woman wondering what she will do with her so-called liberty. She wonders what kind of lie she will be forced to invent in order to hide, at ease, from men, so that she will – finally – be left alone.

Ta Nehisi Coates: Between the World and Me

But race is the child of racism, not the father. And the process of naming “the people” has never been a matter of genealogy and physiognomy so much as one of hierarchy. Difference in hue and hair is old. But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at the heart of these new people who have been brought up hopelessly, tragically, deceitfully, to believe that they are white.


I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.


You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this.


Black people love their children with a kind of obsession. You are all we have, and you come to us endangered.


So you must wake up every morning knowing that no promise is unbreakable, least of all the promise of waking up at all. This is not despair. These are the preferences of the universe itself: verbs over nouns, actions over states, struggle over hope.


I believed, and still do, that our bodies are our selves, that my soul is the voltage conducted through neurons and nerves, and that my spirit is my flesh.


It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.


The problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that our country is ruled by majoritarian pigs.

Serhii Plokhy: Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy

Altogether, 50 million curies of radiation were released by the Chernobyl explosion, the equivalent of 500 Hiroshima bombs. All that was required for such catastrophic fallout was the escape of less than 5 percent of the reactor’s nuclear fuel. Originally it had contained more than 250 pounds of enriched uranium—enough to pollute and devastate most of Europe. And if the other three reactors of the Chernobyl power plant had been damaged by the explosion of the first, then hardly any living and breathing organisms would have remained on the planet.



The Soviets had to choose whether to show Blix the toilet facilities and hide the super-secret radar or vice versa.

David Keenan: For the Good Times

Ali Smith: Spring

We

need to suggest the enemy within. We need enemies of the people we want their judges called enemies of the people we want their journalists called enemies of the people we want the people we decide to call enemies of the people called enemies of the people we want to say loudly over and over again on as many tv and radio shows as possible how they're silencing us. We need to say all the old stuff like it's new. We need news to be what we say it is. We need words to mean what we say they mean. We need to deny what we're saying while we're saying it. We need it not to matter what words mean.

S

Alexander Trocchi: Cain's Book

It provides the police with something to do, and as junkies and potheads are relatively easy to apprehend because they have to take so many chances to get hold of their drugs, a heroic police can make spectacular arrests, lawyers can do a brisk business, judges can make speeches, the big pedlars can make a fortune, the tabloids can sell millions of copies. John Citizen can sit back feeling exonerated and watch evil get its deserts. That's the junk scene, man. Everyone gets something out of it except the junkie. If he's lucky he can creep round the corner and get a fix. But it wasn't the junk that made him creep.


No doubt I shall go on writing, stumbling across tundras of unmeaning, planting words like bloody flags in my wake. Loose ends, things unrelated, shifts, nightmare journeys, cities arrived at and left, meetings, desertions, betrayals, all manner of unions, adulteries, triumphs, defeats… these are the facts.

David Wallace-Wells: The Uninhabitable Earth

It is worse, much worse, than you think. The slowness of climate change is a fairy tale, perhaps as pernicious as the one that says it isn’t happening at all, and comes to us bundled with several others in an anthology of comforting delusions: that global warming is an Arctic saga, unfolding remotely; that it is strictly a matter of sea level and coastlines, not an enveloping crisis sparing no place and leaving no life undeformed; that it is a crisis of the “natural” world, not the human one; that those two are distinct, and that we live today somehow outside or beyond or at the very least defended against nature, not inescapably within and literally overwhelmed by it; that wealth can be a shield against the ravages of warming; that the burning of fossil fuels is the price of continued economic growth; that growth, and the technology it produces, will allow us to engineer our way out of environmental disaster; that there is any analogue to the scale or scope of this threat, in the long span of human history, that might give us confidence in staring it down. None of this is true. But let’s begin with the speed of change. The earth has experienced five mass extinctions before the one we are living through now, each so complete a wiping of the fossil record that it functioned as an evolutionary reset, the planet’s phylogenetic tree first expanding, then collapsing, at intervals, like a lung: 86 percent of all species dead, 450 million years ago; 70 million years later, 75 percent; 125 million years later, 96 percent; 50 million years later, 80 percent; 135 million years after that, 75 percent again. Unless you are a teenager, you probably read in your high school textbooks that these extinctions were the result of asteroids. In fact, all but the one that killed the dinosaurs involved climate change produced by greenhouse gas. The most notorious was 250 million years ago; it began when carbon dioxide warmed the planet by five degrees Celsius, accelerated when that warming triggered the release of methane, another greenhouse gas, and ended with all but a sliver of life on Earth dead. We are currently adding carbon to the atmosphere at a considerably faster rate; by most estimates, at least ten times faster. The rate is one hundred times faster than at any point in human history before the beginning of industrialization. And there is already, right now, fully a third more carbon in the atmosphere than at any point in the last 800,000 years—perhaps in as long as 15 million years. There were no humans then. The oceans were more than a hundred feet higher.


In fact, the belief that climate could be plausibly governed, or managed, by any institution or human instrument presently at hand is another wide-eyed climate delusion. The planet survived many millennia without anything approaching a world government, in fact endured nearly the entire span of human civilization that way, organized into competitive tribes and fiefdoms and kingdoms and nation-states, and only began to build something resembling a cooperative blueprint, very piecemeal, after brutal world wars—in the form of the League of Nations and United Nations and European Union and even the market fabric of globalization, whatever its flaws still a vision of cross-national participation, imbued with the neoliberal ethos that life on Earth was a positive-sum game. If you had to invent a threat grand enough, and global enough, to plausibly conjure into being a system of true international cooperation, climate change would be it—the threat everywhere, and overwhelming, and total. And yet now, just as the need for that kind of cooperation is paramount, indeed necessary for anything like the world we know to survive, we are only unbuilding those alliances—recoiling into nationalistic corners and retreating from collective responsibility and from each other. That collapse of trust is a cascade, too.


Humans, like all mammals, are heat engines; surviving means having to continually cool off, as panting dogs do. For that, the temperature needs to be low enough for the air to act as a kind of refrigerant, drawing heat off the skin so the engine can keep pumping. At seven degrees of warming, that would become impossible for portions of the planet’s equatorial band, and especially the tropics, where humidity adds to the problem. And the effect would be fast: after a few hours, a human body would be cooked to death from both inside and out. At eleven or twelve degrees Celsius of warming, more than half the world’s population, as distributed today, would die of direct heat. Things almost certainly won’t get that hot anytime soon, though some models of unabated emissions do bring us that far eventually, over centuries. But at just five degrees, according to some calculations, whole parts of the globe would be literally unsurvivable for humans. At six, summer labor of any kind would become impossible in the lower Mississippi Valley, and everybody in the United States east of the Rockies would suffer more from heat than anyone, anywhere, in the world today. New York City would be hotter than present-day Bahrain, one of the planet’s hottest spots, and the temperature in Bahrain “would induce hyperthermia in even sleeping humans.


We think of climate change as slow, but it is unnervingly fast. We think of the technological change necessary to avert it as fast-arriving, but unfortunately it is deceptively slow—especially judged by just how soon we need it. This is what Bill McKibben means when he says that winning slowly is the same as losing: “If we don’t act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble,” he writes. “The decisions we make in 2075 won’t matter.” Innovation, in many cases, is the easy part. This is what the novelist William Gibson meant when he said, “The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed.” Gadgets like the iPhone, talismanic for technologists, give a false picture of the pace of adaptation. To a wealthy American or Swede or Japanese, the market penetration may seem total, but more than a decade after its introduction, the device is used by less than 10 percent of the world; for all smartphones, even the “cheap” ones, the number is somewhere between a quarter and a third. Define the technology in even more basic terms, as “cell phones” or “the internet,” and you get a timeline to global saturation of at least decades—of which we have two or three, in which to completely eliminate carbon emissions, planetwide. According to the IPCC, we have just twelve years to cut them in half. The longer we wait, the harder it will be. If we had started global decarbonization in 2000, when Al Gore narrowly lost election to the American presidency, we would have had to cut emissions by only about 3 percent per year to stay safely under two degrees of warming. If we start today, when global emissions are still growing, the necessary rate is 10 percent. If we delay another decade, it will require us to cut emissions by 30 percent each year. This is why U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres believes we have only one year to change course and get started. The scale of the technological transformation required dwarfs any achievement that has emerged from Silicon Valley—in fact dwarfs every technological revolution ever engineered in human history, including electricity and telecommunications and even the invention of agriculture ten thousand years ago. It dwarfs them by definition, because it contains all of them—every single one needs to be replaced at the root, since every single one breathes on carbon, like a ventilator.


Over the past fifteen years, the iconoclastic mathematician Irakli Loladze has isolated a dramatic effect of carbon dioxide on human nutrition unanticipated by plant physiologists: it can make plants bigger, but those bigger plants are less nutritious. “Every leaf and every grass blade on earth makes more and more sugars as CO2 levels keep rising,” Loladze told Politico, in a story about his work headlined “The Great Nutrient Collapse.” “We are witnessing the greatest injection of carbohydrates into the biosphere in human history—[an] injection that dilutes other nutrients in our food supply.” Since 1950, much of the good stuff in the plants we grow—protein, calcium, iron, vitamin C, to name just four—has declined by as much as one-third, a landmark 2004 study showed. Everything is becoming more like junk food. Even the protein content of bee pollen has dropped by a third. The problem has gotten worse as carbon concentrations have gotten worse. Recently, researchers estimated that by 2050 as many as 150 million people in the developing world will be at risk of protein deficiency as the result of nutrient collapse, since so many of the world’s poor depend on crops, rather than animal meat, for protein; 138 million could suffer from a deficiency of zinc, essential to healthy pregnancies; and 1.4 billion could face a dramatic decline in dietary iron—pointing to a possible epidemic of anemia. In 2018, a team led by Chunwu Zhu looked at the protein content of eighteen different strains of rice, the staple crop for more than 2 billion people, and found that more carbon dioxide in the air produced nutritional declines across the board—drops in protein content, as well as in iron, zinc, and vitamins B1, B2, B5, and B9. Really everything but vitamin E. Overall, the researchers found that, acting just through that single crop, rice, carbon emissions could imperil the health of 600 million people. In previous centuries, empires were built on that crop. Climate change promises another, an empire of hunger, erected among the world’s poor.


Early naturalists talked often about “deep time”—the perception they had, contemplating the grandeur of this valley or that rock basin, of the profound slowness of nature. But the perspective changes when history accelerates. What lies in store for us is more like what aboriginal Australians, talking with Victorian anthropologists, called “dreamtime,” or “everywhen”: the semi-mythical experience of encountering, in the present moment, an out-of-time past, when ancestors, heroes, and demigods crowded an epic stage. You can find it already by watching footage of an iceberg collapsing into the sea—a feeling of history happening all at once. It is. The summer of 2017, in the Northern Hemisphere, brought unprecedented extreme weather: three major hurricanes arising in quick succession in the Atlantic; the epic “500,000-year” rainfall of Hurricane Harvey, dropping on Houston a million gallons of water for nearly every single person in the entire state of Texas; the wildfires of California, nine thousand of them burning through more than a million acres, and those in icy Greenland, ten times bigger than those in 2014; the floods of South Asia, clearing 45 million from their homes. Then the record-breaking summer of 2018 made 2017 seem positively idyllic. It brought an unheard-of global heat wave, with temperatures hitting 108 in Los Angeles, 122 in Pakistan, and 124 in Algeria. In the world’s oceans, six hurricanes and tropical storms appeared on the radars at once, including one, Typhoon Mangkhut, that hit the Philippines and then Hong Kong, killing nearly a hundred and wreaking a billion dollars in damages, and another, Hurricane Florence, which more than doubled the average annual rainfall in North Carolina, killing more than fifty and inflicting $17 billion worth of damage. There were wildfires in Sweden, all the way in the Arctic Circle, and across so much of the American West that half the continent was fighting through smoke, those fires ultimately burning close to 1.5 million acres. Parts of Yosemite National Park were closed, as were parts of Glacier National Park in Montana, where temperatures also topped 100. In 1850, the area had 150 glaciers; today, all but 26 are melted.


Bitcoin. The cryptocurrency now produces as much CO2 each year as a million transatlantic flights.

Carl Neville: Resolution Way

Dasa Drndic: Leica Format

So says Thomas Bernhard. If he were alive, I’d propose to Thomas Bernhard, I’d propose, I’d say, Thomas, stay close at hand, Thomas, I like your fugue, show me how one goes away, and I’ll bring you little boxes for breathing.


Sometimes curious coincidences occur, those coincidences have nothing to do with this town, they are general coincidences, existential coincidences, overlappings, crisscrossings, chance happenings never fully resolved, little cosmic earthquakes, that is, neglected time, melted time, resembling literary fabrications, elusive.


Sixty years after the war, conscience was still carrying out a search of its own hiding places, it couldn’t rest, it dug through the archives and dossiers, through the memories of the survivors. Medical faculties and institutes, factories producing glass, cars, medicines, steel, banks, churches, museums, cemeteries throughout Austria and Germany hide the rotten corpses of historical remains, submerged in the muddy depths of the past, worm-eaten and deformed. The past refuses to sink, it floats on waters that spread a stench, but keep flowing on, here, there, throughout the world; the past attacks the memory, digs through recollections, endeavours to clean up its rubbish, the great junk heap of the world. This pathetically late effort, this nauseating human aspiration to obtain forgiveness for unforgiveable sins committed, this longing for purification from unpurifiable sins, is carried out in a whisper, with downcast eyes, half secretly, unwillingly and cravenly.


As far as experiments are concerned, why did history latch on to us, S.S. members? We had models to learn from. The Japanese, the Americans, multinational companies. Pharmaceutical factories all over the world are still carrying out experiments on people, they are producing new biological weapons. In the name of the future. In the name of progress.

Georges Simenon: The Train

The idea of going back to my street, my house, my workshop, my garden, my habits, the labeled radios waiting on the shelves to be repaired, struck me as unbearable.

Megan Dunn: Tinderbox

People often say I think I’ve got a book in me. Well, I thought I had a book in me too. But it turned out that I actually had Ray Bradbury’s book in me.

Yukio Mishima: The Frolic of Beasts

It's hard to believe this photo was taken a few days before the wretched incident.


While he was looking at Yuko's hot cheeks, there appeared to be between them, as always, a distance similar to that between the skin of a patient and her doctor.


Her mouth was like a beautiful half-open sea cucumber.


Koji turned toward Yuko with a fawning expression. Even with the intention of appealing to her better nature, he did so in high spirits, in a calm and carefree manner.

Annie Ernaux: The Years

Yukio Mishima: The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Other people must be destroyed. In order that I might truly face the sun, the world itself must be destroyed....


What transforms this world is — knowledge. Do you see what I mean? Nothing else can change anything in this world. Knowledge alone is capable of transforming the world, while at the same time leaving it exactly as it is. When you look at the world with knowledge, you realize that things are unchangeable and at the same time are constantly being transformed.


The special quality of hell is to see everything clearly down to the last detail.


Yet how strange a thing is the beauty of music! The brief beauty that the player brings into being transforms a given period of time into pure continuance; it is certain never to be repeated; like the existence of dayflies and other such short-lived creatures, beauty is a perfect abstraction and creation of life itself. Nothing is so similar to life as music.


The past does not only draw us back to the past. There are certain memories of the past that have strong steel springs and, when we who live in the present touch them, they are suddenly stretched taut and then they propel us into the future.


To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It's never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. No, it's on a beautiful spring afternoon like this that people suddenly become cruel. It's at a moment like this, don't you think, while one's vaguely watching the sun as it peeps through the leaves of the trees above a well-mown lawn? Every possible nightmare in the world, every possible nightmare in history, has come into being like this.


For clearly it is impossible to touch eternity with one hand and life with the other.


Only knowledge can turn life's unbearableness into a weapon.

Christian Marazzi: The Violence of Financial Capitalism

Private-sector bailouts are essentially a communism of capital, where the state, i.e. the collectivity, caters to the needs of 'financial soviets,' i.e. banks, insurance companies, investment funds, and hedge funds, imposing a market dictatorship over society.

Jackie Wang: Carceral Capitalism

Our bodies are not closed loops. We hold each other and keep each other in time by marching, singing, embracing, breathing. We synchronize our tempos so we can find a rhythm through which the urge to live can be expressed, collectively. And in this way, we set the world into motion. In this way, poets become the timekeepers of the revolution.


For Afro-pessimists it is not the economic sphere that forms the ‘base’ from which the ‘superstructure’ of civil society, politics, and culture emerges, but antiblack violence that makes possible and is necessitated by global capitalism, freedom, civil society, and the interlocutors life of white (and nonblack)


Black Americans are what some might call ‘the canary in the coal mine’ insofar as they are the first to suffer the consequences of political and economic restructuring.


If the exploitation axis is characterized by the homogenizing wage relation... then the axis of expropriation relies on a logic of differentiation that reproduces racialized (as well as gendered) subjects.


The subprime crisis showed us that in the U.S., creditworthiness itself is racialized, as there was an a priori association of blackness with risk. This is consistent with the general moral construction of race, which is undergirded by the assumption that black Americans are immoral (read: criminal) and that they don’t contribute to society or make good in social promises (read: lazy and welfare-dependent).


I don’t know how time is experienced on the inside of prison; I only know how prison mangles time from the perspective of a family member on the outside, looking in. Nine years we sat waiting for my brother’s hearing, while his appeal sat unread on some courthouse clerk’s desk. Time moved on the outside while my brother’s situation remained static. We were teenagers when he got locked up, and now he’s balding. My life slowly ambles along while my brother’s life stands still.


When people identify with their victimization, it is important to critically consider whether they use this gesture as a tactical maneuver to construct themselves as innocent and exert power in a social space. That does not mean delegitimizing the claims made by survivors, but rather, rejecting the framework of innocence, examining each situation closely, and remaining cognizant of the multiple power struggles at play in different conflicts.

Gerard Reve: Parents Worry

Everything was difficult and nothing was easy, that was a fact. But now, suddenly, Treger had a bright idea: there was another dark boy, wasn't there? A boy who, after all, delivered an advertising free-sheet door to door in their neighborhood, thirteen or fourteen years old, a little Turkling, or Algerite or some other little goat-fucker, whom, together, they'd met often enough and who had sometimes looked inquisitively at them?

White Fragility

Maria Turmakin: Axiomatic

Jon fosse aliss at the fire

Leila Slimani adele

Olga Tokarczuk: Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

He was a man of very few words, and as it was impossible to talk, one had to keep silent. It’s hard work talking to some people, most often males. I have a Theory about it. With age, many men come down with testosterone autism, the symptoms of which are a gradual decline in social intelligence and capacity for interpersonal communication, as well as a reduced ability to formulate thoughts. The Person beset by this Ailment becomes taciturn and appears to be lost in contemplation. He develops an interest in various Tools and machinery, and he’s drawn to the Second World War and the biographies of famous people, mainly politicians and villains. His capacity to read novels almost entirely vanishes; testosterone autism disturbs the character’s psychological understanding.


The human psyche evolved in order to defend itself against seeing the truth. To prevent us from catching sight of the mechanism. The psyche is our defense system - it makes sure we'll never understand what's going on around us. Its main task is to filter information, even though the capabilities of our brains are enormous. For it would be impossible for us to carry the weight of this knowledge. Because every tiny particle of the world is made of suffering.


The aim of evolution is purely aesthetic - it's not to do with adaptation at all. Evolution is about beauty, about achieving the most perfect form for each shape.

Yuko Tsushima: Territory of Light

Looking down at the stagnant green water, I could picture as in a dream or a film that spot as it had appeared back then, some fifteen years earlier: a spot clad in flowers and fruit trees, where the sunshine seemed to have congealed. It was bright and tranquil, disquietingly so. No one must ever know about this place that made me yearn to dissolve until I became a particle of light myself. The way that light cohered in one place was unearthly. I gazed at its stillness without once ever going through the gate.


However, the more of those gloomy, cramped apartments I looked at, the further the figure of my husband receded from sight, and while the rooms were invariably dark, I began to sense a gleam in their darkness like that of an animal’s eyes.


At the time, I had not yet taken in the reality of my father’s death, I understood that I would never see him again in this world, but because there was a room at home that was just as it had been when it was his. I had entered the world at more or less the same time as my father departed it.

Deborah Levy: The Cost of Living

It was not that easy to convey to him, a man much older than she was, that the world was her world, too. He had taken a risk when he invited her to join him at his table. After all, she came with a whole life and libido of her own. It had not occurred to him that she might not consider herself to be the minor character and him the major character. In this sense, she had unsettled a boundary, collapsed a social hierarchy, broken with the usual rules.

Antony Beevor: Stalingrad

The army’s exact losses are still uncertain, but there was no doubt that the Stalingrad campaign represented the most catastrophic defeat hitherto experienced in German history.

Keith Gessen: A Terrible Country

Simon Critchley: Notes on Suicide

This book is not a suicide note.


For reasons that we don’t need to go into, my life has dissolved over the past year or so, like sugar in hot tea.


If life is a gift from God, then God must allow for the possibility of suicide as the rejection of that gift.


“Is it not inelegant to abandon a world which has so willingly put itself at the service of our melancholy?”
- EM Cioran

Gregor Hens: Nicotine

…
The first few drags after a period of abstinence induced head spin and dry mouth, while a drowsy numbness crept over my extremities. Soon enough this narcotics phase was succeeded by excitation: spit balled in my mouth, my palms itched, my heartbeat accelerated—in my own small and unsophisticated way, staring at the algal scurf on the duck pond, I believed I could achieve something.


And as I say goodbye, I am once again surprised to have come across existences that I never thought possible and that to the best of my ability could never have imagined. And i reckon that Jay Perry, MS, is thinking practically the same thing.


That I have left behind this phase of my life, hopefully for good, I owe primarily to my reading of Moshe Feldnkrais’s The Elusive Obvious, which I quoted from for the epigraph of this book. The merit o Feldenkrais is his bringing to our attention that for every learned behaviour, even the voluntary ones, there are alternatives, and that we simply need to learn them to gain our freedom.

Patrick Langley: Arkady

My brother had begun to teach me about the world and our place within it, how we lived in the shadows, unwanted, unseen. We were kids who came from nothing, were nothing. The city would only make room for us if we forced it to, the way you force a door with a crowbar, or use plumber’s freeze to smash a lock:

These little acts were ways of opening space to breathe in a city that didn’t want us, wouldn’t protect us, narrowed choices to a flatline.


A fan stirs the room’s thick heat as the officers talk. Jackson wags his legs under the chair and watches his shoes as they swing. The officers speak about beaches. A pathway. Red flags. The story does not make sense. When they finish it, Jackson looks up. The door is open. It frames a stretch of shrivelled lawn and a column of cloudless sky. Colours throb in the heat.

‘Do you understand?’ the woman asks.

‘We are sorry,’ says the man.

Blue uniforms cling to their arms. Black caps are perched on their heads. Jackson peers into the caps’ plastic rims, which slide with vague shadows and smears of light. The officers mutter to each other and swap glances with hooded eyes. The breeze through the door is like dog-breath, a damp heat that smells faintly of rot.

‘Where’s my dad?’ asks Jackson.

The man’s thumb is hooked through his belt. He stands like a cowboy, hips cocked.

‘We don’t know,’ he sighs. ‘Our colleague saw him a moment after. We’re sure he’ll come back soon. You have a small brother? We take you to the place, and you tell him. Tell him your father is coming back. We’ll find him. I promise. Right now.’

They are staying on the side of a mountain, a short but twisting drive away from the nearest coastal town. The hotel is enormous. From a distance it resembles a castle, its high walls strong and stern, its red roofs bright against the mountain’s grey. The valley below is dotted with scrubby bushes and half-finished breezeblock homes. At its centre, a dried-up riverbed runs through copses of stunted trees: a jagged path connecting the hotel to the town.

Frank is in the crèche with the other toddlers.

Cristina Rivera Garza: The Taiga Syndrome

Look at this: your knees. They are used for kneeling upon reality, also for crawling, terrified. You use them to sit on a lotus flower and say goodbye to the immensity.


The man was right: The woman seemed determined to be found. Like Hansel or Gretel, or both, she had sprinkled crumbs of words in every telegraph and post office they passed through. As they progressed, the cities shrank and the transportation became more rudimentary. Airplanes. Trains. Ferries. Barges. Rowboats. Kayaks. She gave the impression of being unable to stop. As if she were falling; it was the same with the messages, as if they were falling. In truth, what she seemed to want was for someone to catch her, to wrestle her down, like in rugby.


This form of writing wasn't about telling things how they were or how they could be, or could have been; it was about how they still vibrate, right now, in the imagination.


Something tilted. So, she had somehow managed to create the forest and the paths of the forest that she'd imagined in the pages of her journal? She didn't seem like a strong-willed woman, but possibly she was. She didn't have the bold or brash attitude of those who manage to transform desires into reality, but if it's true that journals are full of desires, then this woman before me, leaning on the hard thighs of the man with whom she had fled, right after she had stopped breathlessly, without knowing what to do, on a dance floor, had turned those desires into a reality. Her desires. I was facing someone--I told myself several times, just to remember what was so obvious that it could become transparent and pass unperceived--who had managed to transform the world, at least what was around her, into the world of her desires. A trembling image, something that gleams. What is between imagining a forest and living in a forest?

Kevin Barry: Beatlebone

“Never name the moment for happiness or it will pass by.”


“It's about what you've got to put yourself through to make anything worthwhile. It's about going to the dark places and using what you find there.”


"Wind coming easterly. That's the kind of thing that can leave a beast beyond despair. Because of the pure evil sound of it, John. The way it would play across the country in an ominous way. An easterly? If it was to come across you for a fortnight and it might? Sleep gone out the window and a horrible black feeling racing through your fucken blood. Day and night. All sorts of thoughts of death and hopelessness. This is what you'd get on the tail end of an easterly wind. Man nor animal wouldn't be right after it.”


He sits in his tomb up top of the Newport hotel. It contains a crunchy armchair, a floppy bed, several arrogant spiders, a mattress with stains the shapes of planets and an existential crisis. But he wouldn’t want to sound too French about it.


He stops up—he’s had a stunning thought. Is there such a thing, he wants to know, as a positive crack-up? Where the mind breaks down and re-forms again but only to show the world more clearly than before. A mind left calm as a settled pool.

Virginie Despentes: Vernon Subutex 2

He is pleasantly surprised by her spelling and syntax. It is much better than he would have imagined from the way she spoke. The comma between 'Die' and 'fucker' is full-on grammar-Nazi.


"We are the defeated - and we are thousands. We are searching for a way."

Angela Nagle: Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right

The rise of Milo, Trump and the alt-right are not evidence of the return of the conservatism, but instead of the absolute hegemony of the culture of non-conformism, self-expression, transgression and irreverence for its own sake – an aesthetic that suits those who believe in nothing but the liberation of the individual and the id, whether they’re on the left or the right. The principle-free idea of counterculture did not go away; it has just become the style of the new right.


The pop culture cliché of the American High School movie, which adapted old archetypes, depicted a social world in which the worst sexists were always the all brawn no brains sports jock. But now that the online world has given us a glimpse into the inner lives of others, one of the surprising revelations is that it is the nerdish self-identifying nice guy who could never get the girl who has been exposed as the much more hate-filled, racist, misogynist who is insanely jealous of the happiness of others.


It is significant here too that, despite the constant accusations of ‘Cultural Marxism’ by the Trumpian online right, the countercultural aesthetics of anti-conformism in the US were later cultivated by the US government as part of a culture war against communism.


Other similar niche online subcultures in this milieu, which were always given by the emerging online right as evidence of Western decline, also include adults who identify as babies and able-bodied people who identify as disabled people to such an extent that they seek medical assistance in blinding, amputating or otherwise injuring themselves to become the disabled person they identify as. You may question the motivations of the right’s fixation on these relatively niche subcultures, but the liberal fixation on relatively niche sections of the new online right that emerged from small online subcultures is similar in scale – that is, the influence of Tumblr on shaping strange new political sensibilities is probably equally important to what emerged from rightist chan culture.


The hysterical liberal call-out produced a breeding ground for an online backlash of irreverent mockery and anti-PC, typified by charismatic figures like Milo. But after crying wolf throughout these years, calling everyone from saccharine pop stars to Justin Trudeau a ‘white supremacist’ and everyone who wasn’t With Her a sexist, the real wolf eventually arrived, in the form of the openly white nationalist alt-right who hid among an online army of ironic in-jokey trolls. When this happened, nobody knew who to take literally anymore, including many of those in the middle of this new online far right themselves.

Peter Fleming: The Worst Is Yet To Come

Twenty or so people were waiting outside a grey little apartment. London was cold tonight. It was a “rental viewing” and the agents were late. Even so, given the shortage of accommodation in the city nobody was going anywhere. Including myself. Each of us needed somewhere to live. And fast.

A black BMW pulled up and two suited men stepped out. Mmmm. Men? Both looked about eighteen, more like boys. The British rental market is deregulated and anything goes, so this wasn’t surprising.
“Hi guys”, the two agents beamed, unlocking the front door as the throng clambered to get out of the cold.
As I entered my worst fears were confirmed. A complete shithole — but one that would still suck up nearly half my monthly salary.

I asked one of the “boys” if the apartment had central heating. “Have no idea,” the youngster replied. He was darting from room to room, seemingly without purpose, high on some fashionable amphetamine no doubt.
The other bug-eyed youth demanded to see everyone’s passports. He started to photograph them on his phone. The government’s new “Hostile Environment” policy concerning illegal immigration meant rental firms had to check everyone’s papers.

I pulled out my New Zealand passport and bug-boy froze. “You better have a valid visa buddy”, he hyperventilated. I did as it happened, which he scrutinised with suspicion. “Bit funny looking, isn’t it?” he commented. New Zealand passports have a black jacket.

I continued to wander through this glorified cave.

In the bathroom — it hadn’t been cleaned since the previous occupants had left, in a hurry apparently — I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. The person before me was pale and exhausted. My eyes darkened as I surveyed the damage.

The suited boys were still bullshitting next door. I looked down at my hands. They were tight white balls. Here I was, a forty-four-year-old man, betoken to those two coked-up little shits, begging for an apartment that wouldn’t look out of place in Midnight Cowboy. Jesus, was I a contemporary manifestation oWhen I arrived in England in 2003, it was so much easier to take the brutality. Conditions were rough back then too, of course. The rent was outlandish and the city resembled a rubbish tip as today; but London’s possible overthrow was a unique part of its internal narrative, a radical vitality that reached its darkest corners, breathing life into its wasted infrastrucf Ratso Rizzo?


I stood naked in front of the bathroom mirror. Jesus Christ, what happened? My body had not only visibly aged, but become grotesque too. I looked like a distorted Francis Bacon painting. Fat and pale, with tinges of bluish pink.

As I turned away in disgust, I remembered the swollen, unhappy people I’d seen after first arriving in England a decade before. Somehow, I had become one of them, working too much and not exercising.

I decided to visit my doctor for a check-up and he took a blood pressure reading. “Mmmm, that can’t be right”. He took another, “Impressive”, he muttered.

He gave me that look you never want to see from a health professional, something like, “I don’t know why you are wasting time talking to me, you should call an ambulance.”


Milton Friedman famously argued against Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). Focus on profits, he said, and let the stateand churches deal with human welfare. However, CSR became popular nevertheless and is now big business. Almost every corporation has a CSR programme of some kind. The concept is fundamental to neoliberal utopianism because it peddles the falsehood that capitalism can be both ruthlessly profiteering and kind to the planet. Have its cake and eat it too. As a corollary, governmental regulation is deemed unnecessary. CSR provides an excuse for corporations to regulate themselves, and we all know where that leads. It is no surprise that CSR is most visible in controversial industries like mining, oil and gas, arms manufacturing and tobacco (often involving glossy brochures and websites depicting happy African children playing in green rainforests). Moreover, the tax benefits enjoyed by billionaire philanthropists are another good reason they like CSR.



Revolutionary pessimism practices a speculative negativity that goes too far… much too far. It perceives in this decomposing world both a taste of things to come and a way out. When unhappiness is weaponised in this manner, we will have very little to lose. And our survival depends precisely on that loss.

Roald Dahl: Danny, Champion of the World

A message To the children who have read this book. When you grow up and have children of your own, do please remember something important. A stodgy parent is no fun at all! What a child wants -and DESERVES- is a parent who is SPARKY!"


Ah yes, and something else again. Because what I am trying to tell you… What I have been trying so hard to tell you all along is simply that my father, without the slightest doubt, was the most marvelous and exciting father any boy ever had.


Most of the really exciting things we do in our lives scare us to death. They wouldn't be exciting if they didn't.

Virginie Despentes: Vernon Subutex 1

But he never makes a call to ask for help. He cannot put his finger on precisely what is stopping him. He has had time to think about it. It remains an enigma. He scoured the internet in search of advice for pathological procrastinators. He drew up lists of what he had to lose, what he would be risking, and what he had to gain. It made no difference. He calls no-one.


And that unconscious ease that comes of being so young — still oblivious to the blows that will destroy parts of her. Past the age of forty, everyone is like a bombed-out city.

Lloyd Bradley: Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King

Slave revolts, especially in Jamaica, were a far more regular feature of life in the colonies than history books have ever cared to reflect. Indeed, Christianity was eventually accepted for no other reason than it was the only route to literacy, as the Bible was the only book slaves were allowed, and in order to read it they had to be taught to read. However, the first black preachers immediately adapted the scriptures to acknowledge both their people's sufferation and their resolution to remain independent. And as for manner of worship, it was going to be as gloriously, vibrantly African as possible.


In a nation as small as Jamaica, you can never hope to put much daylight between business, politics and art, or the potential commercialization of art.

Byung Chul Han: The Transparency Society

Nor does the society of positivity tolerate negative feelings.
Consequently, one loses the ability to handle suffering and pain, to
give them form. For Nietzsche, the human soul owes its depth,
grandeur, and strength precisely to the time it spends with the
negative. Human spirit is born from pain, too: “That tension of the
soul in unhappiness which cultivates its strength, . . . its inventiveness
and courage in enduring, persevering, interpreting, and
exploiting suffering, and whatever has been granted to it of profundity,
secret, mask, spirit, cunning, greatness—was it not granted
through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?”


The general consensus of the society of positivity is “Like.” It
is telling that Facebook has consistently refused to introduce a
“Dislike” button. The society of positivity avoids negativity in all
forms because negativity makes communication stall. The value of
communication is measured solely in terms of the quantity of
information and the speed of exchange. The mass of communication
also augments its economic value. Negative judgments impair
communication. Further communication occurs more quickly
following “Like” than “Dislike.” Most importantly, the negativity
that rejection entails cannot be exploited economically.


Transparency is a neoliberal dispositive. It forces everything
inward in order to transform it into information. Under today’s
immaterial relations of production, more information and communication
mean more productivity and acceleration. In contrast,
secrecy, foreignness, and otherness represent obstacles for communication
without borders. They are to be dismantled in the
name of transparency.

Richard Powers: Orfeo

Music forecasts the past, recalls the future. Now and then the difference falls away, and in one simple gift of circling sound, the ear solves the scrambled cryptogram. One abiding rhythm, present and always, and you’re free.

Andrew Solomon: The Noonday Demon: An Anatomy of Depression

Listen to the people who love you. Believe that they are worth living for even when you don't believe it. Seek out the memories depression takes away and project them into the future. Be brave; be strong; take your pills. Exercise because it's good for you even if every step weighs a thousand pounds. Eat when food itself disgusts you. Reason with yourself when you have lost your reason.


It is important not to suppress your feelings altogether when you are depressed. It is equally important to avoid terrible arguments or expressions of outrage. You should steer clear of emotionally damaging behavior. People forgive, but it is best not to stir things up to the point at which forgiveness is required. When you are depressed, you need the love of other people, and yet depression fosters actions that destroy that love. Depressed people often stick pins into their own life rafts. The conscious mind can intervene. One is not helpless.


Depression is the flaw in love. To be creatures who love, we must be creatures who can despair at what we lose, and depression is the mechanism of that despair.


Grief is depression in proportion to circumstance; depression is grief out of proportion to circumstance.


Antonin Artaud wrote on one of his drawings, "Never real and always true," and that is how depression feels. You know that it is not real, that you are someone else, and yet you know that it is absolutely true.


The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality and my life, as I write this, is vital even when sad. I may wake up sometime next year without my mind again; it is not likely to stick around all the time. Meanwhile, however, I have discovered what I would have to call a soul, a part of myself I could never have imagined until one day, seven years ago, when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. It's a precious discovery. Almost every day I feel momentary flashes of hopelessness and wonder every time whether I am slipping. For a petrifying instant here and there, a lightning-quick flash, I want a car to run me over...I hate these feelings but, but I know that they have driven me to look deeper at life, to find and cling to reasons for living, I cannot find it in me to regret entirely the course my life has taken. Every day, I choose, sometimes gamely, and sometimes against the moment's reason, to be alive. Is that not a rare joy?


I can see the beauty of glass objects fully at the moment when they slip from my hand.


Depressed people cannot lead a revolution because depressed people can barely manage to get out of bed and put on their shoes and socks.


People with family histories of alcoholism tend to have lower levels of endorphins- the endogenous morphine that is responsible for many of our pleasure responses- than do people genetically disinclined to alcoholism. Alcohol will slightly raise the endorphin level of people without the genetic basis for alcoholism; it will dramatically raise the endorphin level of people with that genetic basis. Specialists spend a lot of time formulating exotic hypotheses to account for substance abuse. Most experts point out, strong motivations for avoiding drugs; but there are also strong motivations for taking them. People who claim not to understand why anyone would get addicted to drugs are usually people who haven't tried them or who are genetically fairly invulnerable to them.


I regret everything because it has just finished, and already when I was twelve, I lamented the time that had gone by. Even in the best of spirits, it's always been as though I wrestle with the present in a vain effort to stop its becoming the past.


If you wake up feeling no pain, you know you're dead. (Russian expression)

Ariana Harwicz: Die, My Love

A bit later I see him go outside. He says he needs to piss, that he doesn't know how anyone can piss inside. He's addicted to the outdoors. I've no clue what he thinks is so bloody special about the sky. He likes it when it's blue and he's even happier when there aren't any clouds. Personally, I don't give a damn if I'm under the open sky or shut up in a trunk.


My baby finally empties my right tit and then my left one. My husband is watching cartoons, he does this to switch off.

So many healthy and beautiful women in the area, and he ended up falling for me. A nutcase. A foreigner. Someone beyond repair. Muggy out today, isn’t it? Seems it’ll last a while, he says. I take long swigs from the bottle, breathing through my nose and wishing, quite simply, that I were dead.


I always toy with the idea of going right through the glass and cutting every inch of my body, always aiming to pass through my own shadow.


I hope the first word my son says is a beautiful one. That matters more to me than his health insurance. And if it isn’t, I’d rather he didn’t speak at all. I want him to say magnolia, to say compassion, not Mum or Dad, not water. I want him to say dalliance.


We barely glanced at each other before going our separate ways

Bruce Pascoe: Dark Emu

The first British sailors sailed to Australia contemplating what they were about to find, and innate superiority was the prism through which their new world was seen.


It is exciting to revisit the words of the first Europeans to ‘witness’ the pre-colonial Aboriginal economy. In Dark Emu my aim is to give rise to the possibility of an alternative view of pre-colonial Aboriginal society. In reviewing the industry and ingenuity applied to food production over millennia, we have a chance to catch a glimpse of Australia as Aboriginals saw it.


To understand how the Europeans’ assumptions selectively filtered the information brought to them by the early explorers is to see how we came to have the history of the country we accept today. It is clear from their journals that few were here to marvel at a new civilisation; they were here to replace it.


Arguing over whether the Aboriginal economy was a hunter-gatherer system or one of burgeoning agriculture is not the central issue. The crucial point is that we have never discussed it as a nation. The belief that Aboriginal people were 'mere' hunter gatherers has been used as a political tool to justify dispossession.


Some say the idea that the world trajectory is driven by conquest followed by innovation and intensification is satisfying to the Western mind because of our psychological dependence on our imperialist history. But if we give consideration to the idea that change can be generated by the spirit and through that to political action, then the stability of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander culture might be more readily explained.


But when next the Aboriginal Elders brought their young men to the initiation site they found it full of bullet-riddled beer cans.

The most disturbing thing about the event was that it undermined the authority of the Elders. They were trying to impress on their young men the importance of maintaining culture and a responsible, alcohol-fee way of life. The young men would have seen immediately that Australia had no regard for the authority of the Elders.


It seems improbable that a country can continue to hide from the actuality of its history in order to validate the fact that having said sorry we refuse to say thanks.

Rachel Kushner: The Flamethrowers

I’d been listening to men talk since I arrived in New York City. That’s what men like to do. Talk. Profess like experts. When one finally came along who didn’t say much, I listened.


The desire for love is universal but that has never meant it’s worthy of respect. It’s not admirable to want love, it just is.


Later, Giddle's response when I told her I was in love: "Oh God, I'm so sorry. Love is awful. It ruins every normal thing, everything but itself. It makes you crazy and for nothing, because it's so disappointing. But good luck with that.


“And here I arrive at my point. The point is that everyone has a different dream. The point is that it is a grave mistake to assume your dream is in any way shared, that it’s a common dream. Not only is it not shared, not common, there is no reason to assume that other people don’t find you and your dream utterly revolting.”


A funny thing about women and machines: the combination made men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them.


“The VW doesn’t make you think of Hitler and genocide. It’s a breast on wheels, a puffy little dream.”

Ursula K. Le Guin: The Lathe of Heaven

“The end justifies the means. But what if there never is an end? All we have is means.”


“Things don't have purposes, as if the universe were a machine, where every part has a useful function. What's the function of a galaxy? I don't know if our life has a purpose and I don't see that it matters. What does matter is that we're a part. Like a thread in a cloth or a grass-blade in a field. It is and we are. What we do is like wind blowing on the grass.”


Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and the dark enters it. Borne, flung, tugged from anywhere to anywhere, for in the deep sea there is no compass but nearer and farther, higher and lower, the jellyfish hangs and sways; pulses move slight and quick within it, as the vast diurnal pulses beat in the moondriven sea. Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defense the violence and power of the whole ocean, to which it has entrusted its being, its going, and its will.


“You don't speak of dreams as unreal. They exist. They leave a mark behind them.”


In so far as one denies what is, one is possessed by what is not, the compulsions, the fantasies, the terrors that flock to fill the void.


He had grown up in a country run by politicians who sent the pilots to man the bombers to kill the babies to make the world safe for children to grow up in.