There was a time when only traditional music was listened to; then a time when only contemporary. Now we live in another kind of time, when not only every past era, but also every other culture, presents its version of music (& they even mingle). --But our literature, & even moreso our poetry, remains mired in the contemporary paradigm. This is its doom, & also its charm: to be unlike our music.

'To be brief is the supreme morality of art.' --Juan Ramón Jiménez

Roman à clef in Ligotti :"Medusa" is clearly about a philosopher like E.M. Cioran.
The mythic "Long Beach" in the movie "City by the Sea": a landscape out of J. G. Ballard.

I said "the Folsom Prison Blues" should be our national anthem--it says more about America, with its guns, its prisons, & its loneliness of highways, than any other single song. But to be the country of "This Land is Your Land" (including the often-omitted verses)--that is something to aspire to.

The illusion that everything is sayable comes from having dwelt too long among the things that have been said.

The Jungian "shadow" concept can be perhaps extended in a political sense; i.e. mokita (Swahili), 'what everyone knows but cannot say'. Historically, we see that around 0 AD it would have been slavery; in 1900 AD, the violence of industrial society; by 2000 it had become: the environmental toll of consumerism. For each age, the unveiling of this public secret will be the dialectic governing both overt politics, & the dream-life of the masses...

In America, the ending of the denial of the Vietnam War gave rise to the new repression of the Reaganite Eighties; & "9-11" caused a new crisis & a second repression, which i don't know if i will see the end of, but which has already become the grounds for all our thinking...

No better proof exists that this is an age of collectivity, not individuals, than in our art: the cinema, which for a solitary to attempt is nearly unthinkable (--though with digital cams this is about to change); & in the other artforms, which have all succumbed to the joys & despairs of genre--once again, the product of a collective sensibility. Our "individualism", in fact, is simply one more myth & mask of the collectivity. Why do we so prize the art of outsiders? Because theirs alone does not even aspire to genre.

"'...it is black coffee, pure but strong, that fortifies against the powers of darkness with which the world is filled.'" --Robert Aickman, "Into the Wood", The Wine Dark Sea (1988)

Redefinition. Wiglomeration (Dickens)- style intolerance

"...You know, patience must be the only one of the virtues
This world invariably punishes
The absence of."

Sebastian Horson, "A Paragraph Without Spell-Check"

Definition. izhvoll -misunderstanding what one lacks

Handedness is a homeland. --sayings of Asmodeus

Things That It Is Not Possible To Improve. Paint. Plain bagels. Bicycle, LP, manual typewriter. Books.

advantasmal- to be in denial about the weather
hiccupant- a job that makes people angry
jumperous- a mixture of resentment & fear
nostralitic- the moment in traffic when you realize the other drivers are never going to let you do what you intended, & you have to figure out something else to do instead

"He lookes upon the mightiest Monarchs Warres
But onely as on stately robberies."

--Samuel Daniel