In traffic, the only way to punish another driver is to wreck your own car. --That's war in a nutshell.

"John Jay Chapman said of Browning that God did duty in his work as noun, verb, adjective, adverb, interjection and preposition, and the same is true of History with Trotsky." --Edmund Wilson, To the Finland Station (1940)

'To display oneself naked is not the same as telling the story of one's life.' --Bernard Arcand, The Jaguar and the Anteater (tr Wayne Grady, 1993)

After our poet's-home coffeehouse closed, i said capitalism was like the sow that eats her own piglets. "There are 500 year old bars in Europe. That's because there wasn't capitalism 500 years ago."

What a debacle for the human spirit to have come to, that new art is not eagerly received as a miracle in the land; that so many want to make art who aren't even artists. And then, that being an artist entails that one must neither complain about the overproduction of effigies & try to curtail it (however ineffectually; that's a task left seemingly to nonartists) nor indeed, even refer to this situation in or out of one's work; but also, that one accept the near-certainty of being buried in this superfluous abundance landfill-bound--without letting it stain the pure art-ness of the now-compromised product. AN IMPOSSIBLE SITUATION. And how much longer, no one can even guess.

It is typically intellectual to assume that problems can be solved by language alone, just as it is typically antiintellectual to assume that language cannot solve problems at all. Imagine these attitudes transferred, say, to a hammer.

"There is no escape through death from the supreme necessity of self-conquest." --Lafcadio Hearn, Japan's Religions

    'Finale

It does not moan or murmur now, the sea,
The sea.

A dreamless field and colorless, the sea,
The sea.

Pitiful, too, the sea,
The sea.

Clouds without reflections move the sea,
The sea.

It yields its bed to dismal mists, the sea,
The sea.

It too, look now, is dead, the sea,
The sea.'

--Ungaretti