Tales of Hell are pastorals, because of their unchanging light.

“No Place affords a more striking conviction of the Vanity of
human Hopes, than a Publick Library.” --Samuel Johnson

Vermeer was not a realist: he was a mystic of the visible.

‘...but twelve years are more in America than half a century
in Europe...’ --de Tocqueville

A name is the place of a name.
A place is the name of a place.

“The tongue is an eye.” --Wallace Stevens, Adagia

‘Gide dinner. Letters from young writers who ask if they should
go on. Gide replies: “What? You can keep yourself from writing
and you hesitate to do so?” ‘ --Albert Camus, Notebooks 1942-
1951 (tr J O’Brien)

What we have so far called genius is more like the wings of those
reptiles who were not yet able to fly with them.

Rembrandt’s Beef; helps me to think about the nature of compassion.
For, in order to look at that side of beef as if it were human & capable
of human suffering, you must also be able to look at humans like
meat. Otherwise you will only see your own suffering.

I got a rejection slip that said, this is very fine writing & I like it but it
doesn’t FIT IN... Periodicals only exist today in order to reify a
point of view.

When i walk down stairs it's a controlled fall, that i continually interrupt
and launch again to sustain the smooth movement of. This, then, might
be a provisional definition of mature art--whose labor has disappeared,
like scaffolding, and yet it holds to a line of necessity (the unseen stairs
of my path) which is both arbitrary and contingent upon a specific context
of reality (not a theory or a feeling but a thought like the solution to a
quadratic equation: definitely ambiguous). --And there is the despair of
having nowhere to fall (no Culture), separate from the despair of being
unable to jump no culture, personally)--

A few more 21c fashion statements, from the recent G8 summit.

Sitar Rock, from "Norwegian
Wood" to "Losing My Religion" (may be a mandolin?). The sitar as signifier. How it goes from being about the
absence of sitars in the Rock of that time, to being about the presence (i.e.
other sitar songs) of sitars in Rock.

Working as a phone psychic.

Texas pledges allegiance. (I knew there
was something that needed to be fixed in this place...)

Just as Nietzsche may be said to have "invented" the 20c, Diderot certainly was the
inventor of the 19c... I wonder who will turn out to be this one's prophet...? The logical
choice, of course, is Orwell (although a tongue-tied Big Brother was, er...beyond
the reach of his irony)--or Kafka--, but my vote would be for H P Lovecraft. All his themes are here:
the Incursion from the Past (what started as Retro & finished as Back-to-the-Book-Funda-
mentalisms); the Horrific Revelation (Sept 11); the Uncaring Universe (cutting of
programs for the poor); & Humanity's Dethronement from Primacy (a rodent in the White
House).