#3 Sign of the Apocalypse: Pynchon on the Simpsons.
(via Silliman's Blog)

"I had been told by Elinor Wylie, after one of her trips to
London, of a meeting with Virginia Woolf which--though
Elinor may have distorted a little--had sounded rather dis-
agreeable. Mrs Woolf, she declared, had asked her why she
tried to write literary English; she had told Elinor that it
would be much more interesting if she let herself go in her
native American and tried something in the line of Ring
Lardner." --Edmund Wilson

The mass production of "facts": an abstract artform. (Its
aesthetics is called "plausibility".)

"I told him there were thirty-five women to every man
in madhouses and thirty-five men to every woman in
jails." --Rhoda Lerman, The Girl that He Marries (1976)

One who is broken-hearted cannot write criticism. It all
seems equally pitiful.

An artist wages transcendence against his alienation; a
pseudoartist cherishes alienation as a badge of honor.

Poetry in a book is like a record in an album cover.

Songs about being rock stars; poems about being English
professors.

Perhaps in all times & places the spirit of emulation
is responsible for the bulk of poems produced. (How
odd that none of our criticism will cop to this.)

The survival of the art of poetry should only be measured
by the amount actually memorized in people's minds today.

"To divine is human." --Michael Edwards, The Dark
Side of History (1977)

"And of all the infirmities we have, the most savage, is
to despise our being." --Montaigne, On Experience
(Florio's tr)

Translations as divination. What draws you to an
author, to a text, as the next direction of your own
writing.

"...Expiring in the frore and foggy air." --Shelley,
The Revolt of Islam, Canto IX. xxv.