Listening to: "Gem Tones" by Kadri Gopalnath.
--South Indian saxophone!

"The smouldering sweetness of a dead red rose" --Riley

Another library booksale. Nothing excites me like
the prospect of getting good books for next to nothing
--yet i still feel as if i've been, also, assisting at the
sack of Rome.

'We avenge death with the sacrifice of ourselves' --Adonis

If Art only has meaning in relation to a tribe, what
do deracinated artists create for? Tribe-simulations:
such as, all the artists that came before--or their imaginary
audience to be.

"I am not worried that poems reach relatively few
people. As it is, they go surprisingly far--among strangers,
around the world, even. Farther than the words of a
classroom teacher or the prescriptions of a doctor; if they
are very lucky, farther than a lifetime." --Sylvia Plath

Somebody's written a book to rehabilitate Caligula.
[Later note: Vlad the Impaler, also!]

"They pay no attention at all but wander
freely in and out of danger like sanderlings
feeding on the edge of the ocean as the tide
changes, chasing after each wave as it recedes,
racing before as the wave rushes back." --Marge Piercy

Ideas have no power; indeed, people's receptivity
to ideas depends much on their power-relations. But
ideas are used as the coin of prestige (--not
the only one), & thus a whole mythology has grown
around ideas associated with prestigious names.
--Which is an unintellectual attitude toward the things
of the mind.

Short stories are to novels what watercolor is to oil
painting--by far the more difficult medium.

'I would say that the State consists in the codification
of a whole number of power relations which render
its functioning possible, and that Revolution is a
different type of codification of the same relations.
This implies that there are many different kinds of
revolution...' --Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge
(interviews)

Surely it was a lover that invented Ghosts.