"...I hate the politics/ which have crept/ into my poetry." -Eric Lerner, Seditious Delicious #2

All things we love we love because we can perceive them as we would human personalities; and the less one knows other people, the more real (person-like) these analogues seem.

The disappearance of our most delicate and important perception is like the stealing of the stars by city lights: imperceptibly gradual and so total in its consummation that the question of its existence can hardly be raised among us.

Painters want to be loved like Van Gogh, but to live like Rubens.

Some computer systems are like this: past a certain point of fulness, it drops the oldest memories to make room for new. Perhaps humans can only learn three things, and if there's more it just becomes a different three you know. Personality, with its dark corners and shifting tumblers, its rhythms and its anomalies, may be a way to get around that limitation.

Personality as a nation-artifact.
Personality as a nation-toxin.
Nation as a personality-construct.
Nation as a personality disorder.


Sheepishly i would have to admit that i get more thoughts only after i have gotten up and gone into the next room to take a piss, than in an hour of sitting here with the book in front of me. ...If i were honest about creating, i would want to chop wood or lift boxes ten hours a day. Then i would sing unfettered by wanting to sing.

I am properly appalled by Kerouac's claim of an art-phase in which he destroyed everything; but if he hadn't bragged about it, i might even envy that freedom.

...Ego is after all a simple deception, as well as a complex process of transmutation...

'He was like one who hears a glorious language and feverishly conceives plans to write, to create in it. He had still to experience the dismay of learning how difficult this language was; he was unwilling to believe at first that a long life could pass away in forming the first short fictitious phrases that have no sense. He flung himself into this study like a runner into a race; but the density of what had to be mastered slowed him up. Nothing more humiliating could be thought out than this apprenticeship. He had found the philosopher's stone, and now he was being forced ceaselessly to transmute the swiftly made gold of his happiness into the lumpy lead of patience. He, who had adapted himself to space, like a worm traced crooked passages without outlet or direction. Now that with so much labor and sorrow he was learning to love, it was shown to him how trivial and careless up to now all the love had been which he thought to have achieved. How none of it could have come to anything, because he had not begun to work at it and make it real.
...We do not know whether he remained; we only know that he came back.' --Rilke, Malte