(via Elsewhere)

'But how warlike are the pages of Bach--those astonishing sheaves of dried mushrooms.'
--Mandelshtam



    "Encrustation of Music"

Ruins i have loved, as if in training
to dwell in a ruined world. The burnished clouds
towering gray at sunset i have loved.

Behind the night-lit storefront glass, they're dancing.

Ruins of ideologies, stormfringe swirling
iridescent skies as my path curls past
puddles and parked cars. Iridescent skies
i have loved with hunger in my belly.

Crunch of invisible snail slaughter
on the last ten feet of my walk home.


'Outrages, oppression, destruction, straitness, want, pillage, treachery, murder, disorder, and lawlessness--that is the Russian land

Shifting, disunited, by a thousand deliriums divided, erratic and silent, voiceless, that is the Russian people.' --Alexei Remizov, The Fifth Pestilence (tr Alec Brown, 1927)


'...however you may sit down to write a certain thing, you sit down and write an altogether different thing.' --V V Rozanov, Solitaria (tr E Gollerbach, 1927)

'The pain of life is much more powerful than the interest in life. That's why religion will always conquer philosophy.' --ibid

'One may both fall in love with terrorism and get to hate it to the bottom of one's soul, without insincerity.' --ibid

'That he [Tolstoy] did not finish The Decembrists is as significant and great as the fact that he hewed out and finished War and Peace and Anna Karenin.' --ibid

'Surely, all our sacraments are open, performed in daylight, before the people; and it is patent that the ancient mysteries, which some people wished to connect with ours--and those people were theologians--have indeed nothing in common with them except the name and pseudo-name.' --ibid

'I have gone through all promotions and I want nothing.'

'From the foundation of the world there have been two philosophies: the philosophy of the man who for some reason longs to give someone a flogging; and the philosophy of the flogged man.' --ibid

'Almost in proportion to the absence of will to live (to realization) I possessed a stubbornness of will to dream.' --ibid

'All religions will pass, but this will remain: simply sitting in a chair and looking in the distance.' --ibid

'Oh, my sad "experiments." And why did I want to know everything? Now I shall not die in peace as I expected.' --ibid

'I rush like the wind, I do not tire like the wind.' --ibid

''When my mother died I merely realized that I could smoke cigarettes openly. And I lighted a cigarette at once.' --ibid

'No man is worthy of praise. Every man is only worthy of compassion.' --ibid


Finally caught up with Godzilla vs. the Smog Monster. Has anyone remarked on his resemblance to Cthulhu?




--And Orion just got closer.