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Robert Mapplethorpe ~ Patti Smith, Chelsea Hotel, 1970.

Why shouldn't i have expected that i'd be a Person Living with Fascism for the rest of my life? that this would be a candy America couldn't resist? that corporate power wouldn't hesitate to corrupt all governance, for a few dollars more? that they would never lack stooges, shills, & yes-men, & most of all from the ranks of the intelligentsia? --For what is power itself but a measure of what stenches a human is willing to put up with?

"The rhetorical pitch is high, the sense of humor or pathos mostly absent, the purpose entirely serious. They're a bit of a trial, brilliant but exhausting."

"For no one in this world can reach his goal;
The greatest or the lowest of our race,
We all wake partway through our dream: the start
Is here, the end is in another place."

--Selected Poems of Victor Hugo (tr Blackmore & Blackmore, 2001), "The Melancholy of Olympio"

"There is nothing quite like it in our language."