"All these novels in which the authors try desperately to dramatize their own histories, their experiences, to recount their own psychological dramas - this is not literature. It is secretion, just like bile, sweat or tears - and, sometimes, even excretion. It is the literary transcription of 'reality television'. It is all the product of a vulgar unconscious, not unlike a small intestine, around which roam the phantasms and affects of those who, now they've been persuaded they have an inner life, don't know what to do with it."

- Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

 

“Where men are forbidden to honour a king they honour millionaires, athletes, or film-stars instead: even famous prostitutes or gangsters. For spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.” - C.S. Lewis

 "Poets muddy their own waters to make them appear deep."

- Voltaire

 

Virginia Woolf, privately dissing James Joyce

"the inferior water" "callow board school boy" -wotta snob!

(Didn't she say similar snobby snipes about D.H. Lawrence?)

More Woolf bitchery about Ulysses

"I should be reading ‘Ulysses,’ and fabricating my case for and against. I have read 200 pages so far—not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested, by the first two or three chapters—to the end of the cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irritated and disillusioned by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. Tom, great Tom [T.S. Eliot], thinks this is on a par with ‘War and Peace’! An illiterate, underbred book, it seems to me; the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, and ultimately nauseating.”

Got no dog in this race - I have read exactly the same number of pages of Ulysses as of Mrs Dalloway - eight.

 “The mind that has no firm anchor point is lost for, as is commonly said, it is nowhere if it is everywhere” 

Montaigne, “On Idling.”

“He who lives everywhere, lives nowhere” - Martial

 

Tell me what you see vanishing and I

Will tell you who you are

                                                            -  W.S. Merwin, "For Now"

" If I do it, it'll be done - and then I can do something else"

Half - maybe two-thirds - of my life has been wasted stuck on the comma between the first clause of that sentence and the second. 

I'm on the comma right now.

 “If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming.”

—Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari