Jon Woodson > Quotes

“Something refused to come into focus in my thinking. Indistinctly, as though in a fog, shapes moved toward me and retreated just beyond cognition. But that getting a hold of things is the uncertainty. As the Tractatus says right at the beginning, “The world is everything that is the case.” It seemed as though the Mammy≈Divas® were just like Steve Jobs, trying to have reality bent to their own wills. Objectively, the iPhone was a muddle of mysticism and logic—breakable glass, non-ergonomic design, lousy battery life, lousy irreplaceable battery, lousy headphone jack, lousy virtual keyboard, lousy email, lousy memory, lousy lice, etc., etc, and an interface that you had to adapt to by pretending as an article of faith that no adaptation was required. The Mammy≈Divas® promised a seamless racial interface—eternal blackness ordered and majestic. They put a benign face on their lust for panoptic power. They promised to discipline and punish with pancakes.”
― Jon Woodson

“I was just trying to demonstrate to the students of Rowland University that Rowland University was not infinite. It had taken me a long time to figure out what the problem was, but one day I realized that the students at Rowland University thought that Rowland University was infinite. Infinite bookstore. Infinite fraternities and sororities. Infinite sports teams. Infinite snack shop. Infinite Homecoming. Infinite graduation. Infinite prospects.”
― Jon Woodson

“They would have the use of my moist and intricate cranial recesses,
the joyous bicycle rides of my uninhibited psyche, but they were going
to put me in a new tax bracket.”
― Jon Woodson

“Walter White. Walter White is represented by Jim Trueblood. In this instance irony is ascendant since White, a black civil rights leader, had blond hair and blue eyes and looked like a white person: thus White’s blood was not “true.” In this instance the name relates to the social level of the text, a practice that is not consistent. White’s presence on the social level of the text reverberates against the thematic concern with appearances and purity that comes to the fore in Chapter Ten, when the protagonist finds employment with Liberty Paints. The ten drops of black “dope” that the protagonist drips into the buckets of white paint”
― Jon Woodson, Oragean Modernism:a lost literary movement, 1924-1953