Andy

“The major part of our species seems able to undergo any trauma without significantly re-examining its household mantras, including “everything happens for a reason,” “the show must go on,” “accept the things you cannot change,” and any other adage that gets people to keep their chins up.”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

“The slow cancellation of the future has been accompanied by a deflation of expectations. There can be few who believe that in the coming year a record as great as, say, the Stooges’ Funhouse or Sly Stone’s There’s A Riot Goin’ On will be released. Still less do we expect the kind of ruptures brought about by The Beatles or disco. The feeling of belatedness, of living after the gold rush, is as omnipresent as it is disavowed. Compare the fallow terrain of the current moment with the fecundity of previous periods and you will quickly be accused of ‘nostalgia’. But the reliance of current artists on styles that were established long ago suggests that the current moment is in the grip of a formal nostalgia, of which more shortly.

It is not that nothing happened in the period when the slow cancellation of the future set in. On the contrary, those thirty years has been a time of massive, traumatic change. In the UK, the election of Margaret Thatcher had brought to an end the uneasy compromises of the so-called postwar social consensus. Thatcher’s neoliberal programme in politics was reinforced by a transnational restructuring of the capitalist economy. The shift into so-called Post-Fordism – with globalization, ubiquitous computerization and the casualisation of labour – resulted in a complete transformation in the way that work and leisure were organised. In the last ten to fifteen years, meanwhile, the internet and mobile telecommunications technology have altered the texture of everyday experience beyond all recognition. Yet, perhaps because of all this, there’s an increasing sense that culture has lost the ability to grasp and articulate the present. Or it could be that, in one very important sense, there is no present to grasp and articulate anymore.”
― Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures

“...if any single religion were in fact true, the Observer would have - indeed _should have_ already seen that religion emerge naturally and entirely unassisted wherever human beings were found, regardless of their isolation or epoch. It's deity (or deities) would wear a single hat, carry a single name and speak a single language audible to the deaf, coherent to infants, understood by the demented, and intelligible to the senile. [...] No religion has however emerged twice anywhere on the planet [...] not a solitary person in history has arrived independently at Mithraism, Christianity, Islam, Zoroastrianism, Manichaeism, Scientology or Judaism without if first being taught to them.”
― John Zande, The Owner of All Infernal Names: An Introductory Treatise on the Existence, Nature & Government of our Omnimalevolent Creator

“It was one of those perfect English autumnal days which occur more frequently in memory than in life.”
― P.D. James, A Taste for Death