Andy

Add friend
Sign in to Goodreads to learn more about Andy .

https://www.goodreads.com/onwardtodystopia

Loading...
P.D. James
“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

Mark Fisher
“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

Thomas Ligotti
“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

Henry David Thoreau
“I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
Henry David Thoreau

Thomas Ligotti
“Love? What is it? The most natural painkiller what there is.” You may become curious, though, about what happened to that painkiller should depression take hold and expose your love—whatever its object—as just one of the many intoxicants that muddled your consciousness of the human tragedy. You may also want to take a second look at whatever struck you as a person, place, or thing of “beauty,” a quality that lives only in the neurotransmitters of the beholder. (Aesthetics? What is it? A matter for those not depressed enough to care nothing about anything, that is, those who determine almost everything that is supposed to matter to us. Protest as you like, neither art nor an aesthetic view of life are distractions granted to everyone.) In depression, all that once seemed beautiful, or even startling and dreadful, is nothing to you. The image of a cloud-crossed moon is not in itself a purveyor of anything mysterious or mystical; it is only an ensemble of objects represented to us by our optical apparatus and perhaps processed as a memory.”
Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror

year in books
S̶e̶a̶n̶
3,172 books | 225 friends

mark mo...
2,403 books | 2,608 friends

MuzWot ...
1,254 books | 5,381 friends

Sirensongs
4,047 books | 285 friends

Denny
2,030 books | 402 friends

Arjun M...
700 books | 478 friends

Beagle ...
29,866 books | 635 friends

Ryan Cl...
2,695 books | 176 friends

More friends…
The Shaft by David J. SchowCellars by John ShirleyThe Search for Joseph Tully by William H. HallahanThe Doll Who Ate His Mother by Ramsey CampbellThe Face That Must Die by Ramsey Campbell
Gritty Urban Horror Novels
17 books — 2 voters
Falling Angel by William HjortsbergOur Lady of Darkness by Fritz LeiberThe Tenant by Roland ToporThe Face That Must Die by Ramsey CampbellThe Tribe by Bari Wood
Horror in the City
139 books — 20 voters

More…



Polls voted on by Andy

Lists liked by Andy