baal

“They were Diegueños. They were armed with short bows and they drew about the travelers and knelt and gave them water out of a gourd. They’d seen such pilgrims before and with sufferings more terrible. They eked a desperate living from that land and they knew that nothing excepting some savage pursuit could drive men to such plight and they watched each day for that thing to gather itself out of its terrible incubation in the house of the sun and muster along the edge of the eastern world and whether it be armies or plague or pestilence or something altogether unspeakable they waited with a strange equanimity.”
― Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian, or, the Evening Redness in the West

“Virtually everywhere, decision algorithms are touted to us on the promise that they will permanently displace human subjectivity and bias. And yet in every instance we find that these ambitions are flouted, as the technologies that were supposed to enact them are captured and recuperated by existing concentrations of power. They will not spontaneously bring scarcity to an end, or capitalism, or oppression. Laminated into standing ways of doing, making and selling, the only thing they seem to be capable of spontaneously reproducing is more of the same.”
― Adam Greenfield, Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life

“Antes una aclaración: no hay en este mundo infame comedia que dure tanto ni se enturbie ni se aguante si no hay —cual debe ser— humoradas transgresoras y un sinnúmero de equívocos que vayan de lo ridículo a la sofisticación. En aras de que se cumpla la comedia tal cual es, es mejor apresurar las acciones como sea y ponerle como sea un falso final feliz.”
― Daniel Sada, Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe

“There are sins or (let us call them as the world calls them) evil memories which are hidden away by man in the darkest places of the heart but they abide there and wait. He may suffer their memory to grow dim, let them be as though they had not been and all but persuade himself that they were not or at least were otherwise. Yet a chance word will call them forth suddenly and they will rise up to confront him in the most various circumstances, a vision or a dream, or while timbrel and harp soothe his senses or amid the cool silver tranquility of the evening or at the feast, at midnight, when he is now filled with wine. Not to insult over him will the vision come as over one that lies under her wrath, not for vengeance to cut him off from the living but shrouded in the piteous vesture of the past, silent, remote, reproachful.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses