Michael Kurrier

“Artists are meant to be more human, not less so. And this must be a place of both rigor and pluralism. This must be a place of hard work and also compassion and camaraderie, This must be a place with the intellectual elasticity to conceive of, allow for, and even welcome a diversity of styles, approaches and ideas.”
― dave eggers, Contrapposto

“He looked so strange and absentminded; quite obviously he had just been reading a book, one could tell that from the expression in his eyes, from his hair, from the abstracted way in which he managed his hands.”
― Jens Peter Jacobsen, Mogens and Other Stories

“The feeling of the eerie is very different from that of the weird. The simplest way to get to this difference is by thinking about the (highly metaphysically freighted) opposition — perhaps it is the most fundamental opposition of all — between presence and absence. As we have seen, the weird is constituted by a presence — the presence of that which does not belong. In some cases of the weird (those with which Lovecraft was obsessed) the weird is marked by an exorbitant presence, a teeming which exceeds our capacity to represent it. The eerie, by contrast, is constituted by a failure of absence or by a failure of presence. The sensation of the eerie occurs either when there is something present where there should be nothing, or is there is nothing present when there should be something.”
― Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie

“It is one thing to fail to provide for your children because you live under brutal material conditions, because you are impoverished or displaced, because your city is being firebombed; it is another to have every privilege, every resource, every organic berry and cut of grass-fed beef, and to see your child starve herself, to see her—this is how it felt—refuse life, the life you have offered. Is it because the life on offer is a lie? Is it because she knows that privilege involves the immiseration of others? is it because she registering a sense of futurelessness, catastrophe—fires, floods, fascism? Of course she couldn't tell us; she didn't have the language for it.”
― Ben Lerner, Transcription