Bill Hsu

“Magic is absurd. It is a system of thinking that does not work and does not get one anywhere," said the friar.

"It works, but it does not get one anywhere," said Vance.

"But it is very beautiful. Magic is an art that pleases the eye and the ear," said Bulbul.”
― Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nightmare

“[Dagmar] Krause's material, on the other hand, is the kind of lunar voyage that reminds one how fortunate we are that a few record execs smoked dope in the late 1960s; how else could this music have slipped through the cracks?”
― Benjamin Piekut, Henry Cow: The World Is a Problem

“I kept thinking, I'm wearing way too many clothes! And I fled. Finally night fell and I looked up at the moon that shone over Morningside Heights, its white soft beam so limpid, full of the poetry of Shakespeare and the Caribbean and George Eliot --- the antithesis I suppose of the hot lights I had grown to need. How relaxed, how relieved I now felt, in the white moonlight. Relieved of the chore of playing with the big boys. My clothes seemed to fit again, I became myself. The moon's fleecy lambency corralled my pieces and re-linked us, we joined "hands" as it were, and sang and danced in a circle, very Joseph Campbell, "me" regnant, manhood ceremonial. Birth of the hero. I became Kevin Killian. Did I make a mistake?”
― Kevin Killian, Fascination: Memoirs

“There is a confusion between myself and the literary world about what should constitute a text. I believe (along with many other writers historically) that a text should be elusive, and that the act of reading a text should make the reader conscious of the life they are living. That is, the text should overflow its borders, demonstrating the complicity of our consciousness with the coloring of our surroundings and the supposed sequentiality of events. To write texts this way, one must stop prior to the point of total explanation.”
― Jesse Ball, Autoportrait