Jeremy

“The secret to a successful webcomic is to trick people into believing they will only get all the jokes if they read regularly. By the time they realize there are no jokes for them to get, they’ve invested too much time to quit, and they can’t admit they’ve been duped,” said Kevin. “There is a whole art to creating nonexistent jokes that appear to go over everyone’s head. It’s much harder than creating actual jokes.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky

“Never does one feel oneself so utterly helpless as in trying to speak comfort for great bereavement. Time is the only comforter.”
― Jules Renard

“I believe that what separates us all from one another is simply society itself, or, if you like, politics. This is what raises barriers between men, this is what creates misunderstanding.
If I may be allowed to express myself paradoxically, I should say that the truest society, the authentic human community, is extra-social — a wider, deeper society, that which is revealed by our common anxieties, our desires, our secret nostalgias. The whole history of the world has been governed by nostalgias and anxieties, which political action does no more than reflect and interpret, very imperfectly. No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.”
― Eugène Ionesco

“Adorno’s dim view of popular music was rooted in a belief that the only reason people liked such music was because it was cynically tailored to mirror their world. In a capitalist society, both they and the music were “kneaded by the same modes of production.” (We can assume that, for Adorno, “it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it” was the ultimate expression of this false consciousness.) He talked about music mostly as an abstract entity, rather than as a material object, like a record, so he never quite figured out how to apply his critical theory to recordings per se. At two different points in “The Curve of the Needle,” an oddly disjointed essay that he started in 1927, at the dawn of the electrical recording era, and revised in 1965, four years before his death, he declares, “The relevance of the talking machine is debatable”—the repetition and the span of decades suggesting that he never did find a side to take in that debate. He was pretty sure he didn’t like what the phonograph represented (“stems from an era that cynically acknowledges the dominance of things over people”), but mostly reserved judgment for another day: “For the time being, Beethoven defies the gramophone.”
― Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music