Robert S. > Recent Status Updates

"Little Sartres will raise their fingers in gelaterias and pizzerias if you still care about the quality of works, and perhaps even have fun with the pages. Instead of searching for those who narrate squalor and describe miseries, like a good little bourgeois monkey of the Sartrean type that opens a hundred debates and doesn’t even spend a dime..."

"... they feel it as something against them because literature must evoke displeasure, just as the bestseller list must indicate not the restaurants where you eat well, but those that serve more meals. If you offer a soufflé, it is neither standard nor mass-produced: thus, it doesn’t work, also because it doesn’t take into account calamities and disasters...."

"...And suffering, all the better, as refined people say. But the sense of humor? Never! Lightness? God forbid! The consumer demands the mistreatment of the poor, pays for misfortunes, and gets very angry if someone tries to have fun with literature:..."

"Of course, in literature-as-life, it's known that those who live a life of sorrow mostly want a literature of sorrow, just as it's shown that those who live a life of mmm... demand a literature of mmm... They get offended if they suspect a bit of irony to lift them a little from the horror of their condition. Vulgarity is fine because mmm... is also comic, so it’s consoling and makes one laugh..."

“The distribution of the space flags amongst the victims’ families commemorates the federalization over 9/11. Employees of private enterprise have become with their deaths America’s war heroes.”

«Pour corriger une indifférence naturelle, je fus placé à mi-distance de la misère et du soleil.»

“This done, I commented to Jaco that he had just lied four times in less than two hours... Jaco reflected for a moment and had to accept the accuracy of my observation, but excused himself by saying that absolute truthfulness was incompatible with any advanced society, and that the peacefulness of our cities could only be maintained at the expense of reciprocal deceit.”

For if, in the European war of movement (the specific form of domination of space by speed which henceforth characterizes inter-State conflicts), mass is still the major component of the machine of attack, the military proletarian nonetheless seems more and more a demanding and fragile transmission, a hazardous relay station which, for the war enter-preneur, poses the problem of its deterioration.

“…A sense of morning / without any of the particulars that morning is, / that it inhabits, all of them, individually.”

All rivers, even the most dazzling, those that catch the sun in their streams, all rivers go down to and are drowned in the sea. And life awaits man as the sea awaits the river. You can make meander after meander, twist, turn, seep into the earth- your meanders are your own affair. But life is there, patient, without beginning or end, waiting for you, like the ocean.

The melted window glass hung frozen down the walls like icing on a cake. They went on. In the nights sometimes now he’d wake in the black and freezing waste out of softly colored worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun.

“Gone in the silver end of day under a sky emptied of the last pelican.”

“Modernity is born when the eyes that watch the world see in it ‘this chaos and this monstrous confusion,’ but are not unduly alarmed — indeed, they are excited by the prospect of inventing a strategy for moving into that chaos, a new game that would make all that went before seem Ciceronian. It is an impious view if which only mystics are capable…”