Michael Kurrier > Recent Status Updates

. . . the downwash of celebrity culture, the narcissistic sense of self which had trickled out from university postmodernism in the generation before.

He held out his hand frankly, and his voice trembled a little as he spoke--partly perhaps from real emotion, but more probably from the feeling of reluctance which I have noticed men always exhibit to discovering any sentiment deeper than those usually deemed conventional in correct society.

I'm reading this for my Halloween treat this year ~ a book where the author shifts the setting from the quiet, claustrophobic rooms of Oxford to the decaying, shadow-drenched atmosphere of Italy, complete with haunted histories and a past that refuses to stay buried. It deals with late-19th-century anxieties regarding the fine line between aesthetic beauty and moral corruption.

I kept thinking about how the most cynical or ironic people tend also to be the most vulnerable, because they can't afford to risk sincerity.

I am earnest. Irony bores me, And "cringe" is what people who can't feel things call feelings.

I'm not sure what to say. Except that probably we're neighbors. That we walk past each other every day, and never knew it until now.

Mainstream Anglo-American fiction tends to be literal minded. A chair's a chair, a bus's a bus. You can't have the vertical stripes of a John Lewis logo morph into a vision of distant hills. It just won't do. Thus you have mainstream on the one hand & sci fi on the other. Only in sci fic does the logo morph. This bifurcation is less pronounced in European literature. The metaphysical's in the mainstream
~John Powell

Mice with three legs ( called trice) ran under the rows and cats very good at catching trice (called trousers) ran after them.

~ Steph Swainston, "The Ride of the Garbleratchet"

Everything is a passage, though not every passage leads somewhere.
~ Brian Evenson, "Watson's boy"