Matthew > Recent Status Updates

"In its earliest usage, consumption always implied destruction."

"The shortcut to comfort is called 'specialization' and in an eye-ear-nose-and-throat doctor this makes sense. But in a writer it is fatal. The less he sees of other writers the more of a writer he will ultimately become. When he sees scarcely anyone except other writers, he is ready for New York."

"The mark of such a neurotic descent into the depths of antiquity, of the secret psychological state of such a town, is found in the many "characters," eccentrics and harmless, half-crazy souls who live inside its walls and are, like the buildings, more or less part of the local scenery."

"The mark of such a neurotic descent into the depths of antiquity, of the secret psychological state of such a town, is found in the many "characters," eccentrics and harmless, half-crazy souls who live inside its walls are, like the buildings, more or less part of the local scenery."

This book has become a chore.

I felt it again:

that pang that comes with the changing
leaves, frail unease as the world tilts again
into winter--some forgotten drumming

in the marrow that should have me filling
the woodpile and rasping the axe.
The crows call in threes:

Watch, watch, watch. Shadows of wings,
they say, and gather the seeds.
Count the children again.

[The Sound of One Hand Clapping] as an avenue of poetic thought and a not inconsiderable dose of mentorship. [Songmaster] as its application. [Kingdom Cons] as [Songmaster]'s convex reflection.

Wearing a gray duck suit and a cap, Béthencourt, 13, set out by bicycle from Chatou to Bezons on the 20th. He has yet to arrive.

"On Bécu, 28, who arrived at Beaujon hospital with a gunshot wound, they counted 28 scars. His nickname in the underworld: The Target."

Round Two. FIGHT!

"...but to publish a poem, in Mexico, all those years ago when he lived in Mexico City, he'd had to sweat blood, because Mexico is Mexico, he reflects, and France is France, and then he shuts his eyes and sees a torrent of ghostly. emblematic Mexicans flowing like a gray breath of air along a dry river bed..."

how's this for sonorous:
"It was pretty, cosy, rosy; but she had by turns felt in it what he had felt and heard in it what he had heard. Her effect there--fantastic black, plumed and extravagant, upon deep pink--was that of some 'decadent' coloured print, some poster of the newest school."
- Henry James, 'The Right Real Thing'

"'I can't explain..." And Agastya suddenly wanted to ask him not to. You feel even more naked and alone, he said silently, when you reveal yourself, a gratuitous act, for the strength and comfort that you look for, any of those last illusions of consolation, can finally be only within you."

"Agastya was enraged at himself, for agreeing to the afternoon, for being in Madna, for a job that compelled him to be polite to Srivastav and his wife, for being in the job he was, for not having planned his life with intelligence, for having dared to believe that he was adaptable enough to any job and circumstance, for not knowing how to change either, for wasting a life."

"'There must be something wrong with development if it creates places like Madna.'"

never gets old,

"... What song, devil, is best
sung from my balcony

in my birthday suit, by my heartleaf nightshade's
liquory patina? I'm drunk,
though I won't wear heels, honey, or I'd fall

for anyone. I'd fall devil
over heels over edge over oleander
over open mouth

over birthmark over forked
tongue over forked tongue
that turns on mine."

"Well, sure, I understood. In this life that sometimes seems to be a vast, ill-defined landscape without signposts, amid all of the vanishing lines and lost horizons, we hope to find reference points, to draw up some sort of land registry so as to shake the impression that we are navigating by chance. So we forge ties, we try to find stability in chance encounters."

has some basic information, but the editing is so poor that some of the information isn't there (see figure 6.6) or contradicts itself, not to mention myriad minor errors that continually distract. the interviews are a nice touch and serve as excellent examples, but the bulk of the content thus far is disappointing.

"An illuminated 24/7 world without shadows is the final capitalist mirage of post-history, of an exorcism of the otherness that is the motor of historical change,"

knowledge dropped in Rushdie's 'Haroun':
"That's the trouble with you sad city types: you think a place has to be miserable and dull as ditchwater before you believe it's real."