James Proctor > Recent Status Updates

"Delighted to meet you, Ms Helstrom--"
"I'm male," Bron said. "I just told your receptionist--"
"But you want to be female," the man said, took Bron's hand, shook it, dropped it, and coughed. "We believe in getting started right away, especially with the easy things. Do sit down."
Bron sat.

The street was wet, Bron realized. Had he been incarcerated through one of the fabled rains various areas of the Earth still underwent from time to time?
Suddenly that seemed the most incredible aspect of the injustice. He felt, through the weakness and the hunger and the thirst and the fear and the rage, that he might weep.
Rain...!

"I've always thought the division we use out here of humanity into forty or fifty basic sexes, falling loosely into nine categories, four homophilic--"
"What?"
"You mean, you never punched Sex on General Info when you were ten? ...Homophilic means no matter who or what you like to screw, you prefer to live and have friends primarily from your own sex."

"My dear young man," Lawrence had said, "everyone is a type. The true mark of social intelligence is how unusual we can make our particular behavior for the particular type we are when we are put under particular pressure."

I saw two eyes staring at me. Only the eyes were dark, black, blank... looking at me from underneath a hood, a black hood with a sharp tall peak, like a klansman. They kept staring at me, dark blank eyes, and there was nothing I could do about it. I was truly terrified. I thought, it's God but God isn't supposed to look like that.
It seemed to remain there for hours, just staring at me.
Then it was gone...

Sucking sounds filled the room as my radio played Mahler. I felt as if I were being eaten by a pitiless animal. My pecker rose, covered with spittle and blood. The sight of it threw her into a frenzy. I felt as if I was being eaten alive.
If I come, I thought desperately, I'll never forgive myself.

I am the only person reading this on goodreads

Through the screen door, Hodges calls: "When did you become so assertive, Holly?"
She doesn't turn around to answer. "I guess when I saw pieces of my cousin burning in the street."

A power no longer based on anything other than the policing and prevention of events, which no longer has any political will but to dispel ghosts, itself becomes ghostly and vulnerable. Its virtual power - its programming power in terms of software and the like - is total, but as a result it can no longer bring itself into play, except against itself, by all kinds of internal failures.
This is the 'Hell of Power'.

There is a fierce irony here: the irony of an anti-terrorist world system that ends up internalizing terror, inflicting it on itself and emptying itself of any political substance - and going so far as to turn on its own population... a deterrence without cold war, a terror without balance. Or rather a universal cold war, ground into the tiniest interstices of social and political life.

It is absurd, then, to say that contemporary art is worthless and that there's no point to it, since that is its vital function: to illustrate our uselessness and absurdity. Or, more accurately, to make that decay its stock in trade, while exorcizing it as spectacle.

The idea of art has become rarefied and minimal, leading ultimately to conceptual art, where it ends in the non-exhibition of non-works in non-galleries - the apotheosis of art as non-event. As corollary, the consumer circulates in all this in order to experience his non-enjoyment of the works.

The photograph is the automatic writing of light.

The self-evidence of reality has a shadow of retrospective doubt hovering over it.

The screen reflects nothing. It is as though you are behind a two-way mirror: you see the world, but it doesn't see you, it doesn't look at you. The screen screens out any dual relation (any possibility of 'response').
All that remains is the mental diaspora of images and the extravagant performance of the medium.

This is the miracle: that a fragment of the world, human consciousness, arrogates to itself the privilege of being its mirror. But this will never produce an objective truth, since the mirror is part of the object it reflects.

that for which there is neither a meaning or a definitive reason is an illusion.
The world therefore has all the characteristics of a thoroughgoing illusion... Hence the need to produce all the possible forms of a simulacrum of meaning to mask the original illusoriness.
Thus the simulacrum is not that which hides the truth, but that which hides the absence of truth.

it is in this lucid vision of an endless reversion, in this denial of any objective solution, that the intelligence of evil, if it exists, is grounded.

the worst error, the one committed by all our revolutionary strategists, is to think that they can put an end to the system on the real plane: that is... the imaginary the system itself imposes on them, a system that lives and survives only by getting those who attack it to fight on the terrain of reality, a ground that is always its own.

I asked Dee Dee to stop at a bar. One of hers. The bartender knew her.
"This," she told me as we entered, "is where a lot of script writers hang out."
I disliked them all immediately, sitting around acting clever and superior. They nullified each other. The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.

I love a good reveal especially when you don't see it coming

Each time that Sahuset uttered a word, one of the crocodiles hanging from his ceiling stirred.