September 2009
7 posts
Prokofiev died on the same day as Stalin.
Aldous Huxley died on the same day as John F. kennedy.
Nathanael West died one day after F. Scott Fitzgerald.
Hemingway died one day after Louis-Ferdinand Celine.
West and Fitzgerald had had dinner together one week earlier.
Markson, This is Not a Novel, pg. 74
I suppose it is submerged memories that give to dreams their curious air of hyper-reality. But perhaps there is something else as well, something nebulous, gauze-like, through which everything one sees in a dream seems, pardoxically, much clearer. A pond becomes a lake, a breeze becomes a storm, a handful of dust is a desert, a grain of sulphur in the blood is a volcanic inferno. What manner of...
An idiosyncrasy peculiar to the herrings is that, when dead, it begins to glow; this property, which resembles phosphorescence and is yet altogether different, peaks a few days after death and then ebbs away as the fish decays. For a long time no one could account for this glowing of the lifeless herring, and indeed I believe that it still remains unexplained. Around 1870, when projects for the...
It is impossible, he notes the following day, to lead the only possible life, to live together with a woman, each one free and independent, married neither in outer apperance nor in reality, to be merely together; and even more impossible to take the only possible step beyond a friendship with men — for there, on the other side of the prescribed boundary, the boot is already upraised that...
The Village of W., where I spent the first nine years of my life, I now remember, was always shrouded in the denset fog on All Saints’ Day and on All Souls’. And the villagers, without exception, wore their black clothes and went out to the graves which they had put in order the day before, removing the summer planting, pulling up the weeds, raking the gravel paths, and mixing soot in...
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“He (Berg) liked to give me (Adorno) advice on how to adjust my typewriter, nor...”
– Alban Berg, Master of the Smallest Link, Theodor Adorno