dennis scharnberg

Clever?  Yes.  Profound?  No.

Alton Glendenning,  The Crumbling Modern Buildings.

What good is a searchlight in a bottomless pit?

Sebastian Winthur,  The Hirsute Metaphysics.

Art as “disturbance” converts quickly to art as décor.  To art as badge of sophistication.  To art as…what?

Hudson Hume,  A New Coat of Paint.

It is sometimes difficult to remember that one cannot display humility.

Evelyn Harbuckle,  The Signs of Belonging.

“Even though I don’t like Nigel, I really don’t intend to demean him.  Nevertheless, it must be just awful to have such boring thoughts.”

Myrtle Mawby,  Cabinets and Drawers, a Novel.

“It does make sense, I tell you.  Well, doesn’t it?”  Caroline again has embellished her proposition with a mildly taunting interrogative.  It is a nasty habit.

Jason Starling, ed.,  Adventures in Narrative Parsimony.

…someone was talking about the “difficulty” that made Parker and Monk  jazz “geniuses.”  The tone of the remarks was quasi-religious.

Lawrence Rittle,  The Fundamentals of Confusion.

Most ideas—including scientific ideas—end up being rejected.  Does this mean that we are not good at ideas?  That we are exceedingly good at rejecting?  What does it mean?

Amanda Willcoxen, ed.,  The Literary and Philosophical Fragments of Gregory James Sallust.

We did not articulate the rules and boundary conditions of logic first, and then proceed to be “logical.”

Titus Musgrave,  The Mystery of Sleep.

[The modernist painters] all played at that game—being the rebel, the downtrodden, the seer, the outsider.  I find  that anyone who can strap that on in the morning, day after day, year after year, is a fairly dull person.

Aaron Flynders,  A Theory of Everything.