“The last time I saw Lisa? Yeah, I remember. I remember that husky voice. And I remember her smiling. Although it may have been a smirk rather than a smile.”
Beatrice Landers, The Case of the Disappearing Detective.
Do we live in a trashy culture? Of course. Consider the accomplishments: Hollywood, hip-hop, a demotic hedonism, tattoos, Facebook, yoga pants, gender fluidity, collapsing literacy, ….
Miranda Hughes, Dissolved in Sunlight.
“We sense it. That it’s all just a bit too much. The way we live, I mean. Not that anyone else in the world is doing it any better. But that doesn’t seem to matter much, does it?”
Clifford Apogee, Draining the Pools and Other Tales.
[Aleister Crowley] looked for signs, and indeed he found them.
Cassandra Clive, More Edwardian Abominations.
The speed of contemporary art: Like a clever one-frame cartoon, a piece of contemporary art gets old quick. It becomes something tiresome—something oppressive—to look at.
Ellison Malmo, Hypertrophy and Decline in Visual Art.
“Your childhood, William, has nothing at all to do with your hideous ways as an adult—your crimes, your sneering insolence.” Patricia exaggerated, of course. But how much?
Jason Starling, ed., Adventures in Narrative Parsimony.
We have painted the nineteenth century gray. But what if it should turn out that ours is the dull way, and that the Victorian Age was fascinating? Endlessly fascinating?
Robin Christopher, The Incantation Theory of Historical Truth.
Layer upon layer of hoodwinking. Some of it self-directed. This accounts for the “success” of modernist painting.
Connor Eastwicke, Fear of the Orthogonal.
The lecturer read these two lines aloud: “the smoke thereof shall go up forever” and “the owl also and the raven shall dwell in it”. He steadfastly refused to disclose the source.
Alex Wimsey, Recollections of the Fairport Convention.
They will inevitably say: “Yes, but the mathematics of string theory eventually might be useful.” And I will remind them that what is actually useful is the expression “might be.”
Christopher Valerian, In Search of Boundary Conditions.
dennis scharnberg 