dennis scharnberg

Everything is strange. But we convince ourselves that the world is otherwise.

Cedric Plumm, All Roads Lead.

“Look, I realize that you are a girl—and that you are therefore quite desperate to say the word chaconne, and to pronounce it correctly. Nevertheless, the actual word is ciaccona.”

Dickinson Holmes, The Book of Shoes.

Psychology is the modern elixir. The modern explanation for all things.

Chalmers van Nest, The Trivial Quadrivium.

The infinite is the normal state. It is the finite—the merely material—that is the special case.

Baldwin Tavinger, Toward a Rhetoric of Number.

“…and of course—as you might expect, Watson—the model fails. It does not work. Then, again, they are sometimes all the more charming when they don’t work. When they merely sit there, staring right at you.”

Holden Aberdeen, The White Towers.

In modernist aesthetics, sex is honesty. Failing to posit, to address, to explore, to dwell upon sex—or at least give in to it—is to be inadequate as an artist. Is to be dishonest. Doctor Freud’s victory.

Gaylord Perry III, The Walls of Magnus Martyr.

Anita could see the outdoor thermometer through her kitchen window. It read 96 degrees Fahrenheit. “But what temperature would that feel like?” she wondered.

Charles Jeffrey Yett, Writing in Miniature—Vol. Three.

November 12, 2012. Just today’s additions to my list of favorite words: mistaken, lumber, cloud, blossom, cloudy, leaf, kindling.

Reginald Boyington, Dear Dreadful Diary.

In the postmodern world everything is an announcement of itself, rather than being the thing itself.

Cedric Plumm, All Roads Lead.

Roland Winters presents the talkative Charlie Chan. Oh yes, he does omit some verbs and he leaves out the definite articles. To that degree it is still telegraph English. But in all other respects he is verbose. Almost chatty. It is actually quite ridiculous.

Jeremy Breedlove, A Sardonic View of the Movies.