William H. Gass, prophet: "Everything is debased. Not just language. Everything. ... The masses of the world's population—most of whom are uneducated and in terrible straits—they're going to bring down the culture. The culture is going to be brought down." medium.com/the-william-h-…

Conversely, there is a case to be made that the past is all that is real, since in the present everything we are is owed to – is a creation of – the past. Nostalgia is a desire to return to a point closer to our origins, when the present was still the future and could be changed.

On the last day of the world I would want to plant a tree —W. S. Merwin

I'm watching "Blow Out" as we speak. It leaves Prime in six or seven days, FYI, for anyone who wants to see it.

Of course there's an industry in reactionary takes about young people, but diminishing capacity to deal with long, complex texts is fairly widely reported. It's not just a failure of assignment, though: surely the technological change is a much stronger factor.

Agree with all of this with a caveat re: "silence and your own thoughts." For most people, the value of reading great books consists largely in the fact that the thoughts contained therein are far superior to those people's own default thoughts.

"Life’s fairest days are the first to flee for hapless mortals." optima quaeque dies miseris mortalibus aevi prima fugit -Virgil, Georgics, Book III

You know philistines like to complain that the novels of Melville or Dickens are overwritten, but nobody says books are underwritten? This. This is underwritten.

The writer Brian Patrick Eha joins us in the DARK ROOM for a conversation on Kafka's final, uncompleted novel THE CASTLE. A book even more prescient than it seems. (link in comment)

I had the distinct pleasure of joining Art of Darkness podcast this week to discuss Kafka's "The Castle." Listen as we delve into questions of paradox, Kafka's secular sainthood, and administrative states both fictional and real. The call is coming from inside das Schloss! Link below 👇

Art of Darkness podcast artofdarkpod.com/the-dark-room-…

Kinda nonsensical. If no life is important in and of itself, then how could it gain importance by impacting other lives, which themselves by definition are also unimportant? Rather, it's important to make an impact on other lives because those lives are important, as is our own.

I was struck in the face last night by a random black guy. He was out wilding on a Citi Bike, passing on the sidewalk near my apartment. Even open-handed, he struck with enough force to make me stagger. This was my first encounter with casual violence in two years of living in

Are we still posting definitions of "locked in"?

Excited to hear Brian Patrick Eha on Kafka and the administrative state / bureaucracy — via Art of Darkness podcast podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the…

🚨#BREAKING: Dozens of people are actively looting and breaking into a cargo train 📌#Chicago | #illinois At this time, an estimated 50 to 150 people or more are actively looting and breaking into a cargo train on the west side of Chicago, Illinois. Police have been

"Only an elite can read Whitman, despite the poet's insistence that he wrote for the people." nybooks.com/articles/1984/…

Canetti in the early hours. (tr. Peter Filkins)