et cetera

Want to increase your literary output? All you need is “a total lack of personal style or voice”.

15. In your opinion, should human beings have more shoulders? ( ) Two sets of shoulders? ( ) Three ( )

(Donald Barthelme, Snow White, Atheneum, New York, 1967, p. 83)

Bookmarks; postcards; receipts; dedications; a slip of notepaper pencilled with quotes (from Voltaire’s Candide and Bewes’ Cynicism and Postmodernity); grains of sand; a small handmade booklet with a handsewn W on the front; $70 in book vouchers; a pair of butterfly wings (in Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City).

Ours is a culture of premature ejaculation. Increasingly all seduction, all manner of enticement—which is always a highly ritualized process—is effaced behind a naturalized sexual imperative, behind the immediate and imperative realization of desire. Our center of gravity has been displaced towards a libidinal economy concerned with only the naturalization of desire, a desire dedicated [...]

Reading personals columns is extremely addictive. I read the local personals, internet personals, music magazine personals, anything. I think the personals should become a new genre, as in, read for their own sake, studied, documented, catalogued, themes and movements identified and codified. There should be awards for the best and worst written personal advertisement of [...]

It’s 1:42am and I’ve just finished my entry for the Denis Butler Literary Awards, which are due in tomorrow (today). It’s a nice feeling to actually finish something. And I actually like this story. Hopefully I still like it in the morning…

Switching Off The Television

Hast thou entered into the springs of the sea? Or hast [...]

A room without books is like a body without a soul. (Marcus Tullius Cicero)
There is no soul. (Scientist)
There is no book. (Deconstructionist)

Every single book you own which was printed since the EAN barcode standard was introduced will have a barcode starting with the digits 978. This is in lieu of the normal country code that would appear and in fact represents an imaginary country: Bookland. True story. Maybe everyone should write Bookland as their country of [...]

Jules and Rita were rivals in the office and, therefore, hated each other. You’d often overhear, even when you didn’t try, words like sexist, racist, pig, bitch, phony, liar, chauvinist, dyke, punk in conversations about the other each regularly engaged in with favourite colleagues. So it comes as a great surprise to learn from eyewitnesses [...]

“The surest way of never having any thoughts of your own is to pick up a book every time you have a free moment.”

(Schopenhauer, Arthur. Essays and Aphorisms, R. J. Hollingdale (Trans.), Penguin, London, 1970, p. 90)

Would Mr Schopenhauer have us put down his book, at that point?

I just discovered a name written on the inside of a book I own, which I recognised as the author of another book I own (a philosopher by the name of AW Sparkes). At first I thought this was pretty extraordinary, but now I reflect on it, I’m pretty sure I bought the two books [...]

Television of the Day 1: Jesus Springer

Jesus used to hang out with the thieves and prostitutes, and dispense moral wisdom. These days we have Jerry Springer, who hangs with the scum of American society, dispensing moral wisdom in soundbytes at the end of each show. Except this time around we don’t know if the people [...]

He features in Derrida, a new film that debuted at Sundance this year. It’s going to be showing in Melbourne in August at the International Film Festival—hopefully it makes it to Sydney at some point.

Curiously, as I happened upon deep in the Credits, it appears that Mark Z. Danielewski, otherwise known as the guy who [...]

The first work you come across at the MCA at the moment is a massive pencil drawing by Paul Noble, called Acumulus Noblitatus. It took me about fifteen minutes to decode the message encoded down the left hand side of the work; turns out it’s a quote taken from The Law of Freedom in a [...]

From a review of Jerome Kagan’s Surprise, Uncertainty and Mental Structures:

Kagan divides children into those who are “high-reactive”—who respond to unfamiliar sights and sounds “by thrashing their limbs and crying”—and “low-reactive”—who show minimal responses and no crying. In general, the high-reactive children (about 20 per cent) become shy and fearful toddlers and introvert adolescents; the [...]

Naomi and I are launching a self-published magazine called How To Be Happy at the Octapod tonight. Check MISSION AERO-ZED 6 for the details.

If you’ve found this site because you want to get your hands on a copy, or if you want to interact with it/us, then Fire away. Your problems will be solved.

Anyone who wants to meet up at some Sydney WHAT IS MUSIC? events, let me know. I’m planning on making it to as many as possible…

I paralleli! I paralleli!

Bought an English translation of Cioran’s Sur les cimes du désespoir (On the Heights of Despair) which quotes the following passage from the Bible: ”...wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever.” (Jude 1:13). Which alerted me to the fact that the Portishead song Wandering Star takes its [...]