Block Seating

In relation to nature a positivist scientist is almost in the same position as a savage in a library filled with valuable rare books. For a savage a book is a thing of a certain size and weight. However long he may puzzle over the purpose of this strange thing, he will never understand it by its appearance, and the content of the book will remain for him the unfathomable noumenon....

Pyotr Demianovich Ouspenskii [tr. Kadloubovsky]

The Cyrillic Gorilla (A Nasty Story)

As he went on remembering he became more and more thoughtful. Everybody knows that whole trains of thought can sometimes pass through our heads in the twinkling of an eye, like so many sensations, without being translated into any kind of human, much less, literary language. But we shall try to translate our hero's sensations of that kind and present to our readers at any rate the substance of them, what were, so to speak, their most essential and plausible aspects. Because after all many of our feelings, translated into ordinary language, seem altogether unlikely. That is why they are never brought out into the open, although everybody has them....

Fyodor Dostoyevsky (tr. J. Coulson)

Chin Money

Go With The Wind

"to and fro in shadow from inner to outer shadow

from impenetrable self to impenetrable unself

by way of neither..."


[Samuel Beckett]

Shadow Dance: An Essay On Minimalism

"The oddest product of terraphysics--and who knows, perhaps the one that promises the most to knowledge--is reckoned to be the so-called Polyversum hypothesis. According to it the Cosmos is dual and we, together with the matter comprising the suns, stars, planets, and our bodies, inhabit its "slow" half, the Bradyversum. It is "slow" because movement is possible here at speeds ranging from the static up to locally the highest, that of light. The other or "fast" half of the Cosmos, the Tachyversum, is reached via the light barrier. To get to the Tachyversum, it is necessary to exceed the speed of light: in our world this is an omnipresent frontier separating each spot from another region of existence...."

[Stanislaw Lem]

Kafka's Laughter (Still)

“I always wanted you to admire my fasting,” said the hunger artist.

“But we do admire it,” said the supervisor obligingly.

“But you shouldn’t admire it,” said the hunger artist.

“Well then, we don’t admire it,” said the supervisor, “but why shouldn’t we admire it?”

“Because I had to fast. I can’t do anything else,” said the hunger artist.

“Just look at you,” said the supervisor, “why can’t you do anything else?”

“Because,” said the hunger artist, lifting his head a little and, with his lips pursed as if for a kiss, speaking right into the supervisor’s ear so that he wouldn’t miss anything, “because I couldn’t find a food which I enjoyed...."


[Franz Kafka tr. Ian Johnston]

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Launch Code Demento Shaving Cream IT...

Or: How I learned to stop worrying and love Doctor Strange.

Ah one, and ah two, and ah...