Archives for March 2024

"In Kafka, something is always not being said. What is it?" John Banville (A Different Kafka, NYRB, 2013) “The crows like to insist a single crow is enough to destroy heaven. This is incontestably true, but it says nothing about heaven, because heaven is just another way of saying: the impossibility of crows.” Franz Kafka (The Zurau Aphorisms) "He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. " John Barth (Lost in the Funhouse) I noticed that Bill Maher's routine the other night was about the excesses of the government's response to the Covid pandemic (alleged). I haven't the energy or inclination to dissect Maher's routine but I … [Read more...]

“Late-comers and newcomers have an alarming affinity to positivism... ” Theodor Adorno (Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life ) “Fascism will despite everything get away with its victory scot-free, and, having once been shown so easy, will be continued elsewhere. The logic of history is as destructive as the people that it brings to prominence: wherever its momentum carries it, it reproduces equivalents of past calamity. Normality is death.” Theodor Adorno (Ibid) “But { Walter} Benjamin adds, ‘If the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literalness is the arcade.’ Translation is always insufficient: it serves to emphasise the distance between languages, … [Read more...]