Category: Yo Ivanhoe

Gogol’s last words: ‘A ladder, quick, a ladder!’ —Elias Canetti, The Agony of Flies I’ve never been able to sleep like a normal person, and I literally could count the number of dreams I remember in my lifetime on one hand. This last week, however, I’ve been trying a new medication, and experiencing the sort…

I never stop talking, even when I’m just muddling around the house by myself (which is, to be perfectly honest for a change, most of the time). I’m always spitting out words and pushing them around, hoping to carve a new language out of all the silence and empty space, or at least build something…

There may be nothing in the world so amusing as a purely rational man. The rational man is a fellow who has not yet been able to convince himself that he’s seen a ghost. The poor bastard has repressed his memories of alien abductions and fits of religious mania. He thinks this world is round.…

…on the one hand, the correct political line is demanded of the poet; on the other, one is justified in expecting his work to have quality. Such a formulation is of course unsatisfactory as long as the connection between the two factors, political line and quality, has not been perceived. Of course, the connection can…

‘The question at stake,’ said Epictetus, ‘is no common one; it is this: Are we in our senses, or are we not?’ —The Golden Sayings of Epictetus We cannot truly know whether we are not at this moment sitting in a madhouse. —Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Aphorisms There are those to whom one must advise madness.…

I stopped over to visit my old friend Rich last night. Rich is having a bit of a tough time, or so he had told me on the phone. I go way back with this guy, and on a certain level I’ve always gotten a kick out of him. That said, he is, like many…