Reflection

Bush and Obama are mirror-images. Left becomes right, right becomes left. The rhetoric of reconciliation remains the same.

List: Pseudonyms

1. Michael Angelo Titmarsh
2. Ern Malley
3. Bernardo Soares
4. Brunette Coleman
5. Adonis

Special mention:
Anonymous

P.S. Thanks, gentle Reader, for the suggestion.

On Reduction

"The resemblance of his figures to each other seems to me to represent that precious point at which human beings are confronted with the most irreducible fact: the loneliness of being exactly equivalent to all others."

--Jean Genet, on Alberto Giacometti

Suspense

This notion that the world is awry, that things are in crisis - where does it come from? I think it is a secret sense. Somewhere in the distance, there is a knot of air, somewhere in the far distance. It is anonymous. It may unknot itself, or not, become momentous. In some further time, or planet. Must we await it?

We must. Suspense is working its way into us. Worm, or contagion. How it wishes to furl its flag, restrain a voice. See, it says, the world is full of signs! The way the curtains hang in the time before a breeze; or how the sky is strangely placid; or why there are no birds here...

Unseen, waters tug gently at a shore. Somewhere in the far distance. But this is a pattern, merely, in the mind. A stillness in and of itself, fruit of the germ of stillness. The germ is in the mind, the secret is in the mind.

So it is thought, and so it continues.

Re-phrase

There is a sense, and it is a true sense, that the true locus of pathologies is language itself.

Re fract

"We're not sane and it's language that has made us this way."

-- Pascal Quignard, in "Albucius" (tr. by Bruce Boone)

List: Writers with Technical Educations

1. Robert Musil
2. Hermann Broch
3. Carlo Emilio Gadda
4. Nicanor Parra
5. Juan Benet

Special Mention:
Maurice Sandoz

Winter Hoard

1. Chris Ware, "Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth"
2. Kyril Bonfiglioli, "After You with the Pistol"
3. Alexander McCall Smith, "The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs"
4. H.C. Bailey, "Colonel Greatheart"
5. Paul Muldoon, "Madoc: A Mystery"
6. Francesco Colonna, "Hypnerotomachia Polyphili" (The Strife of Love in a Dream)
7. Brian Morton, "Starting Out in the Evening"
8. Elizabeth Jolley, "Foxybaby"
9. Magdalena Tulli, "Dreams and Stones"
10. Pascal Quignard, "Albucius"
11. Juan Benet, "A Meditation"
12. Philip J. Davis, "The Thread: A Mathematical Yarn"
13. Glen Baxter, "His Life: The Years of Struggle"
14. Girolamo Cardano, "The Book of My Life"
15. Wolfgang Hildesheimer, "Collected Stories"

etc.