Category: quotes

Wittenburg says that composing these interludes was initially difficult but he took inspiration from John Cage’s approach of giving space to silence. The Berlin-based artist is referring to the experiments Cage did in an anechoic chamber at Harvard University in 1951, in which the American master concluded that absolute silence did not exist. Within the chamber, Cage heard two sounds, one high and one low – afterwards, an engineer explained that the high sound was his nervous system and the low one was his blood circulating throughout his system. Another great American composer, Pauline Oliveros, later observed that Cage was listening to the sounds caused by the early symptoms of the stroke he would later die from, and as such, according to Oliveros, while Cage was in the anechoic chamber he was ultimately listening to his future.

When my eldest son was born, I made the mistake of taking him to a Teletubbies premiere, which culminated with a photo opportunity with the Teletubbies themselves. Needless to say he was tremendously nonplussed; falling asleep just beforehand, so in the resulting picture it looks as if I am offering him up to Dipsy as a kind of nightmarish blood sacrifice.

What’s unique in Britain’s case, though, is the way these genres slip and smear into one another. Sci-fi is more often about the past returning to haunt us than about gleaming visions of the future. Horror frequently implicates itself tightly with the British landscape and its eerie, unsettling atmospheres. History invoked via period drama may be scattered with ghostly apparitions. Stories set in the realist present can acquire a mythological underlay. Britain’s self-image as a moated, ‘sceptred isle’ recurs time and again in fascist dystopias and speculative invasions. Class, social inequality and colonialism drive historical and period dramas, from genteel literary adaptations to muddy rural sagas. As I seek to ‘bruise a lane on the grass’ of all this untamed material, in Virginia Woolf’s exquisite phrase, my lens sweeps in a deliberately wide arc, seeking a telemetric folklore of the British Isles.

THE MAGIC BOX, Rob Young (link)

In November, just three months later, Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was ambushed, shot and killed outside Tehran. This was no ordinary murder. Fakhrizadeh was Iran’s top military nuclear scientist, and, rather mysteriously, the gunmen were nowhere to be seen. His heavily armed bodyguards could only haplessly shoot back into thin air. The murder weapon – a robotic machine gun – was equipped with artificial intelligence and controlled by satellite to target Fakhrizadeh, and only Fakhrizadeh. His wife, sitting centimetres away from him in the car, escaped unharmed.

HOW TO STAGE A COUP, Rory Cormac (link)

My father was a well-known writer in Iceland, and I learned a lot from him, not least that writing is not a bohemian exercise but reasonably hard work for which you are eventually rewarded. It really isn’t more complicated than that.

Wild boar became extinct in England at least three hundred years ago but in recent years escapees and releases from wild-boar farms have re-established wild populations. A large population near the coast in East Sussex provides Rye’s annual Wild Boar Festival in October with ‘wild boargers’, ‘boargignon’ and other delicacies from the ‘last of the summer swine’.

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm, Isabella Tree (link)

The end of history, for Kojève, is to end history. As Kojève hauntingly notes, history is nothing more than the persistence of error, understood by Kojève as the adherence to ways of justifying self-preservation.

The Black Circle: A Life of Alexandre Kojève, Jeff Love (link)

…(I) thought of them as someone might think of an astronaut’s footprints, but not a pioneer astronaut like Neil Armstrong, for example, but an astronaut for the end of something, an astronaut for an ending.

THE THINGS WE’VE SEEN, Agustin Fernandez Mallo (link)

Bosch closes his eyes and focuses on this feeling, so he’ll remember it when it’s gone. For it will be gone, will it not? That is the way of things, that is time, and time is a fucker, and except for this one time in all his life he’d never cared about the boot-sludge drone of time, and suddenly it is everything, isn’t it?

VERGE, Lidia Yuknavitch (link)

During the winter months, the only route in and out of the remote valley of Zanskar in the Indian Himalayas is along the ice-path formed by a frozen river. The river passes down through steep-sided valleys of shaley rock, on whose slopes snow leopards hunt. In its deeper pools, the ice is blue and lucid. The journey down the river is called the chadar, and parties undertaking the chadar are led by experienced walkers known as ‘ice-pilots’, who can tell where the dangers lie.

THE OLD WAYS, Robert Macfarlane (link)