Simon Taylor

While paranoia in everyday life asks questions it believes have terrifying answers, paranoid art knows the more terrifying (and inevitable) discoveries are further questions. For paranoid art, unlike paranoid persons, also distrusts itself. And so, paranoid art is the ultimate opposite, the urgent opposite, of complacent art. — Jonathan Lethem, Fear

Donald E. Westlake asks in his introduction to Charles Willeford’s The Way We Die Now… Well he starts out by saying “I knew Willeford some,” and knowing Willeford some he found him to be secure in his persona and to have attained a calm plateau that his character Hoke

I shall die without anyone knowing, There shall be a little blood by my mouth. The ones who don't know me shall say 'He definitely loved someone.' And the ones who know me shall say, 'Poor thing, he suffered a lot' But the real

Poetry magazine suggested, “John Ash could be the best English poet of his generation,” which prompted John to remark wryly, “Why ‘could’?” [- from here] I know I mix the present with the past, but that’s how I like it: there is no other way to go on. -

title is from the final page of Clayton Crockett’s Energy and Change: A New Materialist Cosmotheology, published by Columbia University Press, 2022. I don’t really intend a review. I wrote to the author to say I enjoyed his book, that I was led to read it by my

Bastarda takes us on another musical journey, this time delving into Hasidic Nigunim. These mystical Jewish songs, almost always sung without lyrics, originated in the Hasidic revival movement of the 18th century and often drew from local music patterns and traditions. Ecstatic dancing and singing of nigunim was a way