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Simon Taylor

Simon Taylor

https://orcid.org/0009-0008-6687-4647

day 150 – 166: the president is … & other fun facts, like…

“The American people are all Blanket now.” — Marina Hyde, the genuine article here. Reality can only be apprehended through a comical, dazzling network of texts–writes Adam Thirlwell introducing his interview with Enrique Vila-Matas by stating what he calls the ‘proposition,’ the ‘basic proposition,’ of the author’s A Brief

days 144 – 149

Death is not supposed to be part of the American dream, begins Richard Wolffe’s article for the Guardian. [here] Above this is a photo of a banner reading The Lasting Monument to Trump’s Presidency is Being Built One Death At A Time, above a Goyaesque pile of severed

days following, 105-143

I just watched Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz. More frightening, I just watched a plane disappear above the clouds. The advice is insistent on how to deal with COVID. From the Stoics. It is part of the general onslaught, a how to of personal reconciliation that would be worthless

days 88 – 105: including the comeback of lockdown, ackl; or, papa goff gets a payoff

what kind of report to make, not a record of the days, and this music playing, with its dark intimations, which make you yearn for WAP feat. Megan Thee Stallion and its easy innuendos of something beyond both sex and death. For so it must be. It must be further

day 74 – day 87 of the world winding up business

“When times are hard, like they are now, what’s the use of knowing stuff?” — the end of Cixin Liu’s Of Ants and Dinosaurs (Trans. Elizabeth Hanlon, (London, UK: Head of Zeus, 2020), 248). OPERATION LEGEND: “a sustained, systematic and coordinated law enforcement initiative across all federal law enforcement

days 62-73 showing 60% at 17:17

There is nothing “most beautiful and most wonderful” about the coronavirus, to return to Darwin’s words, but it, too, is a thing of nature. We cannot wish away our connection to it. — from LA Review of Books We cannot wish away our connection to COVID-19. Darwin, Karl Kusserow writes,

days 51-61 Carlos Ruiz Zafón, 25 September 1964 – 19 June 2020, RIP, and the friends he didn’t know he had

Kundera’s description of Czechoslovakia after the Prague Spring, ’68: “A system was born (with no advance planning, almost by chance) that was truly unprecedented: the economy 100 percent nationalized, agriculture in the hands of cooperatives, nobody too rich, nobody too poor, schools and medicine for free, but also: the