journal

“I’ve had only one psychedelic flashback in my life. It was about 20 minutes into a therapy session. Unfortunately, I was the therapist. “This was many years ago now, and I believe it lasted much less than a minute. But when that particular veil lifts, time is a yardstick

Times were simpler when I was reading the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. I don’t recall whether I read the Second Chronicles. But I must have. I picked up that volume just now and the events it relates seem familiar: the daughter of the woman Thomas raped now a woman

read Johnathan Jones’s excellent valedictory in the Guardian: ‘She is dancing among the greats’: the dangerously honest, richly ambiguous Paula Rego …magical realism… says Johnathan Jones … so, read Eden Kupermintz, “On the Radical Escapism of Magic Realism or how to become a god in late capitalism“

Yesterday I was looking at the retrofuturism (or is that Nachträglichkeit?)of Paulina Olowska: …and today I read that Paula Rego died yesterday… …not that there’s much similarity: Olowska’s work is like a painterly Ostalgie. Perhaps it recalls Antoine Volodine?

Mario Levrero begins The Luminous Novel… he is a writer from Uruguay, was. An unnecessary detail, perhaps. Alejandro Zambra, a writer I admire, Chilean, as it happens, or happened, like Bolaño, yet very unlike him, writes about Levrero that we cannot, we readers, we cannot hope to understand that mythical

You know there is a theory … that all that we experience as reality is just a simulation, a kind of hallucination that has been imposed upon us. … …how can we know that our own reality is the last, the final one? How do we know there is not still a