You can find your identity in the damage that’s been done to you. Very, very dangerous. You find your identity in your wounds, in your scars, in the places where you’ve been beat up and you turn them into a medal. We all wear the things we’ve survived with some honour, but the real honour… [Read more…]
January 10, 2012
The quote below is an excerpt from A Man Without A Country — a diamond of a book by the inimitable Kurt Vonnegut. To be as wise, incensed and articulate as Vonnegut is here (age 83) is surely one definition of success. If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the… [Read more…]
May 14, 2011
No escribo para encontrar respuestas, ni creo en las novelas que lo hacen. Faulkner decia que la literatura logra lo mismo que una pobre cerilla que se enciende en mitad de la noche, en mitad de un campo. No sirve para iluminar nada, solamente para ver cuanta oscuridad hay a nuestro alredador y lo poco… [Read more…]
January 16, 2011
One doesn’t expect out of life what one has already learned that it cannot give — Vincent Van Gogh
September 25, 2010
Posted by Cila Warncke I find literary interviews marginally encouraging. Selfishly, I’m pleased to hear Jonathan Franzen took nine years to complete his novel ‘Freedom’. A paragraph lifts my heart like a balloon, then pricks it: It isn’t just that the latest novel took nine years to finish. It is also that, within that period,… [Read more…]
April 18, 2010
Posted by Cila Warncke This is one of my favourite Bill Hicks clips. I love the way his face conveys astonishment, scorn, outrage, and despair all bundled together so seamless-awkwardly it can’t help being hilarious. He doesn’t have to clap hand to forehead; the words make the motion for him. “What are you reading for?”… [Read more…]
January 5, 2010
Posted by Cila Warncke According to the worthy Ziem, man becomes ambitious as soon as he becomes impotent. It’s pretty much all one to me whether I am impotent or not [but] I’m damned if that’s going to drive me to ambition. — Vincent Van Gogh There are two kinds of ambition. The obvious, socially-approved… [Read more…]
November 2, 2009
Posted by Cila Warncke The view from the sixth-floor members’ lounge of the Tate Modern is spectacular. A cool sweep across Saint Paul’s Cathedral, the Millennium Bridge and the sludge-grey curve of the Thames. After that, walking through the ‘Pop Life’ exhibition is like touring a crypt: lifeless, rigid, ostentatious, dull. There are scenes of… [Read more…]
February 8, 2012
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