Orang-utan Biology (1988)
Source: 1940s, I is Style (2000), pp. 100-101 : in: 'That is my confession I have to make MERZ' (1940 – 1946), Kurt Schwitters.
“Never take a seat in the back of the room. Winners sit up front.”
Source: We Were Liars
Interview with Joan Gordon
Context: There’s simultaneously something rigorous and something playful in genre. It’s about the positing of something impossible—whether not-yet-possible or never-possible—and then taking that impossibility and granting it its own terms and systematicity. It’s carnivalesque in its impossibility and overturning of reality, but it’s rationalist in that it pretends it is real. And it’s that second element which I think those who dip their toes in the SF pond so often forget. They think sf is “about” analogies, and metaphors, and so on. I refute that—I think that those are inevitable components, but it’s the surrendering to the impossible, the weird, that characterizes genre. Those flirting with SF don’t surrender to it; they distance themselves from it, and have a neon sub-text saying, “It’s okay, this isn’t really about spaceships or aliens, it’s about real life,” not understanding that it can be both, and would do the latter better if it was serious about the former.
“When no idea seems right, the right one must seem wrong.”
Music, Mind, and Meaning (1981)
“When you are wronged repeatedly, the worst thing you can do is continue taking it--fight back!”
what use in idle words? —
Forward, O warriors of the soul!
There will be breaking up of swords
When that new morning makes us whole.
Forward
The Lord of Misrule and Other Poems (1915)
