SFUltra

"...when I put on my holster, I put God out of my mind" - Cop

"He did not work for posterity, nor did he work for God, whose literary preferences were largely unknown to him." - The Secret Miracle, Jorge Louis Borges

"Delight dwindles. Blame stays the same." - Briggflatts: An Autobiography, Basil Bunting I'm happy to welcome Matt on this last episode of SFUltra for 2023. Matt's youtube channel Bookpilled is one of the main inspirations behind SFUltra and his engaging, thoughtful reviews of books exactly like the one we're covering this week are precisely what makes him the best book reviewer on YouTube. Matt's channel: https://www.youtube.com/@Bookpilled Matt's patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Bookpilled

"Sometimes when I get up and emerge from the mists of slumber, my whole room hurts, my whole bedroom, the view from the window hurts, kids go to school, people go shopping, everybody knows where to go, only I don't know where I want to go..." - Bohumil Hrabal, Total Fears: Selected Letters to Dubenka

"Death's meaning I cannot read. To me death is above all things a smell, a very bad smell, and that, like the skeletons which terrify children, is not death at all. If I had to smell it more often, if I had to work in the catacombs, I would think nothing of it. And a few years or decades from now, I will think nothing about everything." - William T. Vollmann, Rising Up and Rising Down: Some Thoughts on Violence, Freedom and Urgent Means

"The relation between God and human beings is often mediated by the sign of the weapon" - Elaine Scarry

"All alone at the '64 World's Fair Eighty dolls yelling "Small girl after all" Who was at the DuPont Pavilion? Why was the bench still warm? Who had been there?" - They Might Be Giants, Ana Ng

"Being empty, not being a complete, separate being, having no self to groove on and needing to be constantly in female company, he sees nothing at all wrong in intruding himself on any woman's thoughts, even a total stranger's, anywhere at any time, but rather feels indignant and insulted when put down for doing so, as well as confused -- he can't, for the life of him, understand why anyone would prefer so much as one minute of solitude to the company of any creep around." - Valerie Solanas, The Scum Manifesto

There's something they aren't telling us. Something we don't know about. There's more to it. There's always more to it. This is what history consists of. It's the sum total of all the things they aren't telling us. –David Ferrie in Don DeLillo's Libra (1988)