The summer in fact is on the wane; peacefully fading like some brilliant spot of light. The colours of the sunset are everywhere.

When we discussed his poetry, Moten, citing Amiri Baraka, made a distinction between voice and sound. “I always thought that ‘the voice’ was meant to indicate a kind of genuine, authentic, absolute individuation, which struck me as (a) undesirable and (b) impossible,” he said. “Whereas a ‘sound’ was really within the midst of this intense engagement with everything: with all the noise that you’ve ever heard, you struggle somehow to make a difference, so to speak, within that noise. And that difference isn’t necessarily about you as an individual, it’s much more simply about trying to augment and to differentiate what’s around you. And that’s what a sound is for me.”

New Ending:

“Lembrei-me agora de Mário de Andrade que afirmou: “As pessoas não debatem conteúdos, apenas os rótulos”. Meu tempo tornou-se escasso para debater rótulos, quero a essência, minha alma tem pressa.”

Only in the books written in earlier times did she sometimes think she found some faint idea of what it might be like to be alive.

Mythologies of technological autonomy and machine intelligence are nothing new: since the industrial age, they have existed to mystify the role of workers and subaltern classes. As Schaffer has remarked, while describing the cult of automata in Babbage’s age, ‘To make machines look intelligent it was necessary that the sources of their power, the labour force which surrounded and ran them, be rendered invisible.’

For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return. Each deserves a different name; perhaps I have already spoken of Irene under other names; perhaps I have spoken only of Irene.

“I had a cup of tea, thought about my day and mostly about the horse whom, though I'd only known him a short time, I called my friend. I have few friends and am glad to have a horse for a friend. After the meal I smoked a cigarette and mused on the luxury it would be to go out, instead of talking to myself and boring myself to death with the same endless stories I'm forever telling myself. I am a very boring person, despite my enormous intelligence and distinguished appearance, and nobody knows this better than I. I've often told myself that if only I were given the opportunity, I'd perhaps become the centre of intellectual society. But by dint of talking to myself so much, I tend to repeat the same things all the time. But what can you expect? I'm a recluse.”

“No figure in literature, oral or written, baffles us quite as much as trickster. He is positively identified with creative powers, often bringing such defining features of culture as fire or basic food, and yet he constantly behaves in the most antisocial manner we can imagine. Although we laugh at him for his troubles and his foolishness and are embarrassed by his promiscuity, his creative cleverness amazes us and keeps alive the possibility of transcending the social restrictions we regularly encounter.”

“Memory’s only like justice, because it is another wrong idea that makes people feel right.”

It’s not just what we inherit from our mothers and fathers that haunt us. It’s all kinds of old defunct theories, all sorts of old defunct beliefs, and things like that. It’s not that they actually live on in us; they are simply lodged there, and we cannot get rid of them.