Selections from the Zibaldone

 

My brother and his wife bought me a cute notebook for Christmas this year, and I've been using it as a kind of zibaldone since. So I've decided that, during weeks when I don't have the time or the energy (and this week, incapacitated as I am by what is either 'flu or covid, it's the latter) to do an original entry, it might be worth putting together a few quotations therefrom. So here are a few, in no particular order, interspersed with my sketches from the same notebook.

'Abuse is not sanctified by its duration or abundancy; it must remain susceptible to question and challenge, no matter how long it takes.' - Chinua Achebe, Home and Exile 

'In bourgeois ideology, the idea of freedom is the freedom of all to be market actors. In bourgeois ideology, the idea of law is that it binds the propertied and the propertyless equally to their respective situations. These twin conceptions have been the basis of the reactionary idea of 'liberty', which has always been the keystone of formulated bourgeois ideology, from the 'liberty' of the Founding Fathers to own slaves to the 'liberty' of the current billionaire oligarchs to own the entire media ecosystem and to thus control the entire ideological discourse. It is this conception of 'liberty' that is being championed when people like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg drivel on about absolute freedom of speech. They must have the freedom to speak over millions of others who have chosen not to be billionaires.' - Jack Graham, Bourgeois Salvations

'Bond famously has a licence to kill, which raises the question of who has the right to grant someone permission to murder. The answer, as Fleming and Bond saw it, was the British Crown. Bond's enemies also killed and destroyed, of course, but they did so without the correct paperwork and authority. This made them bad.' - John Higgs, Love and Let Die: Bond, The Beatles and the British Psyche

'Life is a nightmare that leaves its mark upon you in order to prove that it is, in fact, real.' - Thomas Ligotti, The Sect of the Idiot

'We always make such distinctions between those of us who are us and those of us who are tables and chairs and then some table turns up and thinks at you, criticizes you, talks to you, looks down on you. Likes you.' - Joanna Russ, We Who Are About To...

'The map had been the first form of misdirection, for what was a map but a way of emphasizing some things and making other things invisible?' - Jeff Vandermeer, Annihilation

'The cops don't get satisfied. They get placated.' - The Limey

'...I know that art has often judged the judges, pleaded revenge to the innocent and shown to the future what the past suffered, so that it has never been forgotten. I know too that the powerful fear art, whatever its form, when it does this, and that amongst the people such art sometimes runs like a rumour and a legend because it makes sense of what life's brutalities cannot, a sense that unites us, for it is inseparable from a justice at last.' - John Berger, Miners