John Darnielle often sends his listeners on a quest of sorts; those listeners who want to plumb the depth of every reference on his hyper-literate albums which have featured brief quotations from diverse works of fiction. The latest literary trace that has resurfaced with my own reading came from Elfriede Jelinek’s “Wonderful, Wonderful Times.” See if you can spot the quotation, recalling on which album it might be found:
She goes on drifting among great, sterile, transparent jellies. Nothing keeps her steady and stable, but the glass-bright mass keeps her in a constant state of suspension, she doesn’t touch the ground. Sophie too will be like that one day, if something isn’t done to prevent it in good time, now. Love will prevent it (p. 91).
Filed under: Stuff I've Been Reading
February 8, 2009 • 10:14 pm
We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.
Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls
Filed under: Stuff I've Been Reading
