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"Yeah, call it a hunch . . . Whatever you do, don't call it what it was — a sudden flood of complete certainty that if he looked at those long-ignored records, he would find something. Because if you call it that, you'll have to admit you don't know what the hell is going on inside your own head these days." — Edward Willett, Marseguro (2008), eerily apropos to the plot of Young Frankenstein A still from the perennially hilarious Young Frankenstein.
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[This note is dedicated to Jonathan Caws-Elwitt.] On the strength of a single droll passage, I am always disappointed with mountains. There are no mountains in the
world as high as I would wish. They irritate me invariably. I should
like to shake Switzerland. — Ronald Firbank, The Princess Zoubaroffa friend and I each bought some selected works of the author. Though neither of us ended up as card-carrying members of the Ronald Firbank fan club, note some of his astonishing staging notes: [in a voice which is rather like cheap scent]
[playing extinct eyes]
[All but imperceptibly, twilight begins to form.]
[impressionistically]
[blinking at a flash of summer lightning]
[covering her eyes with an elaborately becoroneted Vanity-bag]
And in his novel Valmouth, I love Firbanks' thingamabobs, such as: A long sunbeam lighting up the whatnot . . .
Make ready the thingamies!
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 "An essential point bears repeating, however: All of us are expert musical listeners, able to make quite subtle determinations of what we like and don't like, even when we're unable to articulate the reasons why." — Daniel J. Levitin, This is Your Brain on Music
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"The key to power over spiritual nature has been rusting since the flood. It is: wakefulness. Wakefulness is all." —Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face |
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| The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
(permalink) |
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~ Amorphous Apparitions ~ 
Portrait from Biography of Frances Slocum.
“The shadow sat down, too.” —“The Naughty Shadow,” a Russian fable
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"Look at the sun blazing there among the peaks, too blinding almost for our eyes. See how he touches the mountaintops and how they dissolve into fire at his touch. Some day, I tell you, he will burn as we please and spin at our command. He will be our servant, our convenience, our instrument. He will be the fire before our door, the light of our first home as we spread out our power and our blood farther and farther amidst the stars." — H.G. Wells, "The World Set Free" An illustration from a 1913 issue of Century Illustrated magazine. |
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"In the most blessed, the most beautiful state the human race can attain[,] [e]ach one of us would grow in a different way, no one would be like anyone else, everyone would be a crystal, would think and feel in different colours and images, would love and hate differently, as the spirit within wants us to. It must have been Satan himself, the enemy of all colorful diversity, who thought up the slogan that all men are equal." —Gustav Meyrink, The White Dominican |
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 "Don't take this the wrong way, but you really wouldn't have fun at my party." — Sassy (1994)
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| The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
(permalink) |
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~ Amorphous Apparitions ~ 
Portrait from Memoir of Roger Brooke Taney.
“Reality is accompanied by its spectral shadows only insofar as it is already in itself transcendentally constituted through the subject.” —Slavoj Žižek
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An illustration from an 1887 issue of Scribner's magazine. The caption reads: "Out of the night and the other world came into him the dead."
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| [Inexplicable images from generations ago invite us to restore the lost
sense of immediacy. We follow the founder of the Theater of
Spontaneity, Jacob Moreno, who proposed stringing together "now and then
flashes" to unfetter illusion and let imagination run free. The images
we have collected for this series came at a tremendous price, which we explained previously.] |
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 "Many men have forgotten how to play [handball], and some never knew how. This may surprise you, but it is a solemn fact." —Charles Phelps Cushing, "What Can a Fat Man Do?" The World's Work, July 1916
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"The Markee observed, apropos of nothing in particular: 'Ha, ha!'" — Puck, May 23, 1883
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A traveler realizes "that the wild country he surveys is not an accidental assembly of natural phenomena, but the page in a book where these mountains and forests, and fields, and rivers are disposed in such a way as to form a coherent sentence; the vowel of a lake fusing with the consonant of a sibilant slope; the windings of a road writing its message in a round hand, as clear as that of one's father; trees conversing in dumb-show, making sense to one who has learnt the gestures of their language . . . Thus the traveler spells the landscape and its sense is disclosed, and likewise, the intricate pattern of human life turns out to be monogrammatic, now quite clear to the inner eye disentangling the interwoven letters." — Vladimir Navokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight |
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| The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
(permalink) |
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~ Amorphous Apparitions ~ 
Portrait from The Life of Rutherford Birchard Hayes.
“You can almost hear the ghost of Rutherford B. Hayes.” —Adam Horowitz
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"A constraint is the germ of an idea absent the idea itself." — Geof Huth |
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"This may surprise you; a neutron, you will say, has no electric charge and so remains unchanged if you reverse all electric charges! But that is not so: a neutron is magnetic, more precisely a magnetic spinning top ... and if you reverse all electrical charges you also reverse magnetic polarities." — The New Scientist, Jan. 31 1957
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| I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought |
(permalink) |
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"If one man has an idea, that just means that many others will have the same idea at the same time. Anyone who doesn't see that doesn't know what an idea is. Thoughts are contagious, even if they are not expressed; perhaps most contagious when they are not expressed." —Gustav Meyrink, The Green Face |
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| The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
(permalink) |
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~ Amorphous Apparitions ~ 
Portrait from Memoir of the Rev. C. H. O. Cote.
“A ghostly shadow in ghostly light.” —Eugene Field
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 "The outstanding characteristic of the Russian people is their gaiety." — Joseph Stalin
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"Don't be too certain of learning the past from the lips of the present. Beware of the most honest broker. Remember that what you are told is really threefold: shaped by the teller, reshaped by the listener, concealed from both by the dead man of the tale." — Vladimir Nabokov, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
"Memory has its own special kind. It selects, eliminates, alters, exaggerates, minimizes, glorifies, and vilifies also; but in the end it creates its own reality, its heterogeneous but usually coherent version of events; and no sane human being ever trusts someone else's version more than his own." — Salman Rushdie
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"There is a fine line between success and failure in fashion innovation."
—Lucy Montgomery
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| A printed collection of A Fine Line Between... is now available from Amazon.com. |
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| The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
(permalink) |
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~ Amorphous Apparitions ~ 
Portrait from Memoir of the Rev. Elias Cornelius.
“A nearly imperceptible shade separates the possible from the impossible.” —Supreme Court of Louisiana
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"Don't take this the wrong way, but I don't see you writing a novel." — Sassy (1994)
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| The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
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~ Amorphous Apparitions ~ 
Portrait from The Life of Cervantes.
“Cervantes ghost-wrote a number of poems relating to the book of Don Quixote.” —Dale B. J. Randall, Cervantes in Seventeenth-Century England
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"This may surprise you but one of the biggest reasons [people get stuck in the safety of the status quo] is fear." —B ob Beaudine, The Power of Who (2009)
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| The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
(permalink) |
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~ Amorphous Apparitions ~ 
Portrait from Memoir of Nicholas Hill.
“Like a black shadow in the uncertain light.” —Isabella Valancy Crawford
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The surprising truth is that most people don't want to sober up at the end of a night of partying. —E A Stamant/E O Zucca, Instant Sober (2010)
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"The answer is simple — in order to win.”
—The Rotarian (Aug. 1934)
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From Prof. Oddfellow's sketchbook: "At times I had thought of writing poetry myself but getting words to rhyme with each other is difficult, like trying to drive a herd of turkeys and kangaroos down a crowded thoroughfare and keep them neatly together without looking in shop windows. There are so many words, and they all mean something." —Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet |
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"Now this may surprise you, but I think the automotive industry is doing its best." — Boys' Life, March 1972
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| The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
(permalink) |
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"The triumph of empiricism in science is jeopardized by the surprising truth that our sense-data are primarily symbols." —Susanne Langer
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| The Ghost in the [Scanning] Machine |
(permalink) |
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~ Amorphous Apparitions ~ 
Portrait from Memoir of the Duchess of Orleans.
“The odd, thickened light around her face faded with it.” —David Weber, Hell’s Gate
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Original Content Copyright © 2025 by Craig Conley. All rights reserved.
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"A rose is a rose but the rest sure ain't."
"A rose is a rose, but a tulip can bankrupt you."
