Quentin Dara

Marooned in a life I could have never imagined...caught somewhere between German romanticism and the 1970s at their most corduroy....

[𝒮𝒪𝒩𝒩𝒴 𝒮𝐸𝐻𝑅𝒜 ੴ @sonnysehra]

the mysterious, dreamlike, and psychedelic landscapes of eccentric 17th-century dutch painter hercules seghers (1589-1638).
he influenced artists like rembrandt and surrealists like max ernst. german filmmaker werner herzog called him a “forgotten genius”

[Yasha Levine @yashalevine]

fuck this. this is strike one against my new mayor. forcing my child (and all
nyc children) to stare at vampiric google screens all day rather then let them play in the snow? this isnt social democracy this is techno-fascism. the screen is evil. down with the screen.

[Quentin Dara @QuentinDara]

Crumb understands perfection.

[levy @1929stockcrash]

R Crumb was such a creep. I miss him

[Quentin Dara @QuentinDara]

A classroom in a small farm
in the woods with students, teachers, hard copies of Paradise Lost or what-have-you, plus a chalk board, notebooks, then lectures and discussions. Here is a vision of truly countercultural praxis. It is also a beautiful.

[anthony galluzzo @communecore]

Although the workshop model is also a problem tbh + a focus on expository writing as a process both expressive and formulaic. ChatGPT is more spotlight than causative agent. We shd shift back to reading, close reading, lit. English depts might use this moment. Ofc they aren’t.

[Quentin Dara @QuentinDara]

The Eternals’ costumes are even better: Laurel Canyon hippie meets Pre-Raphaelite, and also even more revealing—Charlotte Rampling!

[anthony galluzzo @communecore]

I at least thought I would get a Halloween Zed the Exterminator get-up and stone head mask for writing that book…but no.

@Zer0Books @RepeaterBooks @yashalevine

[Quentin Dara @QuentinDara]

Maybe this was Boorman’s attempt to grapple with the problem of adaptation and the fundamental gap between literary and cinematic texts, verbal and visual registers? So the surfeit of image, overwhelming the story, that is the film and the seemingly separate novel/novelization.

[anthony galluzzo @communecore]

My own book is also a close reading of this strange novel, which isn’t exactly a novelization. Zardoz began as a story Boorman turned into a longer prose piece then he and Bill Stair transformed it into a script. After the film, JB finished the novel.
@RepeaterBooks @Zer0Books o

[anthony galluzzo @communecore]

My interview with JB is the intro to the reissue. And my Zardoz book—Against The Vortex—is also a close reading of Boorman’s novel.

[Quentin Dara @QuentinDara]

Will one inadvertent consequence of this nightmare scenario be that people start to fear their beloved gadgets? Nah—the death drive was always part of the appeal: thanatoid jerk off thrill. Think Ballard’s Crash but with i-Phones and Apple watches.

[anthony galluzzo @communecore]

The recent Israeli techno-atrocities dramatize the extent to which our complex sociotechnical systems, including the handheld computer and the networks upon which it relies, are tied to war + weaponry in both origin- and end-points. Günther Anders, among others, recognized this.

[Quentin Dara @QuentinDara]

Hmmm

[anthony galluzzo @communecore]

Boorman originally wrote the story as prose piece and it was Bill Stair who helped JB translate it into shooting script form. Stair then worked on the (re)novelization with Boorman. A strange beast, Boorman’s fable, as it occupies a liminal space between text and image.

[Quentin Dara @QuentinDara]

What works in North America—or, for me, upstate on the farm—does not seem to work in the Amazon.

[anthony galluzzo @communecore]

Derek Hoff, writing on the Ehrlich-Commoner debate, quips that the planet might sustain billions if we all lived liked the Amish. Yet, according to the NYT, the Mennonites might be destroying the Amazon in remaking it in the image of 19c N. America.

https://t.co/p2vJe8dA2v

[anthony galluzzo @communecore]

A thoughtful essay by @MikeDegani on the rhetoric/reality of sustainable building that also explains why the ecomod “green” supercity—or even the idea of urban density as somehow more environmentally viable, inputs be damned—is yet another comforting metropolitan illusion:

[Quentin Dara @QuentinDara]

I like the bit in this review about the ur-Zardoz: Boorman’s lost written source for both film and novel.

[anthony galluzzo @communecore]

A new and illuminating review of my book:

“It also situates Zardoz within its broader cultural and intellectual milieux — plotting the different utopianisms, the dreams (and, obviously, nightmares) of the future, from which it variously borrows and distances itself.”

[Quentin Dara @QuentinDara]

Oh to reconnect with the centaur life. The quest continues.

[anthony galluzzo @communecore]

“Not the man-machine or mutant but the centaur-man, already bound up in its creatureliness and interdependence with the natural world…accepting, even embracing death as a ‘gift’ that we can reorient ourselves toward each other and the larger world of which we are a part.”

[Quentin Dara @QuentinDara]

@communecore Pynchon—at his best—moves seamlessly between comic-zany and tragic or tragic-absurdist registers. Impressive.

[Quentin Dara @QuentinDara]

Mathers with high speed wi-fi, Babbitts with blue bangs….

[anthony galluzzo @communecore]

One thing I have observed living in a boutique small town full of superficially “woke” urban transplants (w/o substantive radical politics, apt for gentrifiers) for the past few years is how old fashioned small town gossiping pettiness and groupthink gels with…

[anthony galluzzo @communecore]

Galluzzo raises important questions, such as, “How to think utopia within limits? And how to distinguish the surplus limits imposed by an exploitative social arrangement from those necessary biophysical limits attendant upon our creaturely condition?”

https://t.co/cHvkivqlOp

[Zer0 Books @Zer0Books]

"Zardoz is not a simplistic black-and-white polemic and nor is Against the Vortex."

Samuel Miller McDonald | Epilogue

https://t.co/pUekvUrpSE

[Quentin Dara @QuentinDara]

Um…the real movement that preserves and expands the present state of things?

[anthony galluzzo @communecore]

What to say about a US/UK metropolitan left whose image of utopia is a perpetual Black Friday super-sale with gift cards for all? Very little to do with imagining another world, more to do with a downwardly mobile PMC dreaming of their parents’ youth + postwar American affluence.

[Quentin Dara @QuentinDara]

Vaguely Yeatsian

[anthony galluzzo @communecore]

We live in a moment when the most promising intellectual movements are bereft of imagination (and passion) because they lack metaphor and myth, while the most promising movements of imagination are all myth, metaphor, feeling without concept or system.