Eighty-one Epigraphs

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale by Herman Melville has eighty epigraphs. Another Season in Hell will have eighty-one. I don’t want to spoil you all at once so I will drip feed epigraphs to you slowly, slowly, catch the monkey.

DISCLAIMER

Please note that Another Season in Hell aims to include a total of eighty-one epigraphs, surpassing the current record set by Herman Melville in his book Moby Dick; or, The Whale. This ambitious endeavour is a testament to the commitment to literary innovation and surpassing established benchmarks.

The inclusion of Eighty-one Epigraphs in the work-in-progress title Another Season in Hell is an ongoing initiative. It should be stated that any correlations drawn between Eighty-one Epigraphs and Soundtrack are subjective and based on the author’s creative process in writing Another Season in Hell.

As the narrative evolves, additional influences and factors may contribute to the final work. The work-in-progress status of Another Season in Hell implies ongoing adjustments and developments, and any perceived correlations are exploratory in nature and should not be construed as definitive or prescriptive.

Updates or modifications to this list will be communicated through official channels such as, but not limited to, Excavations and the Erkembode Instagram account.

One cannot say everything at once.

–R.D. Laing

And when I grow up, I’m gonna look up from my phone and see my life.

–Phoebe Bridgers

Take a skull. Cover it with paint. Rub it against canvas. Skull against canvas.

–Jasper Johns

The painting of a flag is always about a flag, but it is no more about a flag than about a brushstroke, or about the physicality of paint.

–Jasper Johns

Beginning with a flag that has no space around it, that has the same size as the painting, we see that it is not a painting of a flag. The roles are reversed: beginning with the flag, a painting was made. Beginning, that is, with structure, the division of the whole into parts corresponding to the parts of a flag, a painting was made which both obscures and clarifies the underlying structure.

–John Cage

I have nothing to say, and I am saying it.

–John Cage

I’m streaming, I’m slipping away.

–Baxter Dury

No one is an expert on everything.

–Roddy Woomble

A stable full of houses
A fully automatic washing machine
An armchair, whitewashing the walls
Existence isn’t always everything.

–Roddy Woomble

Once I was shaven and worked every day. Who will remember the money I saved?

–Iggy Pop

What kind of fuckery is this?

–Amy Winehouse

People have often asked me what the Zone is, and what it symbolises, and have put forward wild conjectures on the subject. I’m reduced to a state of fury and despair by such questions. The Zone doesn’t symbolise anything, any more than anything else does in my films: the zone is a zone, it’s life, and as he makes his way across it a man may break down or he may come through. Whether he comes through or not depends on his own self-respect, and his capacity to distinguish between what matters and what is merely passing.

–Andrei Tarkovsky

ROASTBEEF; MUTTON; BREAKFAST; SUGAR; CRANBERRIES; MILK; EGGS; APPLE; TAILS; LUNCH; CUPS; RHUBARB; SINGLE; FISH; CAKE; CUSTARD; POTATOES; ASPARAGUS; BUTTER; END OF SUMMER; SAUSAGES; CELERY; VEAL; VEGETABLE; COOKING; CHICKEN; PASTRY; CREAM; CUCUMBER; DINNER; DINING; EATING; SALAD; SAUCE; SALMON; ORANGE; COCOA; AND CLEAR SOUP AND ORANGES AND OAT-MEAL; SALAD DRESSING AND AN ARTICHOKE; A CENTRE IN A TABLE.

–Gertrude Stein

A rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.

–Gertrude Stein

You dare to call me crazy, have you looked around this place?

–Miley Cyrus

People don’t live or die, people just float.

–Bob Dylan

I ordered some suzette, I said “Could you please make that crêpe.”

–Bob Dylan

But Mona Lisa musta had the highway blues. You can tell by the way she smiles

–Bob Dylan

My world’s on fire, how about yours?

–Gregory Dean Camp

This is fine.

–KC Green

I bring myself around. I leave my things around. Look at this clip I found. I’ll watch it ’round and ’round and ’round.

–Amber Mary Bain

Perform my stupid rituals, everything is cyclical. 

–Amber Mary Bain

I think we’re inclined to think of things to be too important; there’s so much unimportance among people.

–Ray Johnson

I was surprised that people ate them, the hot dogs that fell out of the helicopter.

–Ray Johnson

I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art. I will not make any more boring art.

–John Baldessari

Dostoyevsky described hell as perhaps nothing more than a room with a chair in it. This room has several chairs.

–Bruce Robinson

Thursday, I don’t care about you.

–Robert Smith

Richard Madeley, I’d like to write a film about you one day, production is in the writing stage.

–Will Hung

Googling “derealization”, hating what you find.

–Bo Burnham

Can I introduce you, please, to a lump of cheddar cheese?

–Keith Allen

Can’t remember anything at all… Hannah Montana does the African Savannah as the simulated rainy season begins. She curses the queue at the zoo loos and moves on to Amazonia and cries with the dolphins… Miley Cyrus floats in a swimming pool in Toluca Lake… Can’t remember anything at all.

–Nick Cave

The Big Business Man smiled. “Time,” he said, “is what keeps everything from happening at once.”

–Ray Cummings

A graffito expresses the matter admirably, on the wall in the men’s room I frequent (that one which regularly displays the most reliable telephone numbers) thus:

Time exists so that everything
doesn’t happen at once.
Space exists so that it doesn’t
all happen to you.

–Arthur Power Dudden

There is an old riff I’ve always imagined to have been invented by some graduate student of philosophy (as I was once myself), late one night, who had been struggling through Kant’s abstruse account in his Critique of Pure Reason of the barely comprehensible categories of time and space, and decided that all of this could he put much more simply.

It goes as follows:

“Time exists in order that everything doesn’t happen all at once . . . and space exists so that it doesn’t all happen to you.”

–Susan Sontag

It always smells terrible on a Friday.

–Rizwan, office worker

So I was at home doing the washing up.

–Mark Waldron