Asia begins at the Landstraße

said Metternich and I used, when I stayed in Vienna, to walk to that dusty street to feel it. I couldn’t feel anything. But it’s still a wonderful sentence, in some ways unsurpassed until the morning of March 9th, 2004, when PNH wrote “$3 mass-market sci-fi/fantasy paperbacks are obviously no good, since as we all know, literature begins at $22.95.”