January 2011
54 posts
Ancient Italians were renowned for eating every part of the angels they hunted, including the hair.
—Nasrin Shakib.
A vast uninhabitable region…of no use to man but a prodigious reservoir of animal life: shadows full of snares, of traps, of claws, of fierce beaks, of poisonous little teeth, of razor-sharp little darts loaded with deadly stings.
—Pierre Loti.
A brooding gloom lay over this vast and monotonous landscape; the light fell on it as if into an abyss. The land devoured the sunshine; only far off, along the coast, the empty ocean, smooth and polished within the faint haze, seemed to rise up to the sky in a wall of steel…
The coast…is straight and sombre, and faces a misty ocean…Swampy plains open out at the mouths of rivers,...
The absence of any goal soon removed us from reality, gave rise beneath our feet to increasingly numerous and disturbing apparitions.
—André Breton.
After a still winter night I awoke with the impression that some question had been put to me, which I had been endeavoring in vain to answer in my sleep, as what- how- when- where? But there was dawning Nature, in whom all creatures live, looking in at my broad windows with serene and satisfied face, and no question on her lips. I awoke to an answered question, to Nature and daylight. The snow...
Now you begin to understand and now you don’t understand— that is what seems ephemeral about our condition. But as understanding comes upon us and deepens from time to time, strengthening however fleetingly our appreciation of finality, one becomes aware of its relevance to our everyday situation all along. At the same time one becomes aware that he has been dormant or obtuse with...
I’d like to hear a dew-dogs’ song
Playing on the Leipzig air,
Cackling, arfing.
If there could be rotund booms too
From wannabes and sailors all
Jacking off to beat the band—
Then Joy would come to town.
—Phil de Maestre.
It was most lovely and pleasant in those sylvan solitudes in the early cool morning in the first freshness of autumn. From hilltops we saw fair green valleys lying spread out below, with streams winding through them, and island groves of trees here and there, and huge lonely oaks scattered about and casting black blots of shade; and beyond the valleys we saw the ranges of hills, blue with haze,...
Devotion is the real spiritual sweetness which takes away all bitterness from mortifications, and prevents consolations from disagreeing with the soul; it cures the poor of sadness, and the rich of presumption; it keeps the oppressed from feeling desolate, and the prosperous from insolence; it averts sadness from the lonely, and dissipation from social life; it is as warmth in winter and...
A book is an elegant technique for folding a lot of surface area into a compact, convenient volume; a library is likewise a compounding of such volumes, a temple of compression of many worlds. A city strikes me at times as a sort of library, folding many phenomena into one dense space— and San Francisco has the second densest concentration of people among American cities, trailing only New...
…we were a living epitome of defunct fashions…
—Nathaniel Hawthorne.
…naked brats, and joyous dogs…
—Mark Twain.
It seems as if heaven had sent its insane angels into our world as to an asylum and here they break out into their native music and utter at intervals the words they have heard in heaven; then the mad fit returns and they wallow and mope like dogs.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson.
In the midst of cinematic chaos [during the filming of Der Verlorene], Lorre needed a “well-kept corner.” His love of office materials, which bordered on obsession, amused his co-workers. If he saw a file folder, he had to have it. In his flat, he kept what Bartning described as a large board supported by two sawhorses on which he piled supplies precisely arranged at right angles. On...
Setting aside the scandal caused by His Messianic claims and His reputation as a political firebrand, only two accusations of personal depravity seem to have been brought against Jesus of Nazareth. First, that He was a Sabbath-breaker. Secondly, that He was “a gluttonous man and a winebibber, a friend of publicans and sinners”—or (to draw aside the veil of Elizabethan English that makes it all...
For the ‘double’ was originally an insurance against the destruction of the ego, an ‘energetic denial of the power of death,’ as Rank says; and probably the ‘immortal’ soul was the first ‘double’ of the body. This invention of doubling as a… preservation against extinction has its counterpart in the language of dreams, which is found of representing castration by a doubling or ...
During the question-and-answer period, though, a woman asked the neuroscientist how his studies had changed the way he lived. He paused for a second, and then starting talking about a group he had joined called the Russian-American Folk Dance Company. It was odd, given how hard and scientific he had sounded. “I guess I used to think of myself as a lone agent, who made certain choices and...
Actual Country Music Song Titles
Do You Love As Good As You Look?
Does Your Chewing Gum Lose Its Flavor On The Bedpost Overnight?
Drop Kick Me, Jesus, Through The Goalposts Of Life
Get Your Biscuits In The Oven And Your Buns In The Bed
Get Your Tongue Outta My Mouth ‘Cause I’m Kissing You Goodbye
Guess My Eyes Were Bigger Than My Heart!
Heaven’s Just A Sin Away.
Her...
So I was in the park just now. The roots of the chestnut tree were sunk in the ground just under my bench. I couldn’t remember it was a root any more. The words had vanished and with them the significance of things, their methods of use, and the feeble points of reference which men have traced on their surface. I was sitting, stooping forward, head bowed, alone in front of this black, knotty...
Without the composed images of memory, Plutarch observes, the foolish person is like Oknos in Hades who weaves the rope of his life so absentmindedly that he fails to see that he is paying it out into the mouth of a donkey.
—Steven E. Webb.
Fishing stands for the life of faith, and the leaping fish stands for those exclamatory experiences— perceptual, mnemonic or both— that may supervene upon that life. Apart from our active commitment to what the river may bestow, we would never cast our lines and the fish would never leap. We can’t control their presence, and if we seek for control we shall reduce our lives to...
It was in the Fall of ‘41, October and November, while late Autumn prevailed throughout the northern Canadian Rockies, restoring everything in that vast region to a native wilderness. Some part of each day or night, for forty days, flurries of snow were flying. The aspens and larches took on a yellow so vivid, so pure, so trembling in the air, as to fairly cry out that they were as they...
Expert textpert choking smokers, Don’t you think the joker laughs at you?
…Elementary penguin singing Hari Krishna…
—John Lennon.
Habit is thus the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor. It alone prevents the hardest and most repulsive walks of life from being deserted by those brought up to tread therein. It keeps the fisherman and the deck-hand at sea through...
[T]he rich of today are also different from the rich of yesterday. Our light-speed, globally connected economy has led to the rise of a new super-elite that consists, to a notable degree, of first- and second-generation wealth. Its members are hardworking, highly educated, jet-setting meritocrats who feel they are the deserving winners of a tough, worldwide economic competition—and many of...
Fundamentalism is inhaling the fumes of collapsed traditional faiths that have yet to find the intellectual and spiritual courage to recover themselves. That’s why, in my view, the deepest struggle of our time is religious, not political.
—Andrew Sullivan.
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a...
He paused at this point in his packing. He looked with some wonder upon the first light. You lost your money. You fucked up your back. In the end, it was hard to maintain even one’s front. In the end, they knew. In the end, they had you. He glanced at his watch. He stuffed the last of his gear into his bags and went with it into the alley where he had parked the old Dodge. As he did so, he...
Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task.
—William James.
I wish people would love everybody else the way they love me. It would be a better world.
—Muhammad Ali.