February 2009
38 posts
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billydalto:
Mirando - Ratatat
This track was...
January 2009
41 posts
“Nihil affirmo, quaero omnia.”
– Cicero, saying “I assert nothing, I examine everything” and quoted by the ever-excellent Superfluidity. I think this ought to be one’s basic intellectual posture, and when one does assert something one should not be personally attached to it. We are not our ideas.
And furthermore, any act of...
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“A novel sensation told him that she was not carrying his seed away with her, as...”
– John Updike, describing the post-coital moments between a nearly-impotent middle-American businessman and a prostitute in “Transaction,” from Problems and Other Stories.
Many years ago, I stole this book from my father’s bookshelf. The variously sorrowful, comic, and acerbic...
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The Novelization of George Bush
We misunderstand literature if we consider the construction of plot, the elaboration of thematic interplay, variations on motifs, and persistent symbolism to be literary devices. To so call them is to suggest that they are elements of form, when in fact they are elements of the natural universe as constant as the laws of physics; indeed, the remarkable connectedness of the themes of our lives is...
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“There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the...”
– Stanley Fish, on Barack Obama’s inaugural speech (which he characterizes as paratactic); elaborating on that definition, he writes:
One kind of prose is additive – here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will...
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“A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the...”
– Simone Weil, quoted by my father in response to this post. It is in this way that our most positive attributes can lead us into error; in the way that the strong sometimes mistake strength for virtue, the beautiful sometimes mistake appearance for self.
This is a possible consolation for faults and...
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“There is a fashion today among many of my contemporaries to treat the events of...”
– Graham Greene, in the forward to his 1971 memoir A Sort of Life (from Tyler Coates, who posted a larger excerpt which is worth reading).
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“By her own request there will be no funeral, no service, no one is invited, and...”
– Walter Miller Jr., author of A Canticle for Leibowitz (each discussed previously), announcing the death of his wife of “fifty years, two months, and five days.” He attributed the quote at the end to the Chinese Zen Buddhist Huang-Po.
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“They live on the surface, they are interested in the
transient & fleeting -...”
– Henry David Thoreau, critiquing “most men.” It is a characteristic of the age of mass media that preoccupation with news is taken to mean precisely the opposite of what Thoreau asserts; that is, in circles of the intelligentsia and of the ordinary, attention to “news” is...
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“All that is transitory is but a symbol.”
– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. This is the inscription on the grave of the aforementioned Kurt Tucholsky. On a grave what might be taken as a lyrical bit of philosophical reflection is made forcefully physical: the transitory is a decomposed body, like yours. You are transitory. Of what are you...
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“Either you read a woman or you embrace a book.”
– Kurt Tucholsky.
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“The teeth of the smile evidenced the clinical depressive’s classic...”
– David Foster Wallace, describing the teeth of a patient in a mental ward in Infinite Jest. I took this sentence as a probable sign that Wallace had been depressed, because the indifference to matters of personal hygiene that characteristically attaches to mental illness is not the sort of thing...
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“I am very astonished that the scientific picture of the real world around me is...”
– Erwin Schrödinger.
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Morality
Although I am an atheist, I am very fond of religions and respect belief in them completely (for reasons I’ve discussed previously). Much, though not all, religious tradition is codified morality of a very fine sort, the sort imbued with an otherworldly detachment from ends. While the practitioners of religious morality -being human- have often been deviously barbaric, the ideas themselves...
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“All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy, and at the very bottom of their motives...”
– George Orwell, in “Why I Write.” (From Mise en Abyme).
“Memory can be regarded as the cement of the ego.”
– Wei Wu Wei, quoted by Astroinquiry.
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“As a young child, during moments of acute heartache or shame, I would wonder how...”
– Jace Cooke, whose tumblelog is excellent. Although I might propose possible remedies for the loss of his “tingling, retching unease,” most of them involving media of various forms (and with various limitations), all are superfluous: without invoking eternal return, I think it likely that...
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Remembering Snow
1. I walked in a sea of snow: waves frozen in heaves and troughs, a still white ocean of ceased surging over the land, like a flood soon to abate with the morning’s sun.
2. As I came down the hill, bits of dirt speckled the snow; it became cookie-dough ice cream, and despite the cold I wanted to stop and scoop it into my hands.
Forgive my Southern obsession with snow, but in Oregon I was...