January 2010
31 posts
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“Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant...”
– Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, quoted by Thoughts and Theme Songs. A teacher gave this to me in high school; at the time, it was the most unusual work of fiction I’d even seen, and though I wasn’t sure I understood it well it was nevertheless entrancing.
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Migraine
I have occasion somewhat regularly to sit in intense pain and attempt to think. The psychically-disruptive effects of a migraine are fascinating: I find my mental space collapsing in on itself, my present occupying shorter and shorter spans of time. Phrases –often from songs I don’t listen to- repeat in a kind of punching staccato in my head, the words rearranging themselves, portions disappearing...
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“Already there are movies that have caught up with and commercialized our latest...”
– Günter Grass, “Racing with the Utopias,” first published in Die Zeit, June 16, 1978, quoted by the excellent Gospel of Moll.
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“Could I, would I, have taken a man’s life, just because he was the enemy? Could...”
– DHK linked to an article on American snipers in which William Langewiesche again demonstrates why I consider him the finest narrative journalist writing today. In this short piece, he draws out what intrigues us about a sniper: he is one of the few remaining sorts of soldier who really sees those he...
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“I love and I hate. Perhaps you ask why I do that?
I don’t know but I feel it...”
– Catullus 85, posted by Superfluidity (and Riaz). The perpetuity of loving and hating exhausts me; I sometimes come to awareness of there never being respite from these senselessly intense feelings with the same exhaustion I feel when I think of having to eat, over and over again, every day, for the...
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“there is a specific sadness that surrounds me upon returning home. it is not...”
– Abby misses Five.
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I Value Little those Much Vaunted Rights
I value little those much vaunted rights that have for some the lure of dizzy heights; I do not fret because the gods refuse to let me wrangle over revenues, or thwart the wars of ings; and ‘tis to me of no concern whether the press be free to dupe poor oafs or whether censors cramp the current fancies of some scribbling scamp. These are words, words, words. My spirit fights for deeper...
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“But the books you like must also be read with shudders and gasps…...”
– Vladimir Nabokov, in his rather critical lecture on Dostoevksy, arguing that while there is pleasure to be taken in dismantling mediocre literature it is just as necessary to interrogate and re-imagine one’s favorite works.
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The Magnificent Seventh’s Brass Band - When...
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WatchGPOYW: Torturing my Best Buddy Edition.
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“Baboons are very sensitive to who stands where in their society’s hierarchy. If...”
– In Monkey Babble, Seeking Key to Human Language Development - NYT. This article astonished me. I plan on using this exact baboon technique to sow hierarchical confusion at my office. Also:
“The Campbell’s monkeys give a “krak” alarm call when they see a leopard. But adding an “-oo” changes it...
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“There are those who maintain that you can’t demand anything of the reader. They...”
– Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners. Catholic Novelists and Their Readers, quoted by Ms. Odradek. As is often the case, O’Connor settles this discussion for me.
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The Laboratory of the Real
Contentious debates spring as often from predictive ideas as from unshared assumptions, and while the latter might remain perpetually unresolved, the former cannot: eventually, what is predictive will be substantiated or falsified.
To illustrate, imagine the status of a presently controversial political dispute in the next century. One can use any number of examples, from the sustainability and...
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Mhz - Rocket Science
“Fuck R&B and...
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“Closure is bullshit, and I would love to find the man who invented closure and...”
– James Ellroy, in his characteristic style iterating Faulkner’s assertion that “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The psychological idea of closure has become such a banal component of every tragic story that it’s now impossible to read a politician’s...
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