May
21
For those of you who don’t understand archaeology, I have made a diagram.
The Heavily Abridged Life & Times
May
17
kottke.org: The three types of specialist
From a passage of Kurt Vonnegut’s Bluebeard, the three types of specialists needed for the success of any revolution.
Slazinger claims to have learned from history that most people cannot open their minds to new ideas unless a mind-opening teams with a peculiar membership goes to work on them….
rumble tumble: Werner Herzog slaps a turkey
The camp is silent with resignation; only the turkey is making a racket. It attacked me, overestimating its own strength, and I quickly grabbed its neck, which squirmed and tried to swallow, slapped him left-right with the casual elegance of the arrogant cavaliers I had seen in French Musketeer…
May
15
“An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path, right? He wasn’t certain of which direction to go, and he’d forgotten both where he was travelling to and who he was. He’d sat down for a moment to rest his weary legs, and suddenly looked up to see an elderly woman before him. She grinned toothlessly and with a cackle, spoke: “Now your third wish. What will it be?” “Third wish?” The man was baffled. “How can it be a third wish if I haven’t had a first and second wish?” “You’d had two wishes already,” the hag said, “but your second wish was for me to return everything to the way it was before you had made your first wish. That is why you remember nothing; because everything is the way it was before you made any wishes.” She cackled at the poor berk. “So it is that you have one wish left.” “All right,” said the man. “I don’t believe this; but there’s no harm in wishing. I wish to know who I am.” “Funny,” said the old woman as she granted his wish and disappeared forever. “That was your first wish.”
Morte, Planescape: Torment
“It’s always a mess when they want to trumpet their love, say the words that make it all clear and everlasting, announce that a hard bond has formed between them that will never break, snap, melt, never, then want Dalrymple to come up with some retort that proves it back. He had to guess. He never did quite feel it, but gave a try at thinking his way into love, love with her, the one sitting close, imagining himself deep inside her spirit, toward the very bottom, where it’s fearful and wet and her secret hopes splash about. But the light goes out on that picture before he can find any feelings of his own down in all that black wet, and he’s got to say something.”
Daniel Woodrell, The Outlaw Album
Feb
22
“I have really early memories of feeling inadequate: arrogant, and inadequate at the same time; I think that’s neurological maybe, I don’t think there’s any… I don’t know. But I’ve always felt not quite up to the task. The task of living, you know. So I always felt a lot of real fondness for life, and a kind of enthusiasm for people, somehow linked with the feeling that I wasn’t quite good enough to be at the party. So you add those things together, it equals a desire to achieve something. I felt like: if only I can DO something, I’ll be worthy of all of these people and all of this beauty. Not exactly, uh, a high-functioning mental attitude. But there it is. So I know better, but that’s how it felt to me, always.”
George Saunders, interviewed on The Awl
Feb
4
“Of course the problem is setting the goals in the first place; many enough ‘successful’ men end up drunks for having fulfilled goals the world set for them and then finding they’ve fulfilled nothing in themselves; many enough kids end up junkies for having decided the world’s goals aren’t worth trying for and being unable to set any of their own. A few fortunate combine the two (I don’t mean drink and drugs, but meaning your own and wordly goals), and your education and growing up now are vitally important because learning the world’s goals (even marks in school) gives you the material to form your own—and don’t misunderstand, I don’t mean that by your 16th birthday you should know whether you want to be a poet or an astronaut, but only have a hungry curiosity in all directions for anything that brings you and your mind to life.”
William Gaddis, in a letter to his son (quoted on Conversational Reading)
“
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
“He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of multitudes might ultimately be exacted for the vision of a single flower.”
Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
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