The Heavily Abridged Life & Times

"There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as..."

Mon, 27 May 2013 15:10:59 +0100

“There is nothing more difficult to outgrow than anxieties that have become useful to us, whether as explanations for a life that never quite finds its true force or direction, or as fuel for ambition, or as a kind of reflexive secular religion that, paradoxically, unites us with others in a shared sense of complete isolation: you feel at home in the world only by never feeling at home in the world.”

- Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss

hammpix: For those of you who don’t understand archaeology, I...

Tue, 21 May 2013 09:57:11 +0100

hammpix:

For those of you who don’t understand archaeology, I have made a diagram.

kottke.org: The three types of specialist

Fri, 17 May 2013 12:22:58 +0100

kottke.org: The three types of specialist:

jkottke:

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

Fri, 17 May 2013 10:04:42 +0100

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…

"An elderly man was sitting alone on a dark path, right? He wasn’t certain of which direction to go,..."

Wed, 15 May 2013 12:26:10 +0100

“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

silasmeek: The superest of men.

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 12:33:32 +0000

silasmeek:

The superest of men.

"It’s always a mess when they want to trumpet their love, say the words that make it all clear..."

Mon, 04 Mar 2013 12:33:00 +0000

“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

"I have really early memories of feeling inadequate: arrogant, and inadequate at the same time; I..."

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 11:52:30 +0000

“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

"Of course the problem is setting the goals in the first place; many enough ‘successful’ men end up..."

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 15:03:15 +0000

“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..."

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 12:04:01 +0000

“

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.

”

- Billy Collins, “Introduction to Poetry”

"He thought the world’s heart beat at some terrible cost and that the world’s pain and..."

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 11:18:06 +0000

“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

"Flying coach, he settles into his seat and puts on his headset, and he’s fine, on the verge of..."

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 19:50:47 +0000

“Flying coach, he settles into his seat and puts on his headset, and he’s fine, on the verge of enjoying himself, thinking he’s escaped, gotten out. He drinks his complementary water and eats his complementary pretzel sticks. He’s fine until the plane lands, until he gets in his rental car, until he pulls up at the brother’s house, and then it’s as though he’s been getting smaller and smaller ever since he woke up that morning, shrinking as he brushed his teeth, as he zipped his suitcase, as he left the hotel, as he went through the X-ray machine at the airport, shriveling on the plane as he put his bag in the overhead, as he buckled the belt, even smaller still in the rental car, pulling the seat forward, amazed he could reach the pedals or see over the wheel. Smaller and smaller, so that by the time he arrives at the brother’s house, he is less than four feet, a child again.”

- A.M. Homes, This Book Will Save Your Life

"Soon, you are saying, we will come to a pass or a fork in the road. There will be ACTION. There will..."

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 19:47:23 +0000

“

Soon, you are saying, we will come to a pass or a fork in the road. There will be ACTION. There will be more than the personification of a very dear, aging penis, more than Mia’s extravagant tangents onto this or that, more than presences and Nobodies and Imaginary Friends, or dead people or Pauses or men offstage, for heaven’s sake, and one of these old ladies or girl poetesses or the mild young neighbor woman or the teetering-on-the-brink-of-four version of Harpo Marx or even wee Simon will DO something. And I promise you they will. There is a brewing, oh yes, there is some witches’ stew brewing. I know because I lived it. But before I get to that, I want to tell you, Gentle Person out there, that if you are here with me now, on the page, I mean, if you have come to this paragraph, if you have not given up and sent me, Mia, flying across the room or even if you have, but you got to wondering whether something might not happen soon and picked me up again and are reading still, then I want to reach out for you and take your face in both my hands and cover you with kisses, kisses on your cheeks and chin and all over your forehead and one on the bridge of your (variously shaped) nose, because I am yours, all yours.

I just wanted you to know.

”

- Siri Hustvedt, The Summer Without Men

"I am not a stakeholder. I hold no stake. I pay my taxes. My taxes buy weapons and arm soldiers. My..."

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 19:41:40 +0000

“I am not a stakeholder. I hold no stake. I pay my taxes. My taxes buy weapons and arm soldiers. My taxes send the soldiers to Afghanistan and formerly Iraq to be terrified and inflict terror and trauma upon others, including the killing and maiming of others, and I do not support Our Boys, it is a volunteer army and I believe that every one of these volunteers is misguided and that their innate, childish, boyish attraction to aggression and adventure and camaraderie is being perverted by malign and morally vacant politicians who are not even clever enough to be operating to anyone’s advantage, not even their own, who are merely drunk on narrative and who see themselves as part of something bigger, such as the delusion of History, and who are impressive only in the scope and depth and profundity of their stupidity.”

- Keith Ridgeway, Hawthorn & Child

"His mind was dividing. Parts of it were roped off. There were things he could say. There were things..."

Tue, 29 Jan 2013 19:38:05 +0000

“His mind was dividing. Parts of it were roped off. There were things he could say. There were things he could not say but could write in the book. And now there were things he could neither say nor write but only think, and they pressed up against the others like they wanted a fight.”

- Keith Ridgeway, Hawthorn & Child

"Come 2013, I think it’s time for people in and around the “music industry” to stop..."

Fri, 04 Jan 2013 16:22:20 +0000

“

Come 2013, I think it’s time for people in and around the “music industry” to stop blaming themselves, and thinking their situation is somehow special. Whatever happens to musicians will eventually happen to everybody.

Nobody was or is really much better at “digital transition” than musicians were and are. If you’re superb at digitalization, that’s no great solution either. You just have to auto-disrupt and re-invent
yourself over and over and over again.

It’s pretty awful to be a musician and have no possibility of health insurance (as Jaron Lanier keeps pointing out), but you could have been a Nokia engineer. You’d have been blindsided even harder and faster, and you wouldn’t even have had the girls and the weed.

”

- Bruce Sterling, The WELL: State of the World 2013

"Specificity, precision, and brevity, applied in language, drive us towards compassion. Conversely,..."

Tue, 09 Oct 2012 11:49:24 +0100

“

Specificity, precision, and brevity, applied in language, drive us towards compassion.

Conversely, all attempts at world domination begin with weak, evasive, impersonal language: “It has been observed that when the doors are shut, the load always presses hard against them as soon as darkness sets in,” a petty bureaucrat writes to his superior. “This is because the load naturally rushes toward the light when darkness sets in, which makes closing the door difficult. Also, because of the alarming nature of darkness, screaming always occurs when the doors are closed. It would therefore be useful to light the lamp before and during the first moments of the operation.” The bureaucrat was the ironically named “Mr Just”, his organisation the SS, the year 1942.

Certain kinds of language walk hand-in-hand with falseness: vague language, humourless language, sloppy language, language that strings together code words, language that eliminates the doer and the done to, that shuns people and things in favour of the abstract (“On structures not unlike rock masses, it was observed that certain animals perhaps prone to flight slept somewhat less aggressively than previously”).

So that is one reason I write: as a kind of spiritual practice, to force truth to emerge from my habitual state of lazy dishonesty.

”

- George Saunders, “The battle for precision”

gingerlandcomics: Farmer’s Dilemma, 2012

Thu, 04 Oct 2012 10:02:37 +0100

gingerlandcomics:

Farmer’s Dilemma, 2012

"Number one, everybody should realize that all this “art” and “bop” and “rock-’n’-roll” and whatever..."

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 12:43:12 +0100

“Number one, everybody should realize that all this “art” and “bop” and “rock-’n’-roll” and whatever is all just a joke and a mistake, just a hunka foolishness so stop treating it with any seriousness or respect at all and just recognize the fact that it’s nothing but a Wham-O toy to bash around as you please in the nursery, it’s nothing but a goddam Bonusburger so just gobble the stupid thing and burp and go for the next one tomorrow; and don’t worry about the fact that it’s a joke and a mistake and a bunch of foolishness as if that’s gonna cause people to disregard it and do it in or let it dry up and die, because it’s the strongest, most resilient, most invincible Superjoke in history, nothing could possibly destroy it ever, and the reason for that is precisely that it is a joke, mistake, foolishness. The first mistake of Art is to assume that it’s serious. I could even be an asshole here and say that “Nothing is true; everything is permitted,” which is true as a matter of fact, but people might get the wrong idea. What’s truest is that you cannot enslave a fool.”

- Lester Bangs, “James Taylor Marked for Death” (quoted in Maria Bustillos - “How Lester Bangs Taught Me to Read”)

"There are, I feel very strongly, these definitions given by [Ernesto] Sabato — I have known..."

Wed, 05 Sep 2012 17:03:45 +0100

“There are, I feel very strongly, these definitions given by [Ernesto] Sabato — I have known him very well — of daytime writing and nighttime writing. In daytime writing, a writer even when he invents he represents a world that corresponds to his vision of the world, of life, of values. In something that belongs to the daytime writing, like my writing against the dictatorship of the Argentinian generals and the character’s engagement and his faith, and there is a line. Suddenly, sometimes in the night… it is very important to me to answer this… My deepest truths are not to be found in this other book. In the dark books is the truth, horrible truths sometimes. I have betrayed myself. Contradicted myself. It is very interesting, because sometimes emerges in us something we did not know we had, which says not what we are, but what we also are. What perhaps only by chance not are. Perhaps I could be now in a prison for having killed somebody instead of speaking with you. Some horrible thoughts which deny our radius.”

- Claudio Magris, interviewed on Bookslut