A great work of art is something as real as reality itself, and sometimes even more real than the real. Long after this war is forgotten, when its existence is a paragraph in a schoolbook students won’t even bother to read, and everyone who survived it is dead, their bodies dust, their memories atom, their emotions no longer in motion, this work of art will still shine so brightly it will not just be about the war but it will be the war. [/b]
Maybe?
By now the only part of me not sweating were my eyeballs. An X-ray of my skull would have shown a hamster running furiously in an exercise wheel…
I think I know what he means. But, sure, maybe not.
The word that identified what we did not possess was “money,”. The other word was “votes,” so that together “money votes” was “open sesame” to the deep caverns of the American political system.
Obviously, there are more compelling ways to point this out.
Like a shark who must keep swimming to live, a politician had to keep his lips constantly moving.
And that’s a lot of lies.
Nothing, the General muttered, is ever so expensive as what is offered for free.
Of course that won’t always be true.
So the list went, a fair percentage collecting both welfare and dust, moldering in the stale air of subsidized apartments as their testes shriveled day by day, consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile.
“We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we can describe.” Rene Descartes[/b]
Come on, like there are not really, really important distinctions to make.
“The World is not ruined by the wickedness of the wicked, but by the weakness of the good” Napoleon Bonaparte
By definition, right?
“I am not a positivist. Positivism states that what cannot be observed does not exist. This conception is scientifically indefensible, for it is impossible to make valid affirmations of what people ‘can’ or ‘cannot’ observe.” Albert Einstein
And then on to the very, very big and the very, very small.
“Mark this well, you proud men of action! You are, after all, nothing but unconscious instruments of the men of thought.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Clearly, for better or worse.
“Genuine tragedies in the world are not conflicts between right and wrong. They are conflicts between two rights.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Dialectically as it were.
“Our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite.” Karl Popper
My impression is that life—a big word, I know—inflicts themes on a writer through certain experiences that impress themselves on his consciousness or subconscious and later compel him to shake himself free by turning them into stories.[/b]
An existential contraption as it were.
Instead of speaking of justice and injustice, freedom and oppression, classless society and class society, they talked in terms of God and the Devil.
In other words, either one or the other. And it doesn’t get any simpler than that.
…as everybody in the Andes knows, when the devil comes to work his evil on earth he sometimes takes the shape of a limping gringo stranger.
Up here of course it’s the other way around.
Because happiness was temporal, individual, in exceptional circumstances twofold, on extremely rare occasions tripartite, and never collective, civic.
Not counting nationalism of course. Or even rooting for the home team.
A Criminal is the case of surplus of human energy directed in the wrong direction.
Not from his point of view.
In the civilization of our times, it is normal, and almost obligatory, for cookery and fashion to take up most of the culture sections, for chefs and fashion designers now enjoy the prominence that before was given to scientists, composers and philosophers. Gas burners, stoves and catwalks meld, in the cultural coordinates of our time, with books, laboratories and operas, while TV stars and great footballers exert the sort of influence over habits, taste and fashion that was previously the domain of teachers and thinkers.
Yeah, ain’t we the lucky ones.
[and here of course the fucking Kids]
We are not meant to know everything, Mae. Did you ever think that perhaps our minds are delicately calibrated between the known and the unknown?[/b]
God knows?
Suffering is only suffering if it’s done in silence, in solitude. Pain experienced in public, in view of loving millions, was no longer pain. It was communion.
How close is this to utter nonsense?
In her kitchen, she saw many things she would like to eat. On the counter, there was a bunch of new bananas, yellow as a Van Gogh chair, and two apples, pristine. The cabinet was open and she saw a box of crackers, a new box of cereal, a tube of curved chips. She felt overwhelmed, seeing all of the food there, that it was all hers. And there was more in the refrigerator! There were juices, half a melon, a dozen bagels, salmon, a steak, yogurt in a dozen colors. It would take her a week to eat all of this food. She does not deserve this, she thought. It really isn’t fair, she thought. You’re correct, God said, and then struck dead 65,000 Malaysians.
Anyone here know if this is actually true?
The raising of a child is the building of a cathedral. You can’t cut corners.
You know, if that is even an option.
Your life has been lived a hundred times. A thousand times. It’s not all that great, really. Don’t take it so seriously.
Let’s all try this.
If things continue this way, there will be two societies - or at least I hope there will be two - the one you’re helping create, and an alternative to it. You and your ilk will live, willingly, joyfully, under constant surveillance, watching each other always, commenting on each other, voting and liking and disliking each other, smiling and frowning, and otherwise doing nothing much else.
Do I dare disturb the universe?
Yes, I do, I do. I think.
Jerry suddenly understood the poster–the solitary man on the beach standing upright and alone and unafraid, poised at the moment of making himself heard and known in the world, the universe.[/b]
My guess? Jerry will grow out of this.
A new sickness invaded Jerry, the sickness of knowing what he had become, another animal, another beast, another violent person in a violent world, inflicting damage, not disturbing the universe but damaging it.
My guess? Jerry will grow out of this.
And he did see–that life was rotten, that there were no heroes, really, and that you couldn’t trust anybody, not even yourself.
My guess? Jerry will not grow out of this.
They tell you to do your own thing but they don’t mean it. They don’t want you to do your thing, not unless it happens to be their thing, too.
And not just Mommy and Daddy.
There was nothing more beautiful in the world than the sight of a teacher getting upset.
Especially when you’re the reason.
She discovered how distant pity was from hate, how very far it was from love.
Thanksgiving is important for relearning that most of your older American relatives are racists, and that their younger relatives are sanctimonious idiots who would have been Nazis.
And not just in the Heartland.
As a boy, I climbed the great oak tree, to speak with God. At the top of that tree were other boys, and also many girls, who would fail in their quests. One by one, they climbed down dejected, while I remained, until the sky darkened, the stars ascended, and I received an answer.
Okay, what was it?
He who does self-checkout has a fool for a grocer.
The ‘how’ has a great effect on what we see. To say that ‘what we see’ is more important than ‘how we see it’ is to think that ‘how’ has been settled and fixed. When you realize this is not the case, you realize that ‘how’ often affects ‘what’ we see. [/b]
Does anyone really know what stuff like this means?
The way we see things is constantly changing. At the moment the way we see things has been left a lot to the camera. That shouldn’t necessarily be.
I’ve never let it.
How difficult it is to learn not to see like cameras, which has had such an effect on us. The camera sees everything at once. We don’t.
I actually think I understand this.
You must plan to be spontaneous.
We’ll need some examples of course.
Teaching people to draw is teaching people to look.
For example, by opening your eyes.
When conventions are old, there’s quite a good reason. It’s not arbitrary.
You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.[/b]
I’ve never tried to.
How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.
Including the parts that actually aren’t.
Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.
Someone explain this to, among others, Satyr.
Consistency is the playground of dull minds.
And no one is more consistent here than me, right?
History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.
Let’s decide if that is still true.
The romantic contrast between modern industry that “destroys nature” and our ancestors who “lived in harmony with nature” is groundless. Long before the Industrial Revolution, Homo sapiens held the record among all organisms for driving the most plant and animal species to their extinctions. We have the dubious distinction of being the deadliest species in the annals of life.
Well, God did give us dominion over all the animals.
I was afraid of the consequences of my acts in the right way, beyond guilt, but it was too late. I’d already become the person I should have been afraid of becoming.[/b]
Don’t you just hate that?
It’s like a crime is an act that when you’ve committed one the act is over and you haven’t changed inside. But when you commit a sin it’s like you create a condition that you have to live in.
You know, if you believe in that sort of thing.
Of all the animals on this planet, we are surely the nastiest, the most deceitful, the most murderous and vile. Despite our God, or because of him. Both.
I agree: Both.
…he believes in God the way he believes in politicians—he knows He exists but doesn’t count on Him for anything.
Politicians exist alright. For example, down on the border with Mexico.
It was like a dream, a beautiful, soothing dream of late autumn: low, gray skies, smell of woodsmoke, fallen leaves crackling beneath my feet, and somewhere out there, in the farmsteads and plantations ahead of me, swift retribution! Freedom! The bloody work of the Lord!
Either Him or [nowadays] the terrorists.
Father argued that society as a whole must come to be organized on a different basis than greed, for while material interests gained somewhat by the institutionalized deification of pure selfishness, ordinary men and women lost everything by it.
If you stepped out of the shower and saw a leprechaun standing at the base of your toilet, would you scream, or would you innately understand that he meant you no harm?[/b]
Unless of course he does mean you harm.
Well, that’s a hell of a reason to poison yourself.
Though some no doubt will poison themselves for less.
The Greeks had invented democracy, built the Acropolis and called it a day.
Thank God then for the Renaissance .
Cover your glass in France or Germany – even worse, in England – and in the voice of someone who has personally affronted, your host will ask why you’re not drinking.
‘Oh, I just don’t feel like it this morning.’
‘Why not?’
‘I guess I’m not in the mood?’
‘Well, this’ll put you in the mood. Here. Drink up.’
‘No, really, I’m OK.’
‘Just taste it.’
‘Actually, I’m sort of…well, I sort of have a problem with it.’
‘Then how about half a glass?’
I forget how it works in America.
Across town, over in the East Village, the graffiti was calling for the rich to be eaten, imprisoned, or taxed out of existence. Though it sometimes seemed like a nice idea, I hoped the revolution would not take place during my lifetime. I didn’t want the rich to go away until I could at least briefly join their ranks.
The new pragmatism.
Watch, hell, Walt said. This is strip poker. What kind of homo wants to sit around and watch four guys get naked?
Gay or straight, when it comes to strip poker, that’s a pretty good point.
In what disorder we lived, how many fragments of ourselves were scattered, as if to live were to explode into splinters.[/b]
Tell me about it.
Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.
Not that we don’t all have one of our own.
Everything in the world was in precarious balance, pure risk, and those who didn’t agree to take the risk wasted away in a corner, without getting to know life.
You know, if they’re lucky.
They were more severely infected than the men, because while men were always getting furious, they calmed down in the end; women, who appeared to be silent, acquiescent, when they were angry flew into a rage that had no end.
On average as it were.
Things without meaning are the most beautiful ones.
Let’s give them one anyway.
You see? In the fairy tales one does as one wants, and in reality one does what one can.
And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim’s Aunt, Miss Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, Would you like anything to read?[/b]
I guess we’ll never know if they did.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
I do not need any friends. I prefer enemies. They are better company and their feelings towards you are always genuine.
Fortunately, I have any number of enemies here.
And books which told me everything about the wasp, except why.
For that matter, wasps and everything else.
I’ve had eighteen straight whiskies, I think that’s the record . . .
We’ll have to run this by Ben Sanderson.
This poem has been called obscure. I refuse to believe that it is obscurer than pity, violence, or suffering. But being a poem, not a lifetime, it is more compressed.
…we confidently say that it’s not worth trying to reach any conclusions merely because we decide to stop halfway along the path that would lead us straight to them.[/b]
Not counting the times when there may well not be any conclusions that one can reach.
We have deemed all these words necessary in order to explain that we have been traveling more slowly than was predicted, concision is not a definitive virtue, on occasion one loses out by talking too much, it is true, but how much has also been gained by saying more than was strictly necessary.
Cue, among other things “the golden mean”.
God does not forgive the sins He makes us commit.
Can it even be put better than that?
Put less respectfully, these men and women, standing before the mirror of their life, spit every day in the face of what they were with the sputum of what they are.
Can it even be put better than that?
You know, if the shoe fits.
Nothing so tires a person as having to struggle, not with himself, but with an abstraction.
Or as I like to call them, “general descriptions”.
Are dreams perhaps the soul’s memories of the body?
The soul again. Though, sure, why not, point taken.
A used copy of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: $5
A latte: $5
The ability to feign knowledge of Wittgenstein’s picture theory of meaning: priceless[/b]
And getting more priceless all the time.
The philosophers have only interpreted the world. The point, however, is to
Marx: change it
Schopenhauer: demonstrate that it has no redeeming value whatsoever
Nietzsche: break it up and sell it for parts
Definitely not Marx of course.
Greek philosophy: Free your mind
German philosophy: Free your will
British philosophy: Free your senses
American philosophy: Free your debt ceiling
While in the drive-thru line at McDonalds.
Don’t stare too long into the void of
18th century: the absolute
19th century: the arbitrary
20th century: the undecidable
Today: your inbox
Or your Facebook account.
Lit Crit 101: Death of the author
Lit Crit 201: Death of the reader
Lit Crit 301: Death of death
Lit Crit 401: What’s on Netflix?
Let’s pin down Lit Crit 501.
What is the good?
Plato: the true
Kant: willing without contradiction
Hegel: the inexorable march of negation
Nietzsche: I’m going to have to go with glam rock
