surrender

We are too civil to books. For a few golden sentences we will turn over and actually read a volume of four or five hundred pages.

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

...The ultimate truth is penultimately always a falsehood. He who will be proved right in the end appears to be wrong and harmful before it.

But who will be proved right? It will only be known later. Meanwhile he is bound to act on credit and to sell his soul to the devil, in the hope of history's absolution.

♥ The Darwin Awards, named in honor of Charles Darwin, salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it - thereby ensuring that the next generation is descended from one less idiot. We applaud the heroic self-sacrifice of these noble men and women, who gave their all to improve the human race.

Of necessity, this Award is usually bestowed posthumously.

♥ In order to qualify for a Darwin Award a person must remove himself from the gene pool via an "astounding misapplication of judgement." Three liters of sherry up the butt can only be described as astounding.

♥ This is a true Darwin Award trifecta: two people die, while in the act of procreation, due to an astonishingly poor decision. Bottom line: If you put yourself in a precarious "position" at the edge of a pointy roof, you may well find yourself coming and going at the same time.

♥ The Darwin Awards provide ample evidence that huimans have no problem shuffling off this mortal coil as a result of plain old bad decisions. But adding mind-addling drugs to the decision-making process further impairs judgment and increases risk-taking behavior, setting the stage for some amusingly lethal acts of stupidity. From jumping into a bear cage while drunk (page 223) to partaking in alcohol enemas (page 4) acute inebriation has been the impetus behind many Darwin Awards.

♥ In a world full of wonders man invented boredom. So work time becomes playtime. If you work in an office, you reproduce your naughty bits on the copy machine. If you work for an arc welding company? A plastic bucket, welding materials, and a single spark can combine for a playdate with a bang.

♥ Any story that begins, "Well I was building a pipe bomb," can never end well.

♥ FAQ: How can I avoid a Darwin Award?

Take a few personal pledges:

"I will keep pointy metal objects away from electrical wires."
"I will not suck bees into a vacuum cleaner."
"I will not disable the safety."
"No rooftop romantic interludes for me!"

Beware of the following ideas:

"Instead of following standard procedure..."
"Attempting to impress the lady..."
"So he could save himself time..."
"They tested the ice by jumping up and down."
"A case of beer went into the planning."
"He is still convinced that the toadstool is harmless."
"He refused to let anyone call an ambulance."
"He thought he could outsmart the police."
"The diver had kissed hundreds of sharks."
"He deceived the radiation control supervisor."
"It's a nice snake. Nothing can happen."

Heed good advice:

"Never surf on a flooded street."
"We urge people not to drive with a burning grill in the vehicle."
"The stupidity of cutting through power cables should be obvious."
"Tossing random chemicals down the drain is not wise."
"Only an idiot would jump into the bear cage."

~~The Darwin Awards: Next Evolution, Chlorinating the Gene Pool by Wendy Northcutt.

In reference to a conversation I was just having:

"No one can read two thousand books. In the four hundred years I have lived, I've not read more than a half dozen. And in any case, it is not the reading that matters, but the rereading. Printing, which is now forbidden, was one of the worst evils of mankind, for it tended to multiply unnecessary texts to a dizzying degree."

And in reference to pretty much my view of power:

"Elections were called, wars were declared, taxes were levied, fortunes were confiscated, arrests were ordered, and attempts were made at imposing censorship--but no one on the planet paid any attention."

--Jorge Luis Borges, "A Weary Man's Utopia"

“Poets are not so scrupulous as you are. They know how useful passion is for publication. Nowadays a broken heart will run to many editions.”
“I hate them for it,” cried Hallward. “An artist should create beautiful things, but should put nothing of his own life into them. We live in an age when men treat art as if it were meant to be a form of autobiography. We have lost the abstract sense of beauty. Some day I will show the world what it is; and for that reason the world shall never see my portrait of Dorian Gray.”

- Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

"A stranger enters a god-forsaken town locked in conflict between two factions, where both sides are equally bad and repugnant, and the audience welcomes the swathe of destruction that the hero creates as he exacts justice. There is something inherently appealing about this scenario. It speaks to a desire latent within all of us: that some agency will come and clean up the mess we have made of our society."

--Justin Howe, "Yojimbo", Directory of World Cinema: Japan

Free digital copy of this book available at http://worldcinemadirectory.org/ . It's decent, I'm disappointed to already know quite a bit about these movies from my own viewing of them and reading into Donald Richie and Tom Mes, but for anyone interested in Japanese cinema in general and not already familiar with it, it's a good place to start.

“Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance … till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake.”

Your thoughts
day-dreaming in a pudden'-soft head
like an overfed lackey on a greasy sofa,
I'll tease with my heart's blood-streaming shred,
deride you, audacious, till you smart all over.

In my soul there isn't a single grey hair,
no senile tenderness does it hold!
My voice thundering everywhere,
I go, - handsome,
twenty-two-years old.

Tender lovers
with violins vie.
The ruder compete with cymbals.
But can anyone turn inside out like I
to be nothing but lips, bodiless and limbless?

Come and I'll teach you,
Miss Now-Now-No-Fooling,
angelic, stiff as the wall of a precipice.
Come you, too, who skim over lips as coolly
as a cook skims through books of cooking recipes.

If you want -
I can be all crazy flesh,
the antipode of polite romance.
Or
sweet and delicate as you wish;
not a man but a cloud in pants.

I'll never believe there's a flowery Nice.
Today once again I sing glory
to men who've sinned till they're sick of vice,
to women worn as a trite old story.

V.V. Mayakovsky

i just started this today and i already love it!

some choice quotes

PRIOR: I... I'm sorry. I usually say, "Fuck the truth," but mostly, the truth fucks you.

( and another )

"A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton called the “good bad book”: that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have perished. Obviously outstanding books in this line are Raffles and the Sherlock Holmes stories, which have kept their place when innumerable “problem novels”, “human documents” and “terrible indictments” of this or that have fallen into deserved oblivion."

- "Good Bad Books" by George Orwell

I have lost my I.D. three times this term. I tell the person I see in psychological counseling that I feel the apocalypse is near. She asks me how my flute tutorial is progressing. I do not tell her I dropped it and started taking an advanced video course instead.

Someone asks me: "What's going on?"

"I don't know," I say. "What is going on?"

Sensory Deprivation Tank.

Rest in Peace.

People are afraid to merge on campus after midnight.

"Ah, but poems amount to so little when you write them too early in your life. You ought to wait and gather sense and sweetness for a whole lifetime, and a long one, if possible, and then, at the very end, you might perhaps be able to write ten good lines. For poems are not, as people think, simply emotions (one has emotions early enough) -- they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and Things, you must understand animals, must feel how birds fly, and know the gesture which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you had long seen coming; to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to parents whom you had to hurt when they brought in a joy and you didn't pick it up (it was a joy meant for somebody else--); to childhood illnesses that began so strangely with so many profound and difficult transformations, to days in quiet, restrained rooms and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along high overhead and went flying with all the stars,--and it is still not enough to be able to think of all that. ( Read more... )