Jul 29
“Unfortunately for infertile Serbs, Dabic’s arrest ended the testicle experiments.”
— NYT
reversely paranoid
description
Jul 27
“It was like one of those dreams where you’re filled with some extravagant feeling you might never have in life, it doesn’t matter what it is, even guilt or dread, and you learn from it what an amazing instrument you are, so to speak, what a power you have to experience beyond anything you might ever actually need.”
— Reverend John Ames (in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead) (via wesleyhill)
Jul 20
“That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.”
— David Foster Wallace in Infinite Jest
Jul 20
“You know when you’re a kid and you get crayons and papers and just draw whatever you want and it’s just a bunch of messy lines, but to you it makes sense, and then they put it on the fridge? From that point on, you’re always trying to get back on the fridge, you start drawing things that look like something, like, the more it looks like a horse, the more chance you have of getting it on the fridge. We wanted to get back to that place before we were trying to make the fridge. We wanted to work with people who hadn’t been affected in that way yet.”
Jul 13
“what we’re reading or listening to, or rather, what we are getting into lately is in some sense the most profound question we can ask each other”
— David Dark, qtd. in this enjoyable post (via wesleyhill)
Jul 11
I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle… And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
-East of Eden, Steinbeck
Jul 02
“…If you are like me, you know that some of us are not the world, some of us are not the children, some of us will not help make a brighter day. Some of us are the silent sufferers of a noisy disease…”
— Amy Hempel, To Those of You Who Missed Your Connecting Flights (via ideasneverdie)
Jul 02
“A construction worker, suspended from a crane, rescued a woman who fell into the Des Moines River in downtown Des Moines Tuesday. A man who also fell into the water died.” (Mary Chind/The Des Moines Register via Associated Press)
-WSJ Photo Journal, full story here. More about low-head dams.
Jun 29
“
Once a friend and I settled in on a cramped patch of grass to see Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals. While we waited for the act to start, a high-school-age girl leaned across a couple of other people, pointed to her boyfriend, and said to me, “He wants to take your picture. Is that OK?” I am not typically accosted by the paparazzi, and she must have detected my puzzlement. “He wants to be like you when he grows up,” she said.
Then I remembered I was a 50ish guy in a sea of younger people, a gray-haired “aging hipster,” as my daughter calls me, in a Johnny Cash T-shirt amid bronzed prime-of-life kids. It was a rock festival, after all. I awkwardly but happily posed for the commemoration of the moment.
About halfway through the set, Harper and his band were cooking red hot. I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was the boyfriend. “This is real, man!” he yelled over the pounding music and raucous applause. “We are really here!” I gave him a thumbs-up. The girl beamed.
When the show was over, we gathered our backpacks and water bottles. I told the teenagers, “Thanks for helping to make this a fun evening.”
The girl nodded, but the boy vigorously shook his head and sputtered, “No, man! Thank you for being alive!”
I chose to take it as the compliment it was intended to be. In summer, with good music, good friends and sweet strangers, just being alive is joy enough. And you know what Barth said about that: “Joy is really the simplest form of gratitude.”
”— Rodney Clapp. (via wesleyhill)
Jun 28
Jun 26
“
Ray Lewis may well be an accessory to a man’s murder. But when I watch him run up and down field on Sunday, it sparks something in me. Woody Allen wooed his wife’s adopted daughter, and may well be a child molester. But I think Bananas makes me laugh. Mike Tyson is, among other things, a convicted rapist. But I had not lived until I saw him demolish Trevor Berbick. And so on …
I guess I could peel these people out my life. I guess I could stop separating art from men. Regrettably, I think, I wouldn’t be left with much art worth admiring. Sometimes awful people, do beautiful things. One doesn’t cancel the other. And mourning the loss of human life, does not excuse the sins of that life.
”
Jun 24
“He who does not enjoy solitude will not love freedom.”
— Schopenhauer
Jun 24
“In the late 1940’s, W.H. Auden became enamored of the idea that every writer’s mind is a household containing three personalities. T.S. Eliot’s, he wrote, included an archdeacon, an old peasant grandmother and a young boy who liked to play practical jokes.”
