We are increasingly fluent in images with no handhold, images freighted with all the orphanhood in the world—fragments.
Ask\\
May 30, 2012
Anonymous asked: is it getting better or worse?
This depends on what you mean. Give me some rope here…
On November 30th, 1965 Robert McNamara was flying back to the United States from one of his periodic fact-finding trips to Vietnam. While on the plane he had a chance to look over the latest field reports in some detail. What he discovered was that the various success metrics that had been developed for the war (ratio of American to Viet Cong casualties, towns lost, held or regained, etc.) had remained unchanged since the last round of analyses. During the same period American troop commitments had increased. McNamara had been the president of Ford and knew something about interpreting statistics, so he quickly realized what this situation meant: to maintain the same results, the United States had been forced to pump more soldiers into its side of the equation. This is a classic example of Things Getting Worse without any immediate evidence of things getting worse.
Incidentally, at the tarmac press conference McNamara lied through his teeth by saying that the situation in Vietnam had never been better.
Ten years ago you were using a computer so slow and inefficient that if you were forced to use it today it would be something like torture. At the same time, you are probably no happier or more content using a computer now than you were ten years ago. As the technology you use becomes more sophisticated, the goalposts of satisfaction recede ever further towards…. what?
I would say ‘an horizon.’
Take medicine as an example. Medical science is actually two sciences. The first deals with preserving health and the second with extending life. When you fracture your arm and one of the bones breaks the skin, you are suffering from a disorder that was almost universally fatal 150 years ago. Today it’s nearly an inconvenience. The power of doctors to restore a person who has suddenly lost his or her health is basically miraculous. However, this power is only used to restore a person to a state of normality. And normal health for a seventeen year old has not changed significantly. On the other hand, the extension of life without regard to health is something new, as opposed to simply miraculous. Miracles are just situations we wish would come to pass, precisely because they never seem to happen. There’s nothing more familiar than the wish for a suitcase of cash to fall at our feet when we’re broke. But the newness of extending life is different. I would say that it is new in exactly the same way as the computer example. Which is to say, new in a bad way.
We are already unable to deal with the novel cruelty of keeping a relative minimally alive using a mechanical ventilator. This situation exists because we reason that life of any degree must be better than death. This is what it feels like to be beyond the horizon of humanity thanks to technology. I would say that this is an experience you will have to get used to, because sister situations are going to populate your life by the hundred.
As it stands, your life is getting worse because you require more computational power year by year to maintain the same equanimity. But this sameness is deceptive, because you are in fact hurtling towards an horizon. At some point the McLuhan cliché of ‘we make our tools and then our tools make us’ will have to be amended to ‘break us.’
I’m finding it hard to explain “where I am in life” to the great anonymous internet presence I’ve adored for so long [somehow sic] without sounding like an ass. So I’ll give it to you straight. I’m a little over a month away from 27. An empath in fucking Brooklyn maintaining a hermit routine for sanity. Working a warping, multifaceted, demanding, yet unfulfilling job for a greedy, sadistic vortex of a man who feeds on my life force. All creativity and spirituality on the back burner save for the occasional photo or tarot reading both which feel like little more than masturbation. Female, a natural beauty, both to my chagrin. Ecstatic over each new wrinkle and grey hair. Carrying a dead weight depressed boyfriend of 8.4 years. In a word: stagnant. In another word: drained. But boo fucking hoo, right?
Response:
Sorry if this sounds like an especially arrogant reading, which incidentally you should never, ever do again.
Self-pity, fear and the recourse to a kind of malevolent female softness are and are going to be the three biggest obstacles to a future where you don’t want to die all the time.
-Self-pity. This makes everyday insult and ignominy feel bearable because self-pity places those things into a context where you deserve them. It reframes the fundamentally indifferent things that happen to you into a perspective where all lines of action lead necessarily to your own self. Obviously, everyone does this all the time, q.v. Middlemarch, Ch 27…
An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact. Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun. It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially, and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable. The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person…
…but in your case I think there’s the danger that those concentric circles of force will become prison bars instead of just explanations.
-Fear. Quit your job and tell your boyfriend what’s going on. If you can’t go somewhere else together, tell him to fuck off and move on. The fear of penury and making someone else feel sad are absolutely nothing compared to the feeling of looking back on twenty or thirty years of life and realizing that they were exchanged for nothing much. Let alone the most popular deathbed regret: I wish I hadn’t worked so much. I mean, think about it. One day you are going to be lying on a bed from which you will never rise, thinking about all those twelve hour days away from what you actually wanted to do. And how you can never have them back. A day of stagnation should feel like liverless Prometheus chained to the rock. FUCK eight years of it.
-A malevolent female softness. Lots of women, when confronted with stereotypical Hamlette life-problems retreat into a kind of tulle-world. A world where intuition has infinite credit and dithering is confused with grace. This is a huge mistake. If there is a female essence, uniquely suited to navigating the world that confronts women, this malevolent female softness is a black parody of it. Trapped in these doldrums, it can feel perfectly reasonable to pull the petals off your soul until you’re nothing but a narcotized point.
The solution to each of your three canonical problems is to fuck shit up.
These all work:
El Angel Exterminador ///////////// Last Year At Marienbad My Dinner With Andre /////////////// Interiors ///////////////// The Anatomy of Melancholy Essais of Montaigne The Balloon - Barthelme Proust Heart of Darkness The Golden Notebooks - Lessing Antigone Oedipus the King Oedipus at Colonus The Rings of Saturn The Maypole of Merry Mount - Hawthorne Under the Volcano Jose Saramago’s Nobel Prize speech /////////////// The Raj Quartet + Staying On all William H. Gass essays all Flannery O’Connor stories In the Heart of the Heart of the Country Infinite Jest The Kreutzer Sonata - Tolstoy The Ruling Class /////////////// The Shawl - Ozick Eichmann in Jerusalem Moby Dick All that is Solid Melts into Air - Berman The Destruction of the European Jews Shoah ////////////////// Within the Context of No Context ///////////// Herodotus
I think it’s helpful to think of the Hilary Rosen/Ann Romney thing from last week. Rosen saddles up and says that a housewife isn’t a tenable advisor on macroeconomics for her husband, the presidential candidate. Now obviously, a shitstorm. But as ever, read between the lines. What the furor was precisely not about is anyone giving two dry farts about Ann Romney’s dignity. Republicans were thrilled that Rosen had handed them a statement so easily refracted into a weapon. The Administration was furious that Rosen had been so stupid as to hand Republicans a line that could so easily be refracted into a weapon. (Like so stupid you have to go to school for it, I still can’t believe it.) For some reason this fact hides in plain sight and is utterable by no media mouth.
This shell-game of shuffling outrage around like so many tranches of collateralized debt strikes me as a unique and tedious feature of life in modern democracy. It can be active and orchestrated, as with Rosen/Romney, in which case it is a cynical manipulation of general sentiment. Or it can be systemic and exploitative, as in Black, Swedish, Cake Story, in which case it has more in common with a loose firehose than a society working out its racial hangups in public. In rather the same way that racism persists despite the disappearance of proudly racist individuals (the system itself soaks up racial prejudice and converts it into oppressive protocols), the brazen exploitation that once had black bodies as its object has simply been aimed at something else. Instead of exploiting their physical labor, this exploitation now generates money, prestige and power for itself from the attention of outraged black (and likeminded) minds.
Increasingly, the story is not what is reported, because by that point the facts have already been subtly recast to more perfectly pander to what the market already believes.
As ever, any mediator between my feelings and the facts is only and always a middleman. And middlemen exist to skim cream.
_______________________
(personally I thought the artist in the black cake made a nice point by having the arms of the cake rest on its breasts like the Venus of Willendorf. Making Europeans eat something syncretic like that strikes me a rather healthy.
that’s the most unashamed I’ve ever seen anyone be of a hat fetish
In one of his essays, Davenport claimed to “live almost exclusively off fried baloney, Campbell’s soup, and Snickers bars”.
skull with a blue eye
frangible evening
an evening of fragmentation
As the taxi sped into a freeway tunnel, he spotted a homeless couple at the side of the road, caught between the hurtling traffic and the wall of the concrete underpass. In that momentary glimpse, it seemed as if one figure, a woman, was sewing the other, a man, into a nylon sack.
WASPmas is when you put a menorah in the George Foreman, and together chant: ‘GILES COREY SHALL PLEAD!’
sprorgi the meatman: entrez vous el imperium proletario MWF TruBond DDS
I have this recurring dream of Neil deGrasse Tyson being murdered by a Swiss Guard. I’m not even Catholic.
Κάτι τρέχει στα γύφτικα, M Gk phrase: ‘Who gives a shit?’ (lit. trans. ‘There is trouble in the gypsy village.’)
a five hour documentary on the history of noodle
Rio Tinto Borax mine west of Boron, California
As a non-spectral color, brown has been especially resistant to theory, and philosophers and experimental physiologists have generally argued that it is simply a darkened variety of spectral yellow.
blue-john - derogatory and southern term for skim milk, especially that about to go bad
we find it hard to say what something is, unless we can say what something is like
fling a knife back up the eyeline of a cop
one dislikes powerful music in the same way one hates cops, or anything else with the power to override will.
Dear Oliver,
always bet on insanity, strife, evil and darkness
Matilda Moldenhauer Brooks
invigilate [ɪnˈvɪdʒɪˌleɪt] vb(intr) 1. (Social Science / Education) Brit to watch examination candidates, esp to prevent cheating US word proctor 2.Archaic to keep watch [from Latin invigilāre to watch over, from in-2 + vigilāre to keep watch; see vigil] invigilationn invigilatorn
Erasing Liquid
vomiting. tremendous burp that cannot be dispatched. profound and revolting spice, burning the back of your throat.
the watery plasma
my body is a slave and I want to kill it when it falters
scallops are in fact the only migratorybivalve
scallop meats
Jinhua ham is an ingredient in the dish Buddha Jumps Over the Wall
moving truck lower compartments just above the roadbed. compartments full of boxes of books. road salt has corroded the metal walls of the compartments and eventually the floor of one fails. the plastic bin of books falls through the floor and on to the road. the asphalt abraids the bottom of the bin and gets to work on the books. every page of every book is stripped off by the road. the road is smeared with thousands of pages of books, one at a time
people who eat anchovies, black licorice and their own hair have a special insight into the slender odds governing all human happiness
Scepter and crown Must tumble down And in the dust be equal made With the humble scythe and spade. “felt himself overwhelmed with an horrible melancholia, with perpetual irritation, fretfulness, and impatience; and with a dejection, gloom, and despair, which made existence misery”
Adam Smith reporting:
I have seen that creature [Samuel Johnson] bolt up in the midst of a mixed company; and, without any previous notice, fall upon his knees behind a chair, repeat the Lord’s Prayer and then resume his seat at table. He has played this freak over and over, perhaps five or six times in the course of an evening.
Eccovi Il Medico
iwa
The rubbing board oracle is regarded as the least reliable, the poison oracle as the most reliable.
witchcraft is believed to be an inherited substance in the belly which lives a fairly autonomous life
FIGS (French, Italian, German, Spanish)
Norway has two official languages. The first isbokmål – literarally the “language of books” – a modernised form of what was once standard Norwegian, which in turn was derived from Danish. The other is nynorsk – literally “new Norwegian” – a language created by the linguist Ivar Aasen in the mid nineteenth century, a synthetic language based on Norwegian dialects from all parts of the country.
Or as Gombrowicz puts it in his diaries: “If a mature nation judges its own merits with moderation, a vital nation learns to neglect them.”
“the unedifying gyrations of barbarous tribes in picturesque but irrelevant corners of the globe.”
In his last years he had suffered from sight problems leading to visual illusions, problems which were corrected by surgery.
In 2006 his grandniece, Petra Kujau, was charged with selling “fake forgeries”, cheap Asian-made copies of famous paintings with forged signatures of Konrad Kujau.
Why-questions in general
Why-questions of a very general kind are rarely asked by adults.
Most fields of human activity can do pretty well without questioning their own purpose.
Hi, I’m Lucy. I am, among other things, a kinky polyamourous trans queer dyke, a non-binary femme with invisible disabilities, a feminist who finds a lot of problems with feminism and many feminists, and a bunch of other things.
“a line of coke will make you a new man and that new man wants another line.”
He told me that AA was the better program, but the girls were cuter in NA. Then he changed his mind and said that girls got skinnier after they quit drinking, but fatter when they gave up drugs.
When you were a kid, what did you want to be when you grew up? Which career option presented itself to you first, drawing or writing (or producing?) I don’t remember ever really wanting to be anything as a child. I just wanted to eat and watch TV which still seems to be the way I am.
I guess I am very self-critical. Especially during the process. I mean, when I am home, alone, at my desk, I can descend into deep upset and self-hatred. And that is understating it.
As his name suggests, Leonard Cohen is halakhically a priest.
Tolkin lives in Los Angeles with his wife Wendy Mogel (parenting expert and author of bestseller The Blessing of a Skinned Knee) and their three daughters, Susanna, Emma and Gorax.
“He who says a wise thing is called a wise man [“hakham”], even if he be not a Jew” (Meg.16a)
learned non-Jews are commonly called “hakme ummot ha-‘olam” (the wise men of the nations)
Anonymous asked: what are those stupid long things you post
It’s a good question.
Certain phrases have a strange music or magnetism in them. Like
Yellapragada Subbarao
With thy sharp teeth this knot intrinsicate
thirteen-foot tall
eat shit and die, you heartless cocksucker
Inverted sugar is therefore valued by bakers
It doesn’t all seem to come down to prosody or sibilance or anything like that, although that’s certainly part of it. (For example the way the unvoiced fricative in ‘therefore’ breaks up the voicing of ‘there’ and ‘-ore’ & sets off the voicing in the v of ‘valued,’ and how the feeling of saying that immediately collides with the alliteration of ‘by bakers.’)
But it isn’t really qualities or attributes that I like. Any old potato or solar flare has more qualities hanging off it than we could possibly describe in a lifetime (not that that stops people.) It’s the fact that these things start to smoke when you bring them together,
‘diseased of his freehold, There is no known species of venomous bird,
Open this tin and experience the pleasant, marzipan-like aroma.’
that seems like the real point.
It feels important to have something in your life that channels great powers but which you aren’t really that good at manipulating. Or as Walt puts it
If, to use a simile, one views the growing [literary] work as a funeral pyre, its commentator can be likened to the chemist, its critic to an alchemist. While the former is left with wood and ashes as the sole objects of his analysis, the latter is concerned only with the enigma of the flame itself: the enigma of being alive. Thus the critic inquires about the truth whose living flame goes on burning over the heavy logs of the past and the light ashes of life gone by.
that thing where you just want to peel the entire china marker out of its wrapping as a pennant of futility
exhilaratingly sullen
In one well known incident, a commoner bumped into a samurai. The samurai pointed out the disrespect but the commoner refused to apologise. Feeling merciful, the samurai offered the shorter of his two swords, so the commoner would have the chance to defend himself. Instead, the commoner decided to run away with his sword, creating even more dishonor. The incident resulted in the samurai being disowned from his own clan. The samurai later regained his honor by seeking out the commoner and killing him, along with every member of the commoner’s family.
what if ornament were the translation into physicality of how the supernatural feels?
in the same way that it is impossible to dismember an earthworm
menacing frivolity
all conversations secretly aim for
the intimacy and candor that
orbits the moment of
falling asleep
In any man who dies, there dies with him his first snow and kiss and fight. Not people die, but worlds die in them. General Tso died in 1885
Theda Skocpol
The male Orchid bee is highly unusual in seeking out and collecting large quantities of the insecticide DDT, all while suffering no apparent harm
rosalind eisenbronck
the satirist’s cardiogram of the hidden heart
row of silent, dark houses and the illuminated doorbell buttons that riddled the night.
AND YOU WILL NOT TAKE ME OFF THE AIR FOR NOW OR FOR ANY OTHER SPACELESS TIME
I mean look, the simple black fact of it is this: Anyone who isn’t in their deepest self a consumer of products is invalid and disreputable. Keeping up has strung our collective bows far too tight to ever get an arrow off. You are incapable of creativity pinned beneath this amount of mulch.
in France a mux is called a bouquet
agroglifo agroglyph
—crop circles
He afterwards told me, that at one time the blood from an artery flew into his eyes, so that he could not see. It was nearly an hour and a half that I was beneath his hand, in cutting out the entire breast, in cutting out the glands beneath the arm, in tying the arteries, in absorbing the blood, in sewing up the wound, in putting on the adhesive plasters, and in applying the bandage.
Italian findings from 2009 suggest that toads are able to detect pre-seismic cues
If Witch Baby didn’t cut out the articles, she knew she would lie awake, watching the darkness break up into grainy dots like an over-enlarged newspaper photo.
the only venomous plant
The statue of Samian Hera, as Aethilos says, was a wooden beam at first, but afterwards, when Prokles was ruler, it was humanized in form
\
The US is the only English-speaking country in the world whose authors are ineligible for the Man Booker prize.
a burgeoning market for exotic flesh
2. in this so-called jazz type repertoire, preference is to be given to compositions in a major key and to lyrics expressing joy in life rather than Jewishly gloomy lyrics;
British Oxygen Corporation
Rhodium has also been used for honors when more prosaic metals such as silver, gold, or platinum are deemed insufficient. In 1979, the Guinness Book of World Records gave Paul McCartney a rhodium-plated disc for being history’s all-time best-selling songwriter and recording artist.
The trees look ominous, like judges. Here all things scream silently, and, baring my head, slowly I feel myself turning gray. And I myself am one massive, soundless scream
//his brains were coming out of the hole in in his head //he has plenty of brains \check out the big brain on brett! \einstein’s brain was preserved in a jar What kind of thing is a brain that it is plural in increments but singular in quantity?
Xoanon
while attempting suicide, Jacques Prévert fell on the co-founder of Yves Saint-Laurent \ and all were thwarted in their efforts of that day
His universe was a brilliantly illuminated circle extending from himself at its center to the exact limit of his occupations and interests
My dear Kepler, what would you say of the learned here, who, replete with the pertinacity of the asp, have steadfastly refused to cast a glance through the telescope? What shall we make of this? Shall we laugh, or shall we cry?
what if maybe getting beaten up is a lot better than certainly being afraid
stultifying enthusiasm of the blindly ambitious
left and right shoes only date to around 1800
son of a mustard manufacturer’s clerk from Clapham
that venomous combination of being both weak and predatory
the worst you can be is a failure. anyone egotistical enough to be bothered by that probably shouldn’t be in the game
American Cyanamid
a highly teratogenic drug and categorized in Pregnancy Category X by the FDA
getting something down or at least out feels like finding your footing on a very small iceberg
Pethidine
has the unusual property of being both a local anaesthetic and opioid analgesic
Itch is never felt in muscle, joints, or inner organs
both TrichobilharziaandGigantobilharzia!
In 1793 Goethe wrote to his mother in Frankfurt requesting that she buy a toy guillotine for his son, August. Age 3.
catalyzing their own synthesis
“If I ever do that to you,” my father once told me as we watched a furious Russian Tennis Parent lay into his son at a tournament, “kill me.”
diseased of his freehold, There is no known species of venomous bird,
Open this tin and experience the pleasant, marzipan-like aroma.
my dear, a most apollonian sexual experience
I Saw Pinetop Spit Blood
everything america can be proud of has at its inception revolted those in power
\ the closest I ever felt to my father was when I would play blues piano upstairs and could hear him whistle harmonies as he opened the mail in the kitchen
an environment that fostered the creation of boogie-woogie: lumber, cattle, turpentine, and oil
José Iturbi had a son-in-law named Stephan Hero
ce qu’il fallait démontrer—C.Q.F.D was zu beweisen war—w.z.b.w
the dome of collapsing soap bubbles ticking in the sink’s throat
YOU SHOULD BUNT TO SACRIFICE YOURSELF TO THE RUNNER
The Italo-Dutch satellite BeppoSAX
Some telegraph systems \continued to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.
\\///
and for Murch, the guilty evidence
welling up reminds him of his ad-
olescent shame when he tried
to flush a porn magazine and
it came floating back at
just the wrong time
the bread was at that stage of staleness where eating it reminded you of pushing a wad of fabric into your mouth
415 863 1944
The explosive power concentrated on board the ship exceeded all the bombs dropped in the history of warfare by at least a factor of three.
PERVERSION ALWAYS CONCEALS SENTIMENTALITY
They are the safest of all stilts.
Sovetskoye Shampanskoye or ‘Soviet champagne’
The returning mud can contain natural gases or other flammable material which will collect in and around the shale shaker
The first death was Ricardo Diomedes
the dog of pompeii was named Delta
any masterpiece should end with a mistake
George Washington’s dogs: Taster; Tipler; Vulcan; Madame Moose and Sweet Lips
you made me feel more as I oughta
Cabbages, whose heads, tightly folded, see and hear nothing of this world, dreaming only on the yellow and green magnificence that is hardening within them
\\\\\\\\surreptitiously jazz-loving Nazis like the Luftwaffe officer Dietrich Schulz-Köhn, who was nicknamed “Doktor Jazz”
No man so potent breathes vpon the ground, But I will Beard him.
the god of history is a man who is both drunk and bored
i paint the sort of paintings i can, not the ones i necessarily want
reading your own reviews reminds me of the difference between eating something and watching someone eat. I can only be honest and say that it repulses me
What happened in detail I can hardly remember, all I know is that we kept merging into one another. I was you, you were me. Finally somehow you caught fire.
and of course, when Kurt Cobain was my age he’d been in the ground for nine months
and the view of a city out of an airliner’s window. just in front of the mouth of the engine/ so that it seems to be consuming the landscape as you travel forward
Chekhov’s pet crane
He recognized the danger of that dedication being dimmed by his love for his machines, but by the grace of God that commitment extended over a period of fifty years.
Einar Enevoldson
As if you’d had some sort of second-order stroke, and were locked-in or aphasic on a level most people never even realize they have.
I worry that our project of coterminous descent into ever greater silence and heat has stalled. Say it isn’t so
The 17,000 gallons of ether drunk by the Irish in 1890.
and then the feeling that this is all just licking the rim of a glass you want more than anything to drink from. programmatically. but that speaks to fear, which is remediable the woman chasing the puck of fat, which had slipped out of the pho and onto the table beside her bowl the model of the battle of Esztergom, created in sugar by confectioners to the Viennese court, which Empress Maria Theresia devoured during one of her melancholies architecture’s actual material is structural strain or crystallized movement
drill holes in a blank book
well on her way to a lifelong psychic crouch restrained by the keloids that contort every flameout the woman in bojangles that looked like a fifty year old margot tenenbaum, who waited for her food with her feet in the fourth position, whose face was in thrall to an insuperable sadness and other stories
one of those things like imagining chewing when you aren’t or thinking about friendships when they’re not Ether was taken with coffee or raspberry juice. Or by inhalation. Or by being poured into the ear.
but then the life you want is never the point and all problems are metaphysical
or that their judgment of you will be the same as your own. and so, inescapable
in this way you will stop confusing happiness with safety or his sty
smell of hot rust in slanting sunlight
as with anyone who talks a lot you end up hearing everything and more than once
The horror of our history has purged me of opinions, as of vanity, confidence, spirit, charity, hope, vitality, everything—except dull dread and a kind of melancholy, stunned persistence
this is how to decline fame
here is how to be a self without arrogance binding you up
this is the way to cancel fear
paradoxically, shallowness is much easier to drown in
I am going to make myself available to you
when you say ‘heist’ you are saying ‘hoist’ in a new york city dialect that has been extinct for ninety years— ‘hoist’ as slang for steal illuminates the ‘lift’ in ‘shoplift’ and indicates a scale of criminal magnitude (what one cannot lift has to be hoisted)
whatever glows in daylight
ablate your own cleverness until you can make without hope—at every level the world is the world of a sperm; model your life after his mindless postpositive ambition
in former times one would write spells on the surface of running streams with a quill—as when we tag in white ink the black rubber handrail of a moving escalator
guillaume apollinaire coined the word ‘surrealism’ while recovering from the wound in which a length of shrapnel penetrated his temple and lodged in his brain
an inherent smirk in the word ‘triglyceride’
endurance cuisine
the mission district gym called 4SF that was secretly an abbreviation for ‘Too too solid flesh’
Enver Hoxha
Contact with skin causes immediate whitening due to the rapid production of subcutaneous oxygen
“Oh, my life is very simple,” said Dorothea, her lips curling with an exquisite smile, which irradiated her melancholy.
Bronchiolitis obliterans
the story about Rembrandt, Thomas Browne and Rene Descartes all being present for the anatomy lesson of Dr. Tulp
worn almond face of a commune mom in the eighties
a chameleon has a master who places it on a Scotch plaid. it is first frenzied, and then dies of fatigue
the only saltwater frog the only herbivorous snake the only carnivorous parrot
Marcel Proust circling people at parties, collecting the divinations and observations that he called his mel noir (black honey)
vision of myself collapsing in a pizza parlor and coughing an impossible amount of arterial blood onto the white tile floor
Despite its name, the New River is the second oldest river in the world
Paul Claudel visited her in the asylum every few years, though he referred to her in the past tense.
Edward Otho Cresap Ord
metronome with index finger
Commodus killed a Camelopardalis, or giraffe, the tallest, the most gentle, and the most useless of the large quadrupeds.
Is there no beginning to your talents?
it has to stop
Appreciation of art is a moral erection
awkwardness returned to painting about 1870
Clodomiro Picadio Twight
| a hypercane or multiple megacyclones
a word like ‘only’ that relates twoness rather than oneness
Tyler Clementi is Jumping off the gw bridge sorry
middle third
Morelia spilota
the potent cardiac glycoside cerberin
Spisula solidissima
everyone goes to the grand canyon to marvel at five miles of emptiness, but no one looks up to watch forty miles of blue, much less at night, when distance is lyrical
\\
something horrific and mesmerizingly reptilian about the skin of a pineapple
What group of 800 American intellectuals would miss both the Democratic National Convention and the opening of the World Chess Championship to make the round trip to a point 900 miles out in the North Atlantic indistinguishable from any neighboring point?
savings bonds for urban outfitters
Iroko wood dust is known to be carcinogenic. (why???)
The Yetzer Reb would be the pub you’d open
writing well was getting what you want by groping blindly for something on the top shelf
The judge also noted the “callous indifference” of the people at the adjacent Apple Store who heard screams and cries for help but did nothing
silence and calm are the cutting edges of business
drinking so much coffee or doing so much coke you just stare at games of solitaire, trapped in assessment, without actually playing
the crashing sea-like rush of us as we are knocked flat, react, and corrugate into boredom, forever
Nyholm was passionately associated with industry all of his life.
jade, v. —To make a jade of (a horse); to exhaust or wear out by driving or working hard; to fatigue, weary, tire.…
2.2 Dull or sated by continualuse or indulgence. 1631R. Brathwait Eng. Gentlew. (1641) 305Former times were not so jaded to fashions as to esteeme nothing formall, but what was phantasticall. 1744 Armstrong Preserv. Health ii. 158 To spur beyond Its wiser will the jaded appetite. 1828 W. Sewell Oxf. Prize Ess. 39 Nature was tortured in every way to stimulate the jaded palate.
In a real way I feel like I’m just doing a scientific thing here. b.w.o analogy, think of the research done to make Coca-Cola. Someone realized that it would be much easier to make an essence, coke syrup, and just ship that to places where it would be carbonated. Same thing here, except I don’t want to reconstitute a drink. Making coke syrup solved the problem, and the solution is the syrup, not the glass of soda you can sell for a dollar fifty. These are syrups. You can mix them to make a soda. Don’t make yr stuff reconstitute the world. Make It fall through the air like a ray of light into a block of ice
Chaos Monster (Anzu?) and Sun God (Marduk), p. 319, bas relief, Palace of Ashur Nasir Apal II (885-860BCE) at Nimrud. Austen Henry Layard - Monuments of Nineveh, Second Series, plate 19/87, J. Murray, 1853
The flight crew escape tunnel system was later removed following the completion of the Approach and Landing Tests (ALT) due to concerns over possible engine ingestion of an escaping crew member
Mercury at Quadrature
but what is labor? biological labor? cellular labor? genetic labor? necessary electrostatic spatial reorientation labor?
life is the phenomenon not explicable by continually more minute and fundamental forces
mind is the phenomenon not explicable.
Fernando Lamas: ‘Itis better to look good than to feel good.’ I find myself entranced by the glittering wrongness of this statement
Fiorina “Fury” 161
the girl with the dragon tattoo as an almost perfect retelling/humorless theft of Twin Peaks
Via con Hashem
a wine bottle filled with iodine tincture
feeling foamy enthusiasm for something as you experience it is generally the prelude to a sour reassessment
Robert Lowell died of heart failure in a New York taxi on September 12, 1977. He was carrying Lucian Freud’s portrait of his wife with him and he clutched it as he died. or 23 years, 11 months and 31 days
10,134
now set
your left foot by my right foot, shoulder to shoulder, all that jazz, arm in arm, by the beautiful sea, hum a little, Mr Bones. —I saw nobody coming, so I went instead.
Sherrington’s story about seeing Waldeyer label a mounted Betz neuron as ‘das Denk-Organ’ (‘The Organ of Thought’) in an 1886 histology class. Sherrington going on to remember a student asking if a Betz cell tumor being dissected in the next class was also engaged in thinking.
POLONY
Q. Do you know where the milk is? A. No.
—Michael Dummett’s sole interaction with Wittgenstein
duchy, the domain of a duke. county, the domain of a count. Therefore, ‘Dracula County.’
When Mr. Lai’s colleagues ran outside, dark smoke was mixing with a light rain Postman Pat themed prawn cocktail corn snacks
Other sweet onions such as the crystal wax A minced oath is an expression based on a profanity or a taboo term that has been altered to reduce the objectionable characteristics.
Criminy or crimony is an alteration of Christ’s money, the thirty pieces of silver in exchange for which Judas betrayed Jesus
there are plenty of me where I came from
The term “copy-protection” is pretty misleading. Speaking as a former systems administrator, the way I “protect” stuff is by making copies
purple nutsedge
#f4f4ff
Among keen anglers there are about only 20 carp that can be seriously called “household names”. Benson was near the top of that league. The thing that made Benson famous was her accessibility. A liquid craze is sweeping across our nation from the south. This infectious drink has been carried across continents and language barriers, through millenniums, and by all types of people. I also hear it is trendy in Manhattan. The title that best sums up this drink process is “Horchata.”
A philosopher-mathematician loaded with explosives, lucid and reckless, resolute without optimism. If that’s not a hero, what is a hero? ‘Can it!’ as in ‘preserve that sentiment in a can until some future time when it will be required’
something covert and beautiful about the specificity of ‘The Middle East’
The tuning imperfections introduced by Equal Temperament make barbershop music impossible on the piano.
Barbershop quartets sound like being skinned feels.
In light of this evidence, how could anyone believe that this exemplary officer, whose military career was spotless, whose beautiful penmanship and flourished signature can still be admired, might have donned the ragged clothing of a loner and a rambler, been branded as a cowardly deserter from a besieged fort ? no one really has an effect on anyone
Wind-dried beef Rousong (肉鬆), also sometimes called meat wool, meat floss, pork floss, pork sung In the southern United States, the product of boiling sealed cans of sweetened condensed milk is also called “Danger Pudding.” Impatient troops would eat it in the dark to avoid seeing what they were consuming. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Years_of_Lead_(Italy)
In the summer of 1992, the author WG Sebald, “irradiated by melancholy”, set off on a physical and philosophical wander through the Suffolk countryside
mayonnaise was invented 4 years before the sandwich J. R. Simplot Company
Dolomedes tenebrosus
the strange and similar reactions of Samuel Beckett to being stabbed and Werner Herzog to being shot
“Let There Be Darkness, Please; When Mercury Is at Quadrature, the Social Director Is a Lonely Man For Two Extremely Short Minutes Everyone Gaped Into the Sky”
meat shucked off the bones, stacked on the plate / high like a barrow
panic’s peppery taste flowing along the sides of the tongue, [gaining] the tip
“The Government physically occupied private property for the purpose of obtaining information,” Scalia wrote. “We have no doubt that such a physical intrusion would have been considered a ‘search’ within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment when it was adopted.”
dark olive offness of an lcd in sunlight
a car driving over a mattress
and liquid nitrogen is used by cryosurgeons for cryosurgery, and by inseminators to freeze semen.
a hard boiled egg removed from its shell and impaled on the end of a pool cue
smugness as a cherry you can’t wait to crush
the unwholesomeness of milk in dark bottles
ugly blue luminance
“The selection of a Republican candidate for the presidency of this globalized and expansive empire is—and I mean this seriously—the greatest competition of idiocy and ignorance that has ever been.” Fidel Castro
I have been a bee-keeper for six thousand years And for the past hundred years an electrician. Once I retire I shall keep bees again. Something should hum for me, oh hum for me, Hum and hum and hum Just for me.
Kemény
a boot smouldering on a city street. a single boot burning on the sidewalk
That solitaire should have entropy for an opponent makes it more meaningful than chess—where, instead of striking at life’s only enemy, you merely convert a useless order into one that can service your aims
Art that seems less tortured than irritated
the sadness of limitless jurisdiction the awful barrenness of expression. the round and leaking mouth of no pronouncement
galloping bouts of speechlessness
Why are we taught to despise old yellow pumpkin, the big bellied pumpkin, the mud covered pumpkin who makes the good pies?
To admit —even in a delible way —that we are each other’s sucker feels dangerous and metamorphic
body became rounded off by the hammock where she hung, like a curing meat
A natural waterfall crashing down into a sort of reservoir built on two levels—he found the sight less cooling than grotesquely suggestive of some agonized ultimate sweat.
sit smally in your own apartment, anxious of motion. that you will unweave your life and cancel domesticity
and then the towering drill of the unread
naturally freedom has a ploughshare, a blade where change strikes
why does every relationship have to be a nipple on the reservoir of all human experience? [it does]
but no one has thus far succeeded in singing an epic of peace
