February 2012
9 posts
WatchYards Park!
I Shall Try To Fly By Those Nets
—The soul is born, he said vaguely, first in those moments I told you of. It has a slow and dark birth, more mysterious than the birth of the body. When the soul of a man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.
—James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
I think I just decided “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is the greatest line in literature.
“Loving was by no means as simple as nature would have us believe by bestowing on...”
– Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities
The Greatest Show Possible: Better than The... →
thegreatestshowpossible:
I am in a fantasy baseball league. There is both an Eric and an Erikk in our league. They have never met. Shit got real today. Eric decided to jokingly make an enemy by sending the below email.
I’m taking immediate opportunity to call out Erikk as my team’s rival. His unconscionable spelling of the name obviously comes from some Nordic tradition, and as an...
1 tag
Who Is To Foretell The Flight Of A Word?
There is no stability in this world. Who is to say what meaning there is in anything? Who is to foretell the flight of a word? It is a balloon that sails over treetops. To speak of knowledge is futile. All is experiment and adventure. We are forever mixing ourselves with unknown quantities. What is to come? I know not.
—Virginia Woolf, The Waves
January 2012
25 posts
In a world thronged with monsters and gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we perform in [adolescence] which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest...
Brutality and Love
One could say [sports] are the precipitations of a most finely dispersed general hostility, which is deflected into athletic games. Of course, one could also say the opposite: that sports bring people together, promote the team spirit and all that—which basically proves only that brutality and love are no farther apart than one wing of a big, colorful, silent bird is from the other.
—Robert...
If we are not excessive in our demands and do not believe that we have conquered the world, we will attain a peace that is worth our effort. But we are just as quickly intoxicated as we are plunged into dejection, and I have the thankless task of pouring water into the bubbling wine and making it clear that we do not live alone in Europe but with three other Powers that hate and envy us.
—Otto...
Townes Van Zandt — Standin’
An Almost Habitual Compulsion To The Negative
It was a load off the Au.’s mind to have at least a partial explanation for this embarrassing episode in Leni’s life, but he had no luck when it came to confronting further potential informants as soon as they opened their front doors and greeted him with the question: “Are you for or against ‘68?” Since the Au., riddled with the most varied motivations, torn this...
Since somewhere in the universe there must be an as yet undiscovered flying body in which a giant computer (probably the size of Bavaria) has been installed and is spewing out hypothetical life stories, we will presumably have to wait until the object is eventually discovered.
—Heinrich Böll, Group Portrait with Lady
1 tag
On Finding Humor Where You Least Expect It
One of my most enjoyable reading experiences is when I find, to my surprise, that an author whom I’ve never read, and whose writing for whatever reason I’ve been led to believe, despite its universally agreed-upon value, is dry and humorless—even unenjoyable—actually turns out to be bright, beautiful, enjoyable, and, above all, evinces a delightful and singular sense of humor. In...
1 tag
Everything In One Place
He walked into the room-lagoon, archipelagoed with humanity. Floundered in the pool, scrambled quickly and shoaled himself on the shore-wall. Is this the line? This is the line. A circular line can’t be a good sign. Time moves but nothing else. He brought a book; he can bear anything. Cackling kids at the counter, silent kids sitting behind it fiddling lackadaisically with phones. What was private...
Even as a child, Leni was fascinated by the excremental processes to which she was subject and on which—unfortunately in vain!—she used to demand information by asking: ‘Come on now, tell me! What’s all this stuff coming out of me?’
—Heinrich Böll, Group Portrait with Lady
Deerhoof — “Panda Panda Panda”
The Last Treasure The Past Has In Store
The memories of love are no exception to the general laws of memory, which in turn are governed by the still more general laws of Habit. And as Habit weakens everything, what best reminds us of a person is precisely what we had forgotten (because it was of no importance, and we there left it in full possession of its strength). That is why the better part of our memories exists outside us, in a...
December 2011
17 posts
It's You
Later on, this discrepancy in the picture of ourselves according to whether it is drawn by one’s own hand or another’s was something I was to register in the case of others than myself, living placidly in the midst of a collection of photographs which they had taken of themselves while round about them grinned frightful faces, invisible to them as a rule, but stunning them with...
If I was a poet, I had become one because poetry, more intensely than any other practice, could not evade its anachronism and marginality and so constituted a kind of acknowledgement of my own preposterousness, admitting my bad faith in good faith, so to speak.
—Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station
Maybe An Example When A Hackneyed Pun Is Not...
The following is the caption underneath a picture of a gaunt, bald, cancer-ridden Christopher Hitchens in one of his Vanity Fair columns:
“HOUSTON, WE’VE GOT A PROBLEM The author in Houston, where he is receiving treatment at the MD Anderson Cancer Center.”
Tell me again why anything matters at all ever. Tell me why I shouldn’t punch everything into smithereens and actually...
How do our lives ravel out into the no-wind, no-sound, the weary gestures wearily recapitulant: echoes of old compulsions with no-hand on no-strings: in the sunset we fall into furious attitudes, dead gestures of dolls.
—William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
It’s something fails us. First we feel. Then we fall. And let her rain now if she likes. Gently or strongly as she likes. Anyway let her rain for my time is come. I done me best when I was let. Thinking always if I go all goes. A hundred cares, a tithe of troubles and is there one who understands me? One in a thousand years of the nights? All me life I have been lived among them but now...
