September 2010
64 posts
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The Swift Thoughts
“He is no fool. First he makes sure this really is the content of his life, and his soul is too healthy and too proud to squander the least thing upon an inebriation. He is not cowardly, he is not afraid of letting love creep into his most secret, his most hidden thoughts, to let it twine in innumerable coils about every ligament of his consciousness — if the love becomes an unhappy...
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Truth Comes With Blows
“Since that day of zero weather when I was chopping wod and was struck by the flying log and thought, “Truth comes with blows,” I had evidently discovered how to take advantage of such experiences, and this was useful to me now, only it took a different form; not “Truth comes with blows” but other words and these words could not easily have been stranger. They went...
August 2010
57 posts
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A World Without Redemption
Mark Taylor tries to answer the big questions. I keep thinking I should try harder to meet this guy though I’m assured (by coldplums for instance) that he’s an insufferable prick. About a year ago I read an Op-Ed he wrote in the New York Times and sent him an email. His reply was one sentence: “Why don’t you read my book Confidence Games?” Made me think, ‘Gee,...
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The Law
“Did you ever say “Yes” to one joy? Oh my friends, then you said “Yes” to all pain. All are entwined, enmeshed, enamored —
did you ever want Once to be Twice, did you ever say “I love you, bliss—instant—flash—” then you wanted everything back.
— Everything anew, everything forever, everything entwined, enmeshed, enamored...
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Knees of Trust
Autumn’s child, I met her at a balloon bust picnic She caught me with the beauty queen With jade-green eyes buttons and bows and fancy ties The feet of dust under trees of rust Make them sandals gambol under knees of trust
Captain Beefheart, Autumn’s Child off of Safe As Milk ca. 1967
Haven
robynmariewilcox:
haven (work in progress) by dianne davis.
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The Best Things
robynmariewilcox:
Johnny Cash reciting Robert W. Service’s poem, The Cremation of Sam McGee
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We Shall Become Beijing Yet →
MTA Considers $130 Unlimited Ride Metrocard
Rea
coldplums:
leilacohanmiccio:
ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME???
It’s nice to know I’m “rich” to someone. I wish that someone was me. I hate you, MTA. I really do.
The time has come. Buy a bicycle. Buy a motorcycle. Soon, we shall rule the streets.
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Conrad’s Heart of Darkness read by Orson...
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As-salatu Khairum Minannaum
Get up before anyone else and ride down to the beach.
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I Wish I Could Sleep At Night
robynmariewilcox:
Untitled (2003) by Tara Donovan.
Styrofoam cups and hot glue.
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The Singularity
Down by the bank of the Seine in October in the year 2000, it was my first time in Paris. And the place just glowed, the trees glowed all golden with the leaves turning, even in the early morning mist. I sat on a bench eating a baguette, and I think I was still jet lagged. A young woman emerged from the shop behind me and started setting up tables, followed by an gray-haired man wearing thick,...
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Travelling Men
Calling All Travelling Men (Long Island)
DO YOU RIDE A MOTORCYCLE? REPLY TO JOIN YOUR BROTHERS FOR FUN AND FELLOWSHIP ON THE ROAD
This is the king of craigslist ads and the inspiration for the previous post. I salute motorcycle masonry.
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Hubris
“The waves of the business cycle are becoming ripples. The recent American combination of minimal inflation and very low unemployment may not be an aberration, but the beginning of a new worldwide trend. Smarter government policy, globalization, changes in employment, advances in information technology, and emerging markets all cushion shocks and dampen the familiar boom and bust. The...
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The Glory
Elspeth Beard - the first Englishwoman to ride a motorcycle around the world
Check out the stickers on the luggage! And while you’re at it, check out the size of the luggage! Are those custom jobs, or are they factory?
Via misterhousewife
via marycaple
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The Crying Bandit, Sam Chamberlain
” He was a small, dried up, wiry man, dressed in a half Indian half Mexican costume and armed with a heavy Kentuck rifle, revolver and a huge Bowie Knife. His actions and language was strange and highly ludicrous; he would howl like a coyote, bellow like a bull, crow like a cock, bray until all the mules joined in chorus, and intermingle all this with strange oaths and expressins in a...
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The Unexpected (Biker Wisdom)
“Expect the unexpected because it’s out there. And it’s looking for you.”
Biker wisdom from at a gas station just outside of Baltimore on I-95, Thursday.
He pulled up on a tomato-red Harley, gunned it three times got off and ran into the station and back out. Each time he came out he offered a different nugget of wisdom, in between inexplicable interjections of:...
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“13.
Last year I visited a friend in Rhode Island. We ate dinner in Providence....”
– Discussion of the scariest thing ever by Paul Ford in a beautiful poem/meditation I’m not doing justice with this excerpt. Please read it here.
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A New Plan, But I Would Keep The Motorcycle →
Or, “If Money Doesn’t Make You Happy You’re Probably Not Spending It Right.”
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Sympathetic Magic
Sir James Frazier talks a good deal of sympathetic magic in The Golden Bough, magic where the operative principle is that like attracts like even over great distances and that a touch, however brief, between to properly aligned objects can have great effects regardless of distance over time and space.
He discusses how various tribes from Australia to the backwards reaches of Europe will...
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Ahead, Judges Chambers
Saturday afternoon on Chambers St. waiting for the light to change.
“Be scared. You can’t help that. But don’t be afraid.”
– William Faulkner (via strategos) (via fuckyeahwilliamfaulkner)
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Post Office Confusion
Overheard at the Post Office on St. John’s Place in Brooklyn. A heavy-set man in a do-rag and a yellow t-shirt talking loudly into his cell phone.
You are not gay. You are not gay.
That’s a demon talking.
That’s a demon talking, not the Holy Spirit.
You can’t be gay and be a child of God. Period.
That’s a demon.
You love your children.
What did you just say...
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The Perfect Vehicle
From my mother I learned to write prompt thank-you notes for a variety of occasions; from Mrs. King’s ballroom dancing school I learned a proper curtsy and, believe it or not, what to do if presented with nine eating utensils at the same place setting, presumably at the home of the hosts to whom I had just curtsied. From motorcycles I learned practically everything else.”
Melissa...
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Grand Army, Indeed
Even among the heroes of the Grand Army, this mustache deserves special recognition. (Portrait of Patrick Pittman Carroll, 2nd Lieutenant in the 24th Colored Infantry.)
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Rough Splendor, or Grand Army Wednesday
Grand Army Plaza, so nice I took it twice.
Who doesn’t celebrate the achievements of the Grand Army of the Republic? Particulary in the facial hair category:
Obviously, they were unmatched.
“Clocks slay time… time is dead as long as it is being clicked off by little...”
– William Faulkner (via miffymom) (via fuckyeahwilliamfaulkner)
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The Unacknowledged Legislators of the World
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonies
Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in Sadness. Be thou, spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be though me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
And, by the incantation of this verse,
...
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A Slave's Options, Southern Edition
It was at the Hopson Plantation, and the bartender was taking us through his collection of local historical photographs - real museum quality collection - when we stumble on this one.
“This is a black confederate cavalry officer,” the bartender said. There was a brief pause in the proceedings. The archeologists from Ole Miss and I stood back, internalizing the photo and what it...
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Winners, Like Shelley
“Poetry thus makes immortal all that is best in and most beautiful in the world; it arrests the vanishing apparitions which haunt the interlunations of life, and veiling them, or in language or in form, sends them forth among mankind, bearing sweet news of kindred joy to those with whom their sisters abide - abide, because there is no portal of expression from the caverns of the spirit...
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A Slave's Options, Roman Edition
Within the sanctuary at Nemi grew a certain tree of which no branch might be broken. Only a runaway slave was allowed to break off, if he could, one of its boughs. Success in the attempt entitled him to fight the priest in single combat, and if he slew him he reigned in his stead with the title King of the Wood.
Sir James Frazier, The Golden Bough ca. 1915
Frazier was trying to understand...
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They Call Me Kin
I took road and said goodbye Friends go one way i went mine I got lost then very quickly Started shaking feeling sickly In the lion lair, in the lion lair Watch your own self and take care
Bonnie Prince Billy, Lion’s Lair off Ease Down the Road ca. 2001
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