October 2010
30 posts
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September 2010
64 posts
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This Hour and What Is Dead, Li-Toung Lee
Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking through bare rooms over my head, opening and closing doors. What could he be looking for in an empty house? What could he possibly need there in heaven? Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches? His love for me feels like spilled water running back to its vessel. At this hour, what is dead is restless and what is living is...
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An Obsession
There’s something wrong about the extent to which property in our society has become a financial abstraction. Houses become mortgages become mortgage-backed securities that are insured with credit default swaps that are repackaged as CDOs and synthetic CDOs and on and on until it all collapses under the weight of its unreality and the paper in upon itself until, finally, there is just a...
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Nobody Tells You
Back in New York, I thought I’d write things about living here, that no one ever talks about because they’re too clever. Instead I’ve been posting pictures from past trips to foreign lands and smatterings of doughy philosophy. The reason is that I don’t really live in New York any more, not primarily. I live at Columbia University - a beautiful bubble - and Brooklyn - a...
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A Man Who Had Fallen Among Thieves
a man who had fallen among thieves lay by the roadside on his back dressed in fifteenthrate ideas wearing a round jeer for a hat fate per a somewhat more than less emancipated evening had in return for consciousness endowed him with a changeless grin whereon a dozen staunch and leal citizens did graze at pause then fired by hypercivic zeal sought newer pastures or because swaddled with a...
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A Shakespeare Reference →
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The Man Without Qualities
In the middle of logic class, Prof. Varzi started talking about Musil and The Man Without Qualities: “You see he didn’t want to do anything, because to do something limits your options, it means you can’t do anything else! But really he leads quite a full rich life, for that, just allowing nothing to make due for something. And I was intrigued by this at the time.” Two...
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The Purist, Ogden Nash (for 9/20)
poetry365:
I give you now Professor Twist, A conscientious scientist. Trustees exclaimed, “He never bungles!” And sent him off to distant jungles. Camped on a tropic riverside, One day he missed his loving bride. She had, the guide informed him later Been eaten by an alligator. Profesor Twist could not but smile. “You mean,” he said, “a crocodile.”
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“He made the sign of the teaspoon
She...
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A Southern Story
Martin and I spend a lot of time together, often just like this, as he tells me a story over dinner and a bottle of wine. Last night he told me a story, and, what’s more, he was certain it was a Southern story.
“My mentor in Chicago, Hugh Edwards, was from Kentucky.
So he knew all those Poets (I had just told him of my somewhat disturbing discovery that I am essentially Southern...
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“It’s my belief that these dreams are yours as well.
The only difference between...”
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Werner Herzog, again, from the Burden of Dreams. I agree.
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Taking a close look at what is around us, There is a sort of a harmony. It is the harmony of overwhelming and collective murder. And we in comparison to the articulate violence and baseness and obscenity of all this jungle, We in comparison to that enormous articulation, We only sound and look like badly pronounced half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel a cheap novel. And...
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“He looked like one of those
Who could...
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To The Rising Generation (By Request, For Johnny)
Rishikesh is split by the Ganges, each clinging to the rocky face of the Himalayas, where the river splits them wide. Looking toward the gates of the mountains, the left hand bank is mostly secular, hotels and houses above a sheer cliff that juts from the river’s rocky bank. The right hand bank is where the Yogis are, where the Beatles studied with Mia Farrow and Donovan (and wrote the...
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Swimming →
robynmariewilcox:
brookglenkills:
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I think you’ve created a (possibly false) hierarchy of choices/options. I’m assuming we’re rolling on the assumption that choice exists/is a “real thing” only inasmuch as it is action. And then every action (and inaction) is a choice. There are an unimaginable, vast array…
Imagine a plane. While on the plane one can do many things. subdivide...
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The rain had a little something to say to me last night on the way from the pool: The greatest lie people tell people, tell themselves, tell each other, the most damaging is that we have unlimited options. We don’t. At any moment our options are tiny, withing shouting or fist distance. And even looking toward out toward the future, if you look at yourself, really look, I think you’ll...
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“Thanks to you great Shakespeare!, you who can say everything, everything,...”
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Soren Kierkegaard in Fear and Trembling. I’ve decided to return to the theater.
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“The grandeur and power of a nation must be estimated, not from the exuberant...”
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Ditto. We could learn from this guy.
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“Your Legislators appear to forget that their country is inhabited by an...”
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Letters from a Farmer of Philadelphia, 1791, from the Seligman Collection at Columbia University. Back to school.
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“Every nation, every art has its hypocrisy. The world is fed with a little truth...”
– Romain Rolland, Jean-Christophe, vol. 4: La Révolte (1905)(S.H. transl.)
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Another Sky
There is another sky, Ever serene and fair, And there is another sunshine, Though it be darkness there; Never mind faded forests, Austin, Never mind silent fields - Here is a little forest, Whose leaf is ever green; Here is a brighter garden, Where not a frost has been; In its unfading flowers I hear the bright bee hum: Prithee, my brother, Into my garden come!
–Emily Dickinson, There is...
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Ecce Homo
Years ago I threw parties for a living. The biggest and last one was here, at Pacha a four-story nightclub on West 46th St. down by the water. I recall that I spent about $60,000 on it. I had dresses made and wings and curtains and videos. I hired 100 staff including a man whose job was to airbrush the staff’s bodies and a team of six little people who were to be bartenders but insisted on...
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“The problem is that once the rules of art are debunked, and once the unpleasant...”
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David Foster Wallace
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“The illusion has become real, and the more real it becomes, the more desperately...”
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Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street
