from the comments
The bug will eat you when the bug eats.
Gertrude’s Ghost
A long complicated sentence should force itself upon you, make you know yourself knowing it and the comma, well at the most a comma is a poor period that it lets you stop and take a breath but if you want to take a breath you ought to know yourself that you want to take a breath.
– Gertrude Stein, qtd. here.
Quote Out of Context
I secretly think reality exists so we can speculate about it.
from the comments
To rely on the usefulness of fear is to affirm the efficacy of tyranny.
Long Horn Meat
why aphorisms are cynical
A good single sentence saying can’t require background evidencing or further explanation. It must be instantly recognizable as true. It also needs to be news to the listener. Most single sentences that people can immediately verify as true they already believe. What’s left? One big answer is things that people don’t believe or think about much for lack of wanting to, despite evidence. Drawing attention to these is called cynicism.
(via marginal revolution)
badge of honor
When I was growing up, in Ann Arbor, Mich., there was a little debate: Should school officials try to prevent black students from using the N-word? I don’t believe the issue was ever settled. And this brings up the question of whether “teabagger” could be kind of a conservative N-word: to be used in the family, but radioactive outside the family.
Overheard
“And then things took a 360 for the worse.”
My new motto.
All that we See is Vision,
from Generated Organs gone as soon as come, Permanent in The Imagination, Consider’d as Nothing by the Natural Man.
(William Blake. From the text accompanying his engraving of the Laocoön. Circa 1826-1827.)
The old saying is
“If you don’t like the weather in Texas, wait fifteen minutes.”
My saying is, “If you don’t like the weather in Texas, you’re a lot smarter than I thought you were.”
Exposure, Robert Fripp’s
marvelous 1979 release, features a number of spoken snippets from J.G. Bennett, my favorite of which is, “If you know you have an unpleasant nature and dislike people, this is no obstacle to work.”
“Boogie On”
I got home too late last night
I was being too groovy
I went and did a terrible thing
I forgot to boogie
–Ten Years After
Victor Hugo on trickle-down
“We live in a somber society. How to get ahead, succeed–that is the lesson that trickles down, drop by drop, from the overriding corruption on high.”
“Succeed: That’s the whole idea. Prosperity presupposes Capability. Win the lottery and you are a clever man. The winner is revered. Be born with a silver spoon in your mouth, that’s all that counts. Be lucky and the rest will fall into place. Be fortunate, and you’ll be thought great.”
“They mistake the constellations of the cosmic void for the stars made by ducks’ feet in the soft mud of the bog.”
(p. 45: Les Miserables, trans. by Julie Rose, 2008)
George Eliot
“Truly,” said Mr Lyon, smiling, “the uncertainty of things is a text rather too wide and obvious for fruitful application; and to discourse of it is, as one may say, to bottle up the air and make a present of it to those who are already standing out of doors.”
–Felix Holt, the Radical (p. 380, H.M. Caldwell edition)
Breathe Dead Hippo
You can’t breathe dead hippo waking, sleeping, and eating, and at the same time keep your precarious grip on existence. (Heart of Darkness. Joseph Conrad.)
Three Political Aphorisms
When the ruthless win, there is no good they are holding in reserve.
People who don’t know their friends when things go bad will never care to know you.
Republicans don’t want taxes raised–because they don’t need that in order to get their hands on all of your savings.
Thinking Ahead
While watching the Olympics I noticed many ads featuring big winners of races–which of course had to have been made, along with others, far ahead of time. So I have decided to make some posts up ahead of time for possible outcomes of the presidential election. Here’s one I’ll run if McCain wins:
Fool me once: shame on you.
Fool me twice: shame on me.
Fool me three times: fuck me with a pile driver and tell me how useful I was.
Sturgeon’s Law
Originally, the first was the law and the second was the revelation, but over time, the second became known as the law.
Nothing is always absolutely so.
&
Ninety percent of everything is crap.
My WCW/Interstate Driving “Poem”
Has there ever been
a red pickup that
wasn’t hauling an
open-bed trailer full
of construction crap?
Part of the Problem
Poppy Harlow this morning on CNN, discussing cars and gas mileage:
“Well, you can’t really compare apples and apples.”
I’ve Been Meaning to Ask
Is it third time’s a charm, or three strikes and you’re out?
Something I need to tell some of my relatives
(and something my friends probably want to tell me):
“Y’all have got a lot more talk than I’ve got listen.”
Dog day mornings
“It’s enough to conclude that it’s learning, however late, to think of a day as connected in some way to what went on during the one previous, and what will on the one following, rather than treating one, as I have for years and years, as something to pad with distractions and microscopic achievements until it’s time once more to wage war with sleep.”
Arthur Clarke’s 2001 Diary
In memorial of Arthur Clarke at his passing, Coudal linked to the diary Clarke kept while working on 2001: A Space Odyssey with Stanley Kubrick.
After various false starts and twelve-hour talkathons, by early May 1964 Stanley agreed that “The Sentinel” would provide good story material. But our first concept, and it is hard now for me to focus on such an idea, though it would have been perfectly viable — involved working up to the discovery of an extraterrestrial artifact as the climax, not the beginning, of the story. Before that, we would have a series of incidents or adventures devoted to the exploration of the Moon and Planets. For this Mark I version, our private title (never of course intended for public use) was “How the Solar System Was Won.”
Here are some of Clarke’s aphorisms, known as his Three Laws:
1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. Corollary: When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2) The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to venture beyond them into the impossible.
3) Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
Update: A few quotes from the diary:
October 17. Stanley has invented the wild idea of slightly fag robots who create a Victorian environment to put our heroes at their ease.
December 21. Much of afternoon spent by Stanley planning his Academy Award campaign for Dr. Strangelove. I get back to the Chelsea to find a note from Allen Ginsberg asking me to join him and William Burroughs at the bar downstairs. Do so thankfully in search of inspiration.
May 2. Strange and encouraging how much of the material I thought I’d abandoned fits in perfectly after all.
I’m making a list
Fat is flavor.
Food is fuel.
Food is love.