January 2012
93 posts
Let's get deep and talk about philosophy.
Pony is to horse as ______ is to unicorn.
What goes in that blank? Are pony unicorns a real thing? Real thing? What do I mean by that? Can this even be answered?!??!!?!
“Work expands to fill the time alotted for its completion.”
Have I mentioned I am currently at the home of a dead dog enthusiast? Well, let me clarify. I am at the home of a dog enthusiast who is dead, not a dead dog enthusiast.
Writing letters is, in fact, an intercourse with ghosts, and not only with the ghost of the recipient, but also with one’s own ghost which develops between the lines of the letter one is writing and even more so in a series of letters where one corroborates the other and can refer to it as a witness. How on earth did anyone get the idea that people could communicate by letter! Of a distant...
“You can learn more by going to the opera than you ever can by reading Emerson....”
“Leonardo wrote in his notebooks backwards, from right to left, so that they had...”
– David Markson, Wittgenstein’s Mistress
“If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and...”
– Tina Fey, on her time writing for SNL.
The messages that people send you when you haven’t been posting totally mean more. It’s like they actually missed you.
“Is there one anywhere who can answer for you those questions and feelings,...”
“I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is...”
One of my favorite mean things anyone ever said about anyone is when Faulkner described Henry James as “Truly, the nicest old lady I ever met.”
Oh, hello, you want more Faulkner shit?
How bout this? The story goes that once upon a time it was Faulkner’s daughter’s birthday and there was a party for her in the Faulkner household but Mr. William Faulkner did not take...
And now I go to sleep to Willie Nelson.
Love...
“Quarrels would not last long if the fault were only on one side.”
“He who lives without folly isn’t as wise as he thinks.”
“All women are fair once the candles are blown out.”
– Plutarch.
How funny is that shit? It’s like a modern frat boy aphorism translated into ancient greek talk and fucking articulated by one of the great intellectuals of the ancient world. That just makes me giggle a billion.
He was a flawed father.
And a point just came where the flawed part mattered more to me than the father part.
People say good fences make good neighbors.
But I find warm hellos and energetic waving is what really does the trick.
1 tag
Arguably my favorite word is qualmless.
I first saw this word in a work of David Markson.
In one of his books he keeps refering to himself as Novelist.
And at one point he does this little bit of musing:
If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth, Novelist were to burn an Andy Warhol, qualms?
Qualmless.
“This wasn’t the person he’d thought he was, or would have chosen to...”
Left my backpack on a train.
Has stuff I need in it.
Basically this is going to fuck up a lot of my shit until I can get my bag back from the enormous Metro Lost & Found Department which I believe is run by an extremely drunk Franz Kafka.
If you lose something on a Thursday night, Tuesday is basically the best case scenario for getting it back.
Can you fucking believe that?
http://pastebin.com/c0v9F1M8 →
The Meaning of Puppets. (I just found this strange...
Get out your old box of puppets and take out all of your puppets and just lay them all out on your living room floor and really look at them and try to figure out why human beings invented puppets.
Also, why do you fucking own so many puppets?
Are you waiting to take over Malkovich or something?
Okay, so puppets…
Their meaning is that they are the ultimate proof of this magical and...
There is a kind of radical honesty that comes as result of so often seeing through other people’s attempted deceptions that one is almost forced to adopt the absurd paranoia that you can never fool anyone and so the safest course is always to simply confess what you know because everyone has already figured it out anyway. This can then become a point of pride and one can begin to adopt the...
“No one can know if there really is such a thing as undiscovered genius.”
“There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who has lived...”
I love this quote and I’ve posted it before. But for some reason, no one ever seems to like it as much as I do. It fucking always rings the bell in my chest but apparently it leaves other chests totally silent. Whatever. The other weird thing about this one is that I have no idea where it is from. No idea who made it up. Sounds old school to me but I don’t have a clue. Anyway, here it...
“He had come a long way to this blue lawn and his dream must have seemed so close...”
“Where did you find this condom? It looks like I could have triplets using a...”
– An ex-girlfriend of mine.
“Style is the answer to everything —
Style is the difference,
a way of...”
“All men are frauds. The only difference between them is that some admit it. I...”
– H.L. Mencken
1 tag
And suddenly today on every sidewalk in DC: dead Christmas tree after dead Christmas tree.
“People seem willing to accept that he’s good at what he does but not that...”
– Someone Josh knows, about Stephen King.
Here’s what’s interesting about a good detective story to me. Keep in mind that I generally think mystery/thriller books are bullshit.
The way believable detectives solve mysteries is essentially a result of two things. They are philosophers with respect to human beings. They have clear, although often unarticulated, beliefs about how all human beings work. Two, they are students of...
