“We don’t live in the information age. That would be an insult to information, which, on some level, is supposed to inform. We live in the communication age. Ten billion fingers fumbling away, unautocorrecting e-mails, texts, and tweets; each one an opportunity to offend, alienate, aggrieve, all in public, and at light speed. The misinterpretation age.” — Jonathan Nolan, “Poker Face”
“Foreign policy is not a game of Risk. Great nations achieve lasting influence and security not by bloody gambits but through economic growth, scientific innovation, military deterrence, and the power of ideas.” – Steve Coll, “Remote Control”
“The expectation that cats can be made to change their nature, like wayward teens in a Scared Straight course, is a new development in feline-human relations. Humans bred dogs to be loyal and companionate; cats domesticated themselves. Biologists call them ‘commensal domesticates,’ meaning that they can live with humans, and yet, unlike most other domesticated species, they can revert at any time to feral status. What you glean from the general feline vibe is evolutionary truth: cats can take us or leave us.” — Ariel Levy, “Living-Room Leopards”
“In the search for words, thesauruses are useful things, but they don’t talk about the words they list. They are also dangerous. They can lead you to choose a polysyllabic and fuzzy word when a simple and clear one is better. The value of a thesaurus is not to make a writer seem to have a vast vocabulary of recondite words. The value of a thesaurus is in the assistance it can give you in finding the best possible word for the mission that the word is supposed to fulfill. Writing teachers and journalism courses have been known to compare them to crutches and to imply that no writer of any character or competence would use them. At best, thesauruses are mere rest stops in the search for the mot juste. Your destination is the dictionary.” – John McPhee, “Draft No. 4″
“A fundamental coward is not afraid of the putative cowardice-betraying things, like physical danger. Those things are cosmetic cowardice. In deep cowardice you are afraid of life itself, and you learn to wear a coat of bluster and cheer that hides the fear.” – Padgett Powell (interview with Jacob White in “Having It Together”)
now does our world descend
the path to nothingness
(cruel now cancels kind;
friends turn to enemies)
therefore lament,my dream
and don a doer’s doom
create is now contrive;
imagined,merely know
(freedom:what makes a slave)
therefore,my life,lie down
and more by most endure
all that you never were
hide,poor dishonoured mind
who thought yourself so wise;
and much could understand
concerning no and yes:
if they’ve become the same
it’s time you unbecame
where climbing was and bright
is darkness and to fall
(now wrong’s the only right
since brave are cowards all)
therefore despair,my heart
and die into the dirt
but from this endless end
of briefer each our bliss–
where seeping eyes go blind
(where lips forget to kiss)
where everything’s nothing
–arise,my soul;and sing.
– E.E. Cummings, “62” from 73 Poems (punctuation and spacing as in original)
annie died the other day
never was there such a lay—
whom,among her dollies,dad
first(“don’t tell your mother”)had;
making annie slightly mad
but very wonderful in bed
—saints and satyrs,go your way
youths and maidens:let us pray”
– E.E. Cummings, “22” from 73 Poems (punctuation and spacing as in original)
“I like writing sad songs, it’s a good bag to get into because you can actually acknowledge some deeper feelings of your own and put them in it. It’s a good vehicle, it saves having to go to a psychiatrist.” — Paul McCartney
dive for dreams
or a slogan may topple you
(trees are their roots
and wind is wind)
trust your heart
if the seas catch fire
(and live by love
though the stars walk backward)
honour the past
but welcome the future
(and dance your death
away at this wedding)
never mind a world
with its villains or heroes
(for god likes girls
and tomorrow and the earth)
– E.E. Cummings, “60” from 95 Poems
what Got him was Noth
ing & nothing’s exAct
ly what any
one Living(or some
body Dead
like
even a Poet)could
hardly express what
i Mean is
what knocked him over Wasn’t
(for instance)the Knowing your
whole(yes god
damned)life is a Flop or even
to Feel how
Everything(dreamed
& hoped &
prayed for
months & weeks & days & years
& nights &
forever)is Less Than
Nothing(which would have been
Something)what got him was nothing
– E.E. Cummings, “30” from 95 Poems (punctuation and spacing as in original)
life is more true than reason will deceive
(more secret or than madness did reveal)
deeper is life than lose:higher than have
—but beauty is more each than living’s all
multiplied with infinity sans iff
the mightiest meditations of mankind
cancelled are by one merely opening leaf
(beyond whose nearness there is no beyond)
or does some littler bird than eyes can learn
look up to silence and completely sing?
futures are obsolete;pasts are unborn
(here less than nothing’s more than everything)
death,as men call him,ends what they call men
—but beauty is more now than dying’s when
– E.E. Cummings, “LII” from 1 X 1 (punctuation and spacing as in original)
When you are young
and you move to a new place,
you know you are
going there to live.
Everything there is fresh
and very important.
When you are older, past
the mid-point of your life,
and you move to a new place,
you know you are going there
to die, and you know
it doesn’t matter,
you are now free.
“When I set myself the task of bringing to light what human beings keep hidden within them, not by the compelling power of hypnosis, but by observing what they say and what they show, I thought the task was a harder one than it really is. He that has eyes to see and ears to hear may convince himself that no mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his finger-tips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.” – Sigmund Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria (‘Dora’)” (ed. Gay)
Mansions for sale
up Evanston way
Along Edgemere Court
private drive
three-point-five million a pop
Thirty-five thousand a year
to heat and cool
Servants’ quarters
around back
Never been any slaves up here
“The point of playing games is to confront and accept our inadequacies, a comforting boilerplate that makes it easier to rationalize the cruelty of the way we are slotted into value-based roles in the world. You’re not as good as this person so you get less than them. You’re better so you get more. When playing against other people, this makes direct sense, but when play is computerized, this emotional mandate becomes masochism, a perverse mewling for the rack to be tightened to the point where it becomes intolerable, and once released, one lubricates one’s emotions with the shame of not having been able to tolerate more. When Milton’s Satan wonders if Adam and Eve’s happiness is ‘Proof of their obedience and their faith,’ he is critiquing the logic of game satisfaction and our expectation that accepting punishment should signify a player’s faith and obedience to the rules. But what differentiates players from slaves? Induced by the seductions and security of the game, the player accepts that their present conditions can be improved in some way by their own actions, and if there are inadequacies in their present, they must come from their own personal flaws. Slaves recognize that they are trapped in conditions that have little to do with their personal virtue, that under such conditions, play is a deeper form of servitude, a relieving pantomime that, rather than challenging authority structures, makes them more bearable. Games torture players by regularly affirming their inadequacy, yet their structural values are reassuring, sparing us the anxiety of having to create new values out of nothing at all. The fear of failure is always comforting in that it at least dispels that ambiguity over what the distinction between good and bad should be in the first place. Being met with the resistance of punishment reminds the player there is some godlike meaning we are capable of discovering, it depends only on the player doing well enough to prove worthy of it. Before we can go in search of it, we have to accept there is something inadequate in us, which in turn depends on belief in some ideal state to which we could compare ourselves. Is this what I’m supposed to be doing? Yes, this is what you’re supposed to be doing. Don’t screw it up. I’ll try.” — Michael Thomsen, “Reign in Drool” (emphasis in original)
“If a poet is anybody,he is somebody to whom things matter very little—somebody who is obsessed by Making. Like all obsessions,the Making obsession has disadvantages;for instance,my only interest in making money would be to make it. Fortunately,however,I should prefer to make almost anything else,including locomotives and roses. It is with roses and locomotives(not to mention acrobats Spring electricity Coney Island the 4th of July the eyes of mice and Niagra Falls)that my ‘poems’ are competing.” – E.E. Cummings, is 5 (punctuation and spacing as in original)
“My wife had opened a bottle of liqueur, on which the word ‘Ananas’ appeared and which was a gift from our friend Otto: for he has a habit of making presents on every possible occasion. It has to be hoped, I thought to myself, that some day he would find a wife to cure him of the habit. This liqueur gave off such a strong smell of fusel oil that I refused to touch it. My wife suggested our giving the bottle to the servants, but I—with even greater prudence—vetoed the suggestion, adding in a philanthropic spirit that there was no need for them to be poisoned either.” – Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (emphasis in original; ed. Gay)
“The Internet began as an unlikely collaboration between the military and academia. This fact alone explains much of its contradictory character. The military wanted to link their giant mainframe computers together to share data in order to build better bombs and rockets. They also needed a robust system, open-ended and flexible enough to be extended indefinitely but sufficiently rugged to withstand nuclear attack. The generals turned to the geeks just as they had during the Second World War. Isolated in their cozy ivory towers, the scientists wanted to share data and multitask easily. The system they created elegantly embodied their liberal ideals as well as the military’s strict requirements. It would be transparent from end to end. It was also anonymous and egalitarian, in that all data would be treated equally regardless of either source or destination. Scientists built these values into the Net’s core protocols, or agreed methods of doing things. Programs can certainly be devised to weigh, block, or trace data, but they are all additions to the protocols, not replacements. The fact is that freedom for good or evil is built into the very foundation of the Internet. Any attempt by anyone on any level to limit it in any way is an application built on top of that. And what one application can do, another can undo.” – Jay Nelson, “Can the Internet Be Tamed?” (emphasis in original)
“Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” – David Foster Wallace, “Kenyon Commencement Speech, 2005″
“Satan has one pure pleasure: waiting until you have forgotten him, moved on with your life, feeling, if not a certain variety of cheerfulness, precisely, then at least the deficiency of immediate despair, and stepping up beside you on the street, nestling up behind you in your bed, to remind you in his hissy whisper of just who and what you are not.” — Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4XVJj4jER4
“Travel shows you what you already know in ways you don’t recognize. How little you understand when you begin your journey. How much less when you end it.” — Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
“Our entire popular culture is in essence about high school: about reliving it, about its social relations, about the fears it hammers into your plans.” – Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
“Imagine for a moment, just a moment, that the reason the earth-ball is swarmy with transgression lies not in the fact that Man has foundered, failed, fallen, but that he has never risen, flourished, revised his basic constitution in the slightest, has always been, in a word, exactly what he is now: sin lodged in skin.” – Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
“One must learn to stay put in order to see.” – Lance Olsen, Calendar of Regrets
“No people are more often wrong than those who will not allow themselves to be wrong.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“Ordinary men commonly condemn what is beyond them.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
“Most young people think they are natural when they are only boorish and rude.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)
Squirrels in West Rogers Park
are fat. Skin ’em and gut ’em
and stuff ’em with cloves of sauteed
garlic. Sprinkle with black
pepper. Wrap ’em in foil.
Set ’em to baking in the coals.
They come out all juicy, the meat
melting off the bones. The skulls
can be dipped in clarified
butter and eaten whole.
“We hardly find any persons of good sense, save those who agree with us.” – Francois Duc De La Rochefoucauld, Reflections (trans. Bund & Friswell)