February 2012
13 posts
“Who said time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear. And if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other then what remains is a wound; disembodied.”
—Chris Marker, Sans Soleil, 1983
4 tags
”Insurgent movements are not the product of ‘hard times’; they are the product of insurgent cultures…. Effective insurgent cultures offer people hope. And from this starting point, political movements are possible—especially if times are hard.”
—Lawrence Goodwyn
2 tags
“Under your skin the moon is alive.”
—Pablo Neruda, Ode to a Naked Beauty
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“If you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, that’s not progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress. The progress comes from healing the wound that the blow made. They haven’t even begun to pull the knife out. They won’t even admit the knife is there.”
—Malcolm X
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“We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with candy will lead children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to...
5 tags
STOKELY CARMICHAEL, BLACK POWER ADDRESS AT UC...
“Thank you very much. It’s a privilege and an honor to be in the white intellectual ghetto of the West. We wanted to do a couple of things before we started. The first is that, based on the fact that SNCC, through the articulation of its program by its chairman, has been able to win elections in Georgia, Alabama, Maryland, and by our appearance here will win an election in California, in...
2 tags
“My quietness has a man in it, he is transparent and he carries me quietly, like a gondola, through the streets. He has several likenesses, like stars and years, like numerals. My quietness has a number of naked selves, so many pistols I have borrowed to protect myselves from creatures who too readily recognize my weapons and have murder in their heart! though in winter they are warm as roses,...
3 tags
M.I.A. SHOULDN’T HAVE APOLOGIZED →
“The outrage is tiresome and deeply hypocritical, in all the tiresome ways you’ve been tired out by before. M.I.A. was illustrating her line, acting out the attitude of the words: performing. Fine, it may not be legal to flip the bird on television, but that’s simply a remnant of the fifties we haven’t shaken. Unless somebody was handing out Xanax with the foam fingers, Lucas Oil Stadium...
3 tags
“We all have our little solipsistic delusions, ghastly intuitions of utter singularity: that we are the only one in the house who ever fills the ice-cube tray, who unloads the clean dishwasher, who occasionally pees in the shower, whose eyelid twitches on first dates; that only we take casualness terribly seriously; that only we fashion supplication into courtesy; that only we hear the whiny...
1 tag
“So therefore, I dedicate myself to myself, to my art, my sleep, my dreams, my labors, my suffrances, my loneliness, my unique madness, my endless absorption and hunger- because I cannot dedicate myself to any human being.”
—Jack Kerouac
January 2012
17 posts
1 tag
“Roaring dreams take place in a perfectly silent mind.”
— Jack Kerouac, The Scripture of the Golden Eternity
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“The beauty of things must be that they end.”
—Jack Kerouac, Tristessa
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DAVID FOSTER WALLACE, RACE, & REALITY
A week ago, for Martin Luther King Day, a friend and I organized an event for my dorm floor in which we discussed and addressed issues of race, inequality and discrimination, both in terms of their historical narratives as well as their modern day relevancy. The aim of the night was to observe the legacy and influence of a man and movement that fashioned a positive trend in America’s...
3 tags
“…most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. Or maybe this very lady is the low-wage...
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“…communism forgets that life is individual. Capitalism forgets that life is social, and the kingdom of brotherhood is found neither in the thesis of communism nor the antithesis of capitalism but in a higher synthesis. It is found in a higher synthesis that combines the truths of both.”
— Martin Luther King, Jr.
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“…the Negro must rise up with an affirmation of his own Olympian manhood. Any movement for the Negro’s freedom that overlooks this necessity is only waiting to be buried. As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free. Psychological freedom, a firm sense of self-esteem, is the most powerful weapon against the long night of physical slavery. No Lincolnian Emancipation...
1 tag
“I forgive your hand, right now rising, falling, and leaving trace unlike what it praises; I forgive your shadow for never becoming a stain to mark this road, this bed, but mostly this sea.”
—Valzhyna Mort, from “Island”
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“When I look up, I see people cashing in. I don’t see heaven or saints or angels. I see people cashing in on every decent impulse and every human tragedy.”
— Joseph Heller, Catch 22
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“When I was young, I believed in three things: Marxism, the redemptive power of cinema, and dynamite. Now I just believe in dynamite.”
— Sergio Leone
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“The most fevered opponents of civil rights in the fifties and sixties — and, for that matter, the most fervent defenders of slavery a century before — also usually made their case in in process terms rather than racist ones. They stood for the rights of the individual, or the rights of the states, against the federal Goliath. I am sure Paul’s motives derive from ideological fervor rather than a...
“O Sorriso (este, com maiúsculas) vem sempre de longe. É a manifestação de uma sabedoria profunda, não tem nada que ver com as contracções musculares e não cabe numa definição de dicionário. Principia por um leve mover de rosto, às vezes hesitante, por um frémito interior que nasce nas mais secretas camadas do ser. Se move músculos é porque não tem outra maneira de exprimir-se. Mas não terá? Não...
3 tags
The 2012 Republican Presidential Candidates:
Michelle Bachmann: "Don’t misunderstand. I am not here bashing people who are homosexuals, who are lesbians, who are bisexual, who are transgender. We need to have profound compassion for people who are dealing with the very real issue of sexual dysfunction in their life and sexual identity disorders.” (2004)
Ron Paul: "The rate of AIDS infection is on the increase again. From the gay point of view, the reasons seem quite sensible. First, these men don't really see a reason to live past their fifties. They are not married, they have no children, and their lives are centered on new sexual partners... because sex is the center of their lives, they want it to be as pleasurable as possible, which means unprotected sex. Third, they enjoy the attention & pity that comes with being sick." (1995 in a newsletter)
Rick Perry: "I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a Christian, but you don't need to be in the pew every Sunday to know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school. " (2011 in a campaign ad)
Mitt Romney: "I should tell my story. I'm also unemployed." (2011 while speaking to unemployed people in Florida. Romney's net worth is over $200 million.)
Newt Gingrich: "She's not young enough or pretty enough to be the wife of the President. And besides, she has cancer." (1994, about his first wife)
Rick Santorum: "Is anyone saying same-sex couples can’t love each other? I love my children. I love my friends, my brother. Heck, I even love my mother-in-law. Should we call these relationships marriage, too?" (2008)
Michelle Bachmann: "Carbon dioxide is portrayed as harmful. But there isn't even one study that can be produced that shows that carbon dioxide is a harmful gas." (2009 during a debate)
Mitt Romney: "PETA is not happy that my dog likes fresh air." (2006, when questioned about driving 12 hours with his dog in a cage strapped to the top of his car)
December 2011
34 posts
“I mean, I have the feeling that something in my mind is poisoning everything else.”
—Lolita: A Screenplay, Nabokov
1 tag
WHY WOULDN'T WE WRITE?
One cannot think of the purpose of academic writing without thinking of the process of writing itself. As a method of situating ourselves in debates questioning the nature of ontology, philosophy, life, and meaning, writing helps to establish our sense of involvement in the complex world in which we live, thereby establishing, confirming, and developing our identities and sense of self. In...
“I didn’t become your other half so you could bear half of my misery.”
—Tablo
“You’re beautiful, but you’re empty. No one could die for you.”
—Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince
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“Among other things, you’ll find that you’re not the first person who was ever confused and frightened and even sickened by human behavior. You’re by no means alone on that score, you’ll be excited and stimulated to know. Many, many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them- if you...
“I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without history, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents: I used to believe in every kind of magic.”
—Arthur Rimbaud
YOKE
There’s something inherently true, or fixed about the way recursiveness manifests through days, months, years, other nebulous and constructed sequences of time—primary school, middle school, high school, college. Time itself seems less fixed, allowing for fluidity, a back and forth between experiences and thought: they are both no longer completely distinct. Mornings rush into late...
“Emotions, in my experience, aren’t covered by single words. I don’t believe in “sadness,” “joy,” or “regret.” Maybe the best proof that the language is patriarchal is that it oversimplifies feeling. I’d like to have at my disposal complicated hybrid emotions, Germanic train-car constructions like, say, “the happiness that attends disaster.” Or: “the disappointment of sleeping with one’s...
“So that each is its own, now—each has fallen, blond stillness. Closer, above them, the damselflies pass as they would over water, if the fruit were water, or as bees would, if they weren’t somewhere else, had the fruit found already a point more steep in rot, as soon it must, if none shall lift it from the grass whose damp only softens further those parts where flesh goes soft. There are...
3 tags
FISH ARE FRIENDS, NOT FOOD: THE FALLACY OF THE...
The lives of animals at first thought might not seem all that dissimilar to the lives of humans. We both have similar bodily needs (we need food and nutrients, sleep, oxygen), similar physiological systems (digestive, nervous), we both organize in groups, live in communes, hunt and gather for the sake of our families and the members of our society. Yet still, as a society and culture, we tend to...
“Forest, I fear you! In my ruined heart your roaring wakens the same agony as in cathedrals when the organ moans and from the depths I hear that I am damned.”
—Charles Baudelaire
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz, or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: I love you as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul. I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself, and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose from the earth lives dimly in my body. I love you...
“Her eyes were the color of faraway love.”
– Pablo Neruda, The Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks
“All forms of love, of suffering, of madness; he searches himself, he exhausts within himself all poisons and preserves their quintessence’s.”
—Rimbaud
