January 2012
17 posts
“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
2 tags
“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
