Thursday, December 10, 2015

Ginger is a Tuber

He lives, then, on ginger-nuts, thought I; never eats a dinner, properly speaking; he must be a vegetarian then; but no; he never eats even vegetables, he eats nothing but ginger-nuts. My mind then ran on in reveries concerning the probable effects upon the human constitution of living entirely on ginger-nuts. Ginger-nuts are so called because they contain ginger as one of their peculiar constituents, and the final flavoring one. Now what was ginger? A hot, spicy thing. Was Bartleby hot and spicy? Not at all. Ginger, then, had no effect upon Bartleby. Probably he preferred it should have none.

-Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener"

Wednesday, November 11, 2015

Derrida's Tribute to Deleuze

http://www.usc.edu/dept/comp-lit/tympanum/1/derrida.html

"The historian of philosophy who proceeded with a sort of configurational election of his own genealogy,..."

Deleuze on Marxism: "What interests us the most is the analysis of capitalism as an immanent system that constantly pushes back its proper limits, and that always finds them again on a larger scale, because the limit is Capital itself."
http://genius.com/945319

Thursday, October 22, 2015

A Heap See

Check out the enfolded dimension at 0:33:

"That day...everything was possible...Future became present...that is, no more time, a glimpse of eternity." - Michelet

Sunday, August 9, 2015

We looked at each other, for a long strange moment that I’ve never forgotten, actually, like two animals meeting at twilight, during which some clear, personable spark seemed to fly up through his eyes and I saw the creature he really was – and he, I believe, saw me. For an instant we were wired together and humming, like two engines on the same circuit.
- Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

Monday, February 9, 2015

“It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. … Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated.”

— Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

Saturday, August 30, 2014

Steeple

"Even in Paris, in one of the ugliest parts of the town, I know a window from which one can see across a first, a second, and even a third layer of jumbled roofs, street beyond street, a violet bell, sometimes ruddy, sometimes too, in the finest 'prints' which the atmosphere makes of it, of an ashy solution of black; which is, in fact, nothing else than the dome of Saint-Augustin, and which imparts to this view of Paris the character of some of the Piranesi views of Rome."

"It was always to the steeple that one must return, always it which dominated everything else, summing up the houses with an unexpected pinnacle, raised before me like the Finger of God, Whose Body might have been concealed below among the crowd of human bodies without fear of my confounding It, for that reason, with them."  
- From Swann's Way, Marcel Proust

Wednesday, August 20, 2014

Bacall

"It was quite a terrifying experience for me," Bacall told Fresh Air's Terry Gross in 1994. "I was this kid and I was scared to death of all these pros around me. ... My head would shake and my hands would shake, and I discovered if I kept my head down and looked up, my head would not shake, so I started to do that when I could, when it was appropriate in a scene."

http://www.npr.org/2014/08/15/340632455/in-acting-and-in-life-lauren-bacall-loved-the-idea-of-adventure

Friday, June 6, 2014

"I think Kafka was right when he said that for a modern, secular, non-religious man, bureaucracy, state bureaucracy is the only remaining contact with the dimension of the divine."  -- Zizek

Sunday, December 1, 2013

"It's a facsimile of life for those who hold fast to it..."

Wednesday, October 16, 2013

This GOP debt ceiling/default debacle makes me think of a man (esp. Speaker Boehner) beholding the sight of his own anus.

Thursday, August 22, 2013

"We are going to fail and within those failures, that's where the flavor lies." 

Thursday, June 27, 2013

"I felt like I gave the world a piece of me that I didn't know about." 
-- CL Smooth on the making of "T.R.O.Y.".


Tuesday, March 26, 2013

“It’s entirely conceivable that life’s splendor surrounds us all, and always in it’s complete fullness, accessible but veiled, beneath the surface, invisible, far away. But there it lies —not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If we call it by the right word, by the right name, then it comes. This is the essence of magic, which doesn’t create but calls.”

Franz Kafka

Friday, February 22, 2013

You mean Jared?  You know I had an eerily similar thought not that long ago.  The last commercial where they honor him for like 10 years of weight loss he looks like a marrionette (sp) whose only purpose is having lost weight. (NB -- what is the moment where he was larger than he once was but  smaller than he will become).

> what's up man?  i think the new pioneers should do a story on jerry the subway guy.  his weight loss story has been so commodified that every time he appears in ads now it seems like his personhood has been stripped away.  like he is spot the budweiser dog now.
>

Wednesday, December 19, 2012

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TJ64ZWy6B-I
Twice we have been wrapped up in some kind of national drama and a catastrophe has come in from out of our collective blind spot, swept away the import of the previous discourse, and laid bare a "true" problem.  In the case of the 2012 election, Superstorm Sandy displaced the petty bickering between the two candidates, illustrating that the ongoing cataclysmic global warming is more important than any domestic squabbles.  Secondly, all the b.s. around the "fiscal cliff" (December 2012) was pushed into the background by the Newtown elementary school shooting, demonstrating the need for adequate gun control laws in the U.S.