Quote of the day

[iambiguous]

Iris Murdoch

What a queer gamble our existence is. We decide to do A instead of B and then the two roads diverge utterly and may lead in the end to heaven and to hell. Only later one sees how much and how awfully the fates differ. Yet what were the reasons for the choice? They may have been forgotten. Did one know what one was choosing? Certainly not.

In other words, the Benjamin Button Syndrome.

The theatre is an attack on mankind carried on by magic: to victimize an audience every night, to make them laugh and cry and suffer and miss their trains. Of course actors regard audiences as enemies, to be deceived, drugged, incarcerated, stupefied. This is partly because the audience is also a court against which there is no appeal.

Cue the bots?

Time, like the sea, unties all knots.

Or creates them.

Love doesn't think like that. All right, it's blind as a bat--'
'Bats have radar. Yours doesn't seem to be working.

Let's run this by Maia and her own radar.

“I think I fell in love with you when you were shouting at Romeo and Juliet, 'Don't touch each other!'"

You tell me.

Jealousy is perhaps the most involuntary of all strong emotions. It steals consciousness, it lies deeper than thought. It is always there, like a blackness in the eye, it discolours the world.

And all it cost me was Supannika.

[iambiguous]

Death

“No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found.” Samuel Beckett

Same for us. Only we're basically nobodies and he was anything but.

“For to fear death, my friends, is only to think ourselves wise without really being wise, for it is to think that we know what we do not know. For no one knows whether death may not be the greatest good that can happen to man.” Plato

Death...formally? On the other hand, there's still this: did Plato [and all the rest of them back then] accept Jesus Christ as their own personal savior?
Right, IC?

“Leonard asks me if there's anything I need to know before he dies, I think about it for a minute, turn to him, say what's the meaning of life, Leonard? He laughs, says that's an easy one, my son, it's whatever you want it to be.” James Frey

Maybe, but I doubt that God is fooled.

“We cannot, after all, judge a biography by its length, by the number of pages in it; we must judge by the richness of the contents...Sometimes the 'unfinisheds' are among the most beautiful symphonies.” Viktor E. Frankl

Next up: you bring this up in the death camp.

“If this continues, if this goes on, then when I die, your memories of me will be my greatest accomplishment. Your memories will be my most lasting impressions.” David Levithan

Sure, if you actually believe this, work a bit harder on getting me to.

“I am still in the land of the dying; I shall be in the land of the living soon.” John Newton

His last words, it's said.
Or were they?

[iambiguous]

Catch-22

Gen. Dreedle [to Captain Yossarian who is buck naked]: Unless I miss my guess, Captain, you’re out of uniform.

So, anyone here post buck naked?

Maj. Major: Is something wrong?
Chaplain: No, no. I…I just thought I saw something.
Maj. Major: A naked man in a tree?
Chaplain: Yes, that’s it.
Danby [looking through binoculars]: That’s just Yossarian.

I once had a tree like that myself.
But let's just leave it at that.

Milo: I want to serve this to the men. Taste it and let me know what you think.
[Yossarian takes a bite and spits it out]
Yossarian: What is it?
Milo: Chocolate covered cotton.
Yossarian: What are you, crazy?
Milo: No good, huh?
Yossarian: For Christ’s sake, you didn’t even take the seeds out!
Milo: Is it really that bad?
Yossarian: It’s cotton!!
Milo: They’ve got to learn to like it.
Yossarian: Why?
Milo: I saw an opportunity to corner the market in cotton. I didn’t know there’d be a glut of the stuff. I’ve got warehouses full of it all over Europe. People eat cotton candy, don’t they? This is even better, it’s made out of real cotton.
Yossarian: People can’t eat cotton!
Milo: They’ve got to, for the Syndicate.

For all we know, that might be Milo himself.

Yossarian: He was very old.
Luciana: But he was a boy.
Yossarian: Well, he died. You don’t get any older than that.

Logical enough for you?

Yossarian: What right did they have to take all the girls?
Old Woman: Catch-22.
Yossarian: What? What did you say?
Old Woman: Catch-22.
Yossarian: How do you know it was Catch-22?
Old woman: The girls said, “Why are you taking us away?” The men said, “Catch-22.” The girls said, “What right do you have?” The men said, “Catch-22.” All they kept saying was, “Catch-22, Catch-22.” What does it mean?
Yossarian: Didn’t they show it to you? Didn’t you ask them to read it to you?
Old woman: They don’t have to show it to us.
Yossarian: Who says so?
Old woman: The law says so.
Yossarian: What law?
Old woman: Catch-22.

No, really, let's make it the law here. While we're still around to flout it.

Yossarian: I didn’t know.
Luciana: That I work for Milo? Everybody works for Milo.

As for the ending, I don’t think it’ll catch on.

[iambiguous]

The paper being chased here is a transcript of grades…and then a diploma. It hardly focuses at all on the paper that paper chases: the kind we stuff into our wallets. This is back in 1973 though. And idealism was nobler than the pursuit of mere bank accounts. Real integrity instead revolved around securing your humanity in a culture that wants to reduce you down to a pursuit of paper.

In any event the paper now is mostly electronic. It’s all about the numbers. And Harvard law may as well be be taught right on Wall Street.

The “law” is always tricky though. Often it can be infuriating because we know how words can be twisted by a lawyer to create any particular “reality” she chooses. And we know the law can be bought. We know it is used more for political gain than to secure something we might deem to be “just”. But without the rule of law, what’s the alternative? Philosopher kings? Metaphysical morality? Dog eat dog survival of the fittest?

We are stuck with it aren’t we?

In any event the filmmaker tacks on an ending here that doesn’t even have the balls to live up to the film’s own “message”!


The Paper Chase

Kingsfield: Loudly Mr. Hart, fill this room with your intelligence.

Here, of course, for some, it's those blasted emojis.

Toombs [in the dorm after a loud piercing scream]: That’s just the screamer, men. Screams every Friday and Sunday night at exactly 12 midnight. Nobody’s ever seen him. Not that I know of. They say that Kingsfield drove him mad. He’s driven a lot of lawyers mad over the past 40 years that he’s been teaching here. I heard he ripped up a 1-L this morning so bad, the guy lost his breakfast.
Hart: That’s true. That was me.

So, who is our own Kingsfield?
Me, I'm thinking.

Toombs [to Hart]: There’s one more thing. All that stuff about grades is true. You gotta work like hell. No kidding. Nobody jokes about grades. Try getting a job without them.

Though, sure, there are always loopholes. And not just in the law.

Kingsfield: The study of law is something new and unfamiliar to most of you. We use the Socratic Method here. I call on you, ask you a question and you answer it. Why don’t I just give you a lecture? Because through my questions, you learn to teach yourselves. Through this method of questioning, answering… questioning, answering…we seek to develop in you the ability to analyze that vast complex of facts that constitute the relationships of members within a given society. Questioning and answering. At times you may feel that you have found the correct answer. I assure you that is a total delusion on your part. You will never find the correct, absolute and final answer. In my classroom there is always another question…and question to follow your answer.

Of course, some answers will get you an A and others an F. If you get my drift.

Kingsfield: You teach yourselves the law…but I train your mind. You come in here with a skull full of mush and you leave thinking like a lawyer.

Then of course this part: https://www.filevine.com/blog/the-ultim ... yer-jokes/

Hart [to Susan]: You’re up against some incredible minds here. I look at the students and I think this guy’s gonna be a supreme court justice, this guy’s gonna run Wall Street, this guy might even be president of the United States. What it is though is this incredible sense of power.

See where the “Socratic Method” begins to shut down? For example, the questions it doesn’t encourage him to ask?

[iambiguous]

Philosophy

“People who lean on logic and philosophy and rational exposition end by starving the best part of the mind. ” William Butler Yeats

Unless, of course, up in the clouds, that's the only part that works.

“There's only one day at a time here, then it's tonight and then tomorrow will be today again.” Bob Dylan

Of course, the guy is a fucking genius.

“...songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with.” Bob Dylan

Well, that surely explains something, right?

“Who is to decide which is the grimmer sight: withered hearts, or empty skulls?” Honoré de Balzac

Next up: withered skulls.

“I care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.” Charles Dickens

Next up: oblivion.

“He who cannot obey himself will be commanded." Friedrich Nietzsche

Imagine my plight then!

[iambiguous]

The Paper Chase

Susan: You law students are all the same. You can’t let things alone. You have to organize. The endless defining of irrational human behavior into tight little patterns. People are not rational. People are irrational.

Some tighter than others. On the other hand [and you know what's coming], irrational regarding what?

Moss: So you flunked all your practice exams, huh? Every one?
Brooks: Yeah, every one.
Moss: Aww man, don’t look like that, you’ll be saved. Every person in this house almost flunked out of law school in their first year. It’s not hard to see why; they had broads on the brain. It’s the worst thing that can happen to a first-year law student. I don’t suppose that’s your problem?
Brooks: No, no. I’m married.
Moss: Well, the vote’s split on that, but I’ve saved all kinds. I moved in here and saved all these dum-dums. They’ll all graduate, all from Harvard. I give them a little lecture before each exam. They go out and take it on their own. They remember things for a day or two. They’re not stupid. Did you bring any samples of your work?
Brooks: Yeah, I brought some notes…
Moss: Notes don’t mean a thing. Take this down. Imagine an old woman comes to dinner with you. While you are mixing her drink, she slips on an ice cube, slides across the room smashing into your new breakfast table, demolishing it and killing herself. After you’ve cleaned her up off the floor you discover a statute which says homeowners must keep their land free of dangerous ice, especially but not exclusively ice on their sidewalks. And you find out the old lady suffered from dropsy a falling sickness. So you are sued on two accounts. The one relying on the statute and the other ordinary negligence. Can they recover from you for having caused the old lady’s death? Can you recover the price of the breakfast table from the old bag’s estate? Write out an answer. Take half an hour to do it. No help from your friend. Come back a month before exams, and we’ll go over it together. Don’t worry. There’s no possibility of error in my analysis.

Let's imagine Moss here.

Hart: My mind is really in his. I know what he is saying before he says it. I am three questions ahead. I am having a true Socratic experience.
Susan: Three questions ahead, Hart? You’re only three answers ahead.

Uh, regarding what?
Sorry, I just can't help bringing this shit down to Earth.

Susan: They finally got you, Hart, they sucked all that Midwestern charm right out of you. Look, he’s got you scared to death. You’re going to pass, because you’re the kind the law school wants. You’ll get your diploma, your piece of paper that is no different than this [holding up a roll of toilet paper] and you can stick it in your silver box with all the other paper in your life. Your birth certificate, your driver’s license, your marriage license, your stock certificates…and your will.

Silver box?

Hart: They’re just grades, Kevin.
Brooks: You know better than that. It’s a number. It’s a letter. But it determines salaries and futures.

Let's introduce them here.
While we can?

Kingsfield: Mr Hart, can you relate our case to the summary we’ve been building?
Hart: Thank you, I prefer to pass.
Kingsfield: What did you say?
Hart: Well, I have nothing relevant to say concerning the case. However, when I have something relevant to say, I shall raise my hand.
Kingsfield: Mister Hart, would you step down here?
[Hart walks to the podium]
Kingsfield: Here is a dime. Take it, call your mother, and tell her there is serious doubt about you ever becoming a lawyer.
Hart [turning back around as he walks toward the door]: You…are a son of a bitch, Kingsfield!
Kingsfield: Mr. Hart! That is the most intelligent thing you’ve said all day. You may take your seat.

True story? Well, it is now.

Susan: Here’s your mail.
[hands Hart an envelope marked “GRADES ENCLOSED”]
Susan: I just got a letter from my father, something very interesting. My divorce is final. A piece of paper, and I’m free.
[pauses]
Susan: Aren’t you going to open your grades?

Nope. He turns the envelope containing them into an airplane and sends it flying out into the Atlantic ocean. But then, he doesn’t have to open it, does he? We already know that Kingsfield gave him an A. In the movie. That's not in the book at all.

[iambiguous]

By sheer coincidence John Houseman again. His last film.

But forget about the law here. This time the ideas revolve around the subjunctive cacaphony that is always, “how ought I to live my life?”.

Let’s start here: How many films are there where the leading character is the “director of undergraduate philosophy studies of a very fine women’s college”? Still: Ought she to focus on that or try to fix her flaccid marriage? Or, for that matter, flaccid life.

Turning fifty. It’s a personal experience of course but, for some, an ominous one. A time of Existential Doubt. The part ahead suddenly seems a lot shorter than the part behind. So the regrets become more palpable. And you are particularly keen on making the right choices now. But particularly keen as well on just how agonizing that can be. Especially as your options begin to thin. Or when you find [over and again] that you are faced with what seems to be only the lesser of two evils.


Another Woman

Marion [voiceover]: If someone had asked me when I reached my fifties to assess my life, I would have said that I had achieved a decent measure of fulfillment, both personally and professionally. Beyond that, I would say I don’t choose to delve.

Tben this part: "old age is no place for sissies."

Lynn: Don’t you know how Paul feels about you?
Miriam: Sure, we’ve always been very close.
Lynn: You’re deluding yourself. Of course in a way he idolizes you…but he also hates you.
Miriam: I’m sorry but I don’t accept that.
Lynn: You’re such a perceptive woman…how could you not understand his feelings?
Miriam: Look, I’m late. To tell you the truth I make it a practice to never get into these kinds of conversations. You know they’re fruitless and people just say things they always regret later.

Of course, that will never stop us here!

Ken [to his ex-wife in a room filled with people]: Forgive me, I accept your condemnation.

In other words, he might even mean it.

Miriam [narrating]: I thumbed through my mother’s edition of Rilke. When I was 16 I had done a paper on his poem about the panther and on the image that the panther saw as it stared out from its cage. And that image I concluded was death. Then I saw my mother’s favorite poem, “Archaic Torso of Apollo”. There were stains on the page that I believe were her tears. They fell across the last line: For here there is no place that does not see you/You must change your life.

If only virtually?

Paul: Do you remember some years ago when I showed you something I’d written, do you remember what you said?
Marion: No, I don’t remember. I was probably just trying to be truthful.
Paul: Yes, I’m sure. You said, “This is overblown, it’s too emotional, it’s maudlin. Your dreams may be meaningful to you, but to the objective observer, it’s just so embarrassing.”
Marion: I said that?
Paul: Exactly your words. So I tried not to embarrass you any more.

The same here, right?

[excerpt from Miriam’s dream]
Hope: Life.
Psychiatrist: Life?
Hope: The universe. The cruelty and injustice. The suffering of humanity. Illness. Aging. Death.
Psychiatrist: All very abstract. Don’t worry about humanity. Get your own life in order. We can continue with this tomorrow.
[Hope gets up and leaves the office]
Psychiatrist: What would you say she is suffering from.
Miriam [decisively]: Self-deception.
Psychiatrist: It’s a little general.
Miriam: But I don’t think she can part with her lies.
Psychiatrist: No? Too bad.
Miriam: Not that she doesn’t want to.
Psychiatrist: It is precisely that she doesn’t want to. When she wants to she will.
Miriam: It’s all happening so fast.
Psychiatrist: I have to hurry. I’m trying to prevent her from killing herself.

Woody’s world. A world where Hope’s list of abstractions is something he concerned himself with only, well, abstractly. It’s an apolitical world that existed only because it could exist—because the outside world never did intrude much at all. Or largely on his terms. On the other hand, tell that to Ronan.

Miriam [to Hope]: Fifty. I didn’t think anything of turning thirty. Everybody said I would. Then they said I’d be crushed turning forty…but they were wrong. I didn’t give it a second thought. Then they said I would be traumatized turning fifty. And they were right. I’ll tell you the truth, I don’t think I’ve ever recovered my balance since turning fifty.

Let's just say don't get me started.

Marion [voiceover]: I closed the book, and felt this strange mixture of wistfulness and hope, and I wondered if a memory is something you have or something you’ve lost. For the first time in a long time, I felt at peace.

Next up: 60.

[iambiguous]

Richard Wright from Native Son

...the civilization which had given birth to Bigger contained no spiritual sustenance, had created no culture which could hold and claim his allegiance and faith, had sensitized him and had left him stranded,”

That would be our civilization as well, right?

...in a boy like Bigger, young, unschooled, whose subjective life was clothed in the tattered rags of American “culture,” this primitive fear and ecstasy were naked, exposed, unprotected by religion or a framework of government or a scheme of society whose final faiths would gain his love and trust; unprotected by trade or profession, faith or belief; opened to every trivial blast of daily or hourly circumstance.

Cue the Communists?

Whether he’ll follow some gaudy, hysterical leader who’ll promise rashly to fill the void in him, or whether he’ll come to an understanding with the millions of his kindred fellow workers under trade-union or revolutionary guidance depends upon the future drift of events in America.

You tell me. In other words, before I tell you.

...the city in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in America could be an alluring place; but it also often was, for persons without brains or money or simply good luck, a crucible in which the superficial elements of personality and civilization were quickly burned away, to reveal the animal underneath.

We'll need an update, or course.
Care to hear mine?

As he stumbled along a high bright object caught his eyes; he looked up. Atop a building across the street, above the heads of the people, loomed a flaming cross. At once he knew that it had something to do with him. But why should they burn a cross? As he gazed at it he remembered the sweating face of the black preacher in his cell that morning talking intensely and solemnly of Jesus, of there being a cross for him, a cross for everyone, and of how the lowly Jesus had carried the cross, paving the way, showing how to die, how to love and live eternal. But he had never seen a cross burning like that one upon the roof. Were white people wanting him to love Jesus, too?

God and race and burning crosses.

How soon will someone speak the word the resentful millions will understand: the word to be, to act, to live?

Other than Donald Trump, say.

[iambiguous]

If you are going to choose someone to play a “humanoid alien”, you can do worse than Ziggy Stardust. And wasn’t David Bowie up on the wall in Men In Black?

I only vaguely recall what this is all about. I watch it now mostly because it is fascinating just to take it in from time to time. The ambiance as it were. Especially after he meets Mary-Lou and starts accummulating all the televisions.

Just one more speculation about the relationship between “down here” and “up there”. And [of course] the role that the government [in conjunction with Big Business] will inevitably play in tweeking that to their own advantage.

ETs always seemed to make sense to me. Believing in them is not the same as believing in ghosts or in Gods. After all, given the estimated billions of potential earths “out there” it’s not hard to imagine that maybe an advanced technological civilization has “been here”. I haven’t seen any hard evidence actually demonstrating it, of course, but I don’t put it in the same category as, say, the “supernatural”.

Nicolas Roeg originally wanted to cast the 6-foot-10 author Michael Crichton as Thomas Jerome Newton.

James Sallis, writing in the The Boston Globe, describes “The Man Who Fell To Earth” as a Christian parable, not only about the corruption of an innocent being, but as being highly critical of the 1950s conventionalism which Tevis grew up with, along with environmental destruction and the Cold War.

David Bowie worked on a soundtrack for the film that was rejected. Many of the ideas he had for the soundtrack would later be utilized in his 1977 album ‘Low’. IMDb

Too bad. Low is one of my favorite albums. And it fits right into the “ambiance” I noted above.



The Man Who Fell To Earth

Farnsworth: We’ve been together a long time now and I don’t see why you would want to sell off this division. I mean, if I owned a copyright on the Bible, I wouldn’t sell it to Random House.

Let’s just say he doesn’t see the bigger picture.

Mary-Lou: You know Tommy, you’re a freak. I don’t mean that unkindly. I like freaks. And that’s why I like you.

She'd love me then. How about you?

Bryce: Why'd you come here?
Thomas: Where I come from, there's a terrible drought. We saw pictures of your planet on television. We saw the water. In fact, our word for your planet means - planet of water.
Bryce: You watched it all on television?

Sort of let's say.

Thomas: I can’t go to church.
Mary-Lou: Come on, Tommy, it’s a real good church. It makes me feel so good. It gives me something to believe in. Everybody needs to have a meaning in their lives. I mean when you look out at the sky, don’t you feel that somewhere out there there has got to be a God? Got to be…

See, I told you.

Thomas: Ask me…
Bryce: What?
Thomas: The question you’ve been wanting to ask ever since we met.
Bryce: Are you Lithuanian?

Nope, not even close.

Thomas: The strange thing about television is that it doesn’t tell you everything. It shows you everything about life for nothing, but the true mysteries remain. Perhaps it’s in the nature of television. Just waves in space.

Or, perhaps, strings?

Thomas: If I stay, I’ll die.
Mary-Lou: What’re you talking about? Take me with you, I’ll see you don’t die.
Thomas: I can’t stay.
[walks away from her]
Mary-Lou: You’re an alien!

Actually, as I recall, she thinks he's an illegal alien whose visa has expired!

Bryce: Don’t you feel bitter about it…everything?
Thomas: Bitter, no. We’d have probably treated you the same if you’d come over to our place.

The realist?

Waiter: I think perhaps Mr. Newton has had enough, don’t you?
Bryce: I think…perhaps…you’re right.

Again, I forget: was he?

[Impenitent]

On a roadside sign:

The inventor of autocorrect died
The funnel will be held tomato

-Imp

[iambiguous]

John Fowles from The Magus

The human race is unimportant. It is the self that must not be betrayed.
I suppose one could say that Hitler didn't betray his self.
You are right. He did not. But millions of Germans did betray their selves. That was the tragedy. Not that one man had the courage to be evil. But that millions had not the courage to be good.

I'm way, way, way beyond this, however.

The most important questions in life can never be answered by anyone except oneself.

I'm way, way, way beyond this, however.

You wish to be liked. I wish simply to be. One day you will know what that means, perhaps. And you will smile. Not against me. But with me.

Next up: oblivion?

I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope...

Among other things, that's bullshit.
Unless, of course, he's right.

Liking other people is an illusion we have to cherish in ourselves if we are to live in society.

So, how am I doing here?

Men love war because it allows them to look serious. Because they imagine it is the one thing that stops women laughing at them. In it they can reduce women to the status of objects. That is the great distinction between the sexes. Men see objects, women see relationship between objects. Whether the objects love each other, need each other, match each other. It is an extra dimension of feeling we men are without and one that makes war abhorrent to all real women - and absurd. I will tell you what war is. War is a psychosis caused by an inability to see relationships. Our relationship with our fellow-men. Our relationship with our economic and historical situation. And above all our relationship to nothingness. To death.

Pick three:
1] the philosophy of war
2] the psychology of war
3] capitalism and the military industrial complex

[iambiguous]

A tiny town somewhere in New Hampshire. Everybody knows everybody else. But that’s only past the front door. In other words, as is always the case, inside a few of the homes are any number of “family secrets”.

You watch enough of these films and you begin wonder just how many families out there are not dysfunctional.

Then again who wants to see a movie about them?

I always see this as the way each of us pieces the past together differently. And then the way we stitch what we think was true into what we think is right and wrong. And then the way we have to stitch that into all the conflicting narratives of everyone else we interact with. But what are the limits of our responsibilities to “family”. How much shit should we be forced to take before we strike back— or just go out on our own?

And even in a small town the politics of class is everywhere. Or maybe especially there because it sticks out all the more glaringly.

But it’s mostly about men and violence.

How the hell are we supposed to feel about this guy? Well, how close to or far away from his life is yours? I know some chunks of my life certainly do overlap.


Affliction

Rolfe [voiceover]: This is the story of my older brother’s strange criminal behaviour and disappearance. We who loved him no longer speak of Wade. It’s as if he never existed.

I tried that myself.

Wade: You know I get the feeling like a whipped dog some days. Some night I’m gonna bite back, I swear!
Rolfe: Haven’t you already done a bit of that?
Wade: No, no, I haven’t. Not really. I’ve growled a little, but I haven’t bit.

I bit. As, no doubt, you can tell.

Lena: How about you Rolfe? Are you saved?
Rolfe: No, I’m not.
Lena: But then you’ll be in Hell.
Rolfe: I guess I will. Me and Mom and Wade and Pop. We’ll all be there together.

Like in so many ways, they aren't there already.

Lena: Jesus is more powerful than any demon.
Glen: Oh go fuck yourself!

So, has He met his match?

Glen: That’s what I’ve got for children. Jesus freaks and candy-asses!

Next up: what they've got for a father.

Lillian: I’m sorry about your mother, Wade. I liked her. You never know how much women like that suffer. It’s like they live their lives with the sound turned off – and then they’re gone.

Any women like that here?

Wade: It makes me mad. That somebody can pay to kill somebody, his own father-in-law, and not be punished for it. Don’t that piss you off?
Rolfe: Not particularly.
Wade: Right’s right, goddamnit! Don’t you care what’s right?
Rolfe: I care about what happened. The truth.

Next thing I knew I was fractured and fragmented about that too. I Still am.

Rolfe [voiceover]: You will say that I should have known terrible things were about to happen. You will say that I was responsible. But even so, what could I have done by then? Wade lived on the edge of his emotions. He was always first to receive the brunt of our father’s anger. He had no perspective to retreat to, even in a crisis.

And that can take you almost anywhere. After all, look where it took me.

Wade: Love? What the fuck do you know about love?
Glen: Love? I’m made of love!

Famous last words.

Rolfe [voiceover]: The historical facts are known by everyone. All of Lawford, all of New Hampshire, some of Massachusetts. Facts do not make history. Our stories, Wade’s and mine, describe the lives of the boys and men for thousands of years: boys who were beaten by their fathers, whose capacity for love and trust was crippled almost at birth, men whose best hope for connection with other human beings lay in detachment, as if life were over. It’s how we keep from destroying in turn our own children and terrorizing the women who have the misfortune to love us; how we absent ourselves from the tradition of male violence; how we decline the seduction of revenge. Jack’s truck turned up three days later in a shopping mall in Toronto. Wade killed Jack, just as surely as Jack did not kill Evan Twombley, even accidentally. The link between Jack and Twombley, LaRiviere and Mel Gordon existed only in Wade’s wild imaginings. And briefly, I admit, in mine as well. LaRiviere and Mel Gordon were indeed in business. The Parker Mountain Ski Resort is now advertised across the country. The community of Lawford, as such, no longer exists. It is an economic zone between Littleton and Catamount. The house is still in Wade’s name, and I keep paying taxes on it. It remains empty. Now and then, I drive out there and sit in my car, and wonder, why not let it go? Why not let LaRiviere buy it and build the condominiums he wants there? We want to believe Wade died that same November, froze to death on a bench or a sidewalk. You cannot understand how a man, a normal man, a man like you and me, could do such a terrible thing. Unless the police happen to arrest a vagrant who turns out to be Wade Whitehouse, there will be no more mention of him. Or his friend, Jack Hewitt. Or our father. The story will be over, except that I continue.

Next up: the sweet hereafter?

[iambiguous]

Meaning

“Everything on the radio is crap...It's fast food for your ears. It doesn't make you think. It isn't even about anything - not anything real. Don't you think music should say something?” Hannah Harrington

And then there's talk -- squawk -- radio.

“These songs tell me I'm not alone. If you look at it that way, music...music can see you through anything.” Hannah Harrington

Anyone here still believe that?

“We have an odd relationship with words. We learn a few when we are small, throughout our lives we collect others through education, conversation, our contact with books, and yet, in comparison, there are only a tiny number about whose meaning, sense, and denotation we would have absolutely no doubts, if one day, we were to ask ourselves seriously what they meant. Thus we affirm and deny, thus we convince and are convinced, thus we argue, deduce, and conclude, wandering fearlessly over the surface of concepts about which we only have the vaguest of ideas, and, despite the false air of confidence that we generally affect as we feel our way along the road in verbal darkness, we manage, more or less, to understand each other and even, sometimes, to find each other.” José Saramago

Anyone here still believe that?

“Death is only meaningless if it does not change us." James Islington

Oh, it changes us, alright.

“God, it's like reality's completely shifted on me. I used to think I was standing on such solid ground. If I wanted something badly enough, I just worked like hell for it. Now I can't decide what to do, which move to make. All the things I counted on aren't there for me anymore.” Tess Gerritsen

Of course, that could never happen to you.

“Life is like that, full of words that are not worth saying or that were worth saying once but not any more, each word that we utter will take up the space of another more deserving word, not deserving in its own right, but because of the possible consequences of saying it.” José Saramago

You first.

[iambiguous]

It begins with an accident. Then a ferocious argument. They’re practically spitting on each other. Then he backs off. Then the cops come.

Johnny the truck driver is a familiar face to the cops. He was in prison three times. Once he put his wife in the hospital for two weeks.

But Matty has her own problems. Her husband the art teacher is a philandering asshole.

Try to guess where this is going.

Lots of us wake up one morning and find the gap between what our life is and what we want it to be [or once thought it might be] all but intolerable. But life is existential. So, for some of us, it’s not entirely hopeless. But we can’t rely on someone else to wrtite that script for us. Still, we are always taking a chance with someone new. We only know what they tells us about the past, for instance.

And sometimes we go back to someone not because we really want them; it’s more that we don’t want someone else to have them.


Moscow, Belgium.

Vera: Mom, are you taking a bath?
Matty: No, a big black guy is giving me a massage…

How would one actually tell the difference?

Matty: How hold are you?
Johnny: 29
Matty: I’m 41.
Johhny: So?
Matty: Want me to explain it in words with one syllable?

On the other hand, for some, a hole is a hole.

Johnny: You look nice.
Matty: You don’t need to get any ideas. I’ve come just to piss off my husband. My husband lives with his 22 year old girlfriend. He was her teacher. He teaches at the Art Academy. He’s very talented and makes beautiful things and I still love him. So don’t get any ideas.

He gets ideas.

Matty: Just say you want to sleep with me!
Johnny: No! My intentions are honorable.
Matty: You’re talking garbage. Anyway, Da Vinci was gay.
Johnny: Really?
Matty: And Mona Lisa isn’t smiling. She’s being eaten up inside by sadness. She’s just trying to hide it. She’s trapped, stuck.
Johnny: How do you know all this?
Matty: My husband told me. You…you just want to park it inside me.

Meanwhile, Hubby is parking it inside left and right.

Johnny: Do you know what they say in Italy? ‘Ti Amo’
Matty: D’you know what they say in Ledeberg? ‘Kiss my ass!’

Next up: what they'd say here if we let them.

Matty: So you hit her because you loved her.

Anyone ever do that to you?

Johnny: That’s typical of an intellectual! Do you know what my Dad always used to say? He said, “John, all those intellectuals have one thing in common: they don’t know shit!”
Werner: He was a philosopher, was he?

More to the point, is he still posting here?

[iambiguous]

Yuval Noah Harari

You could never convince a monkey to give you a banana by promising him limitless bananas after death in monkey heaven.

On the other hand, has this ever actually been confirmed?

How do you cause people to believe in an imagined order such as Christianity, democracy or capitalism? First, you never admit that the order is imagined.

In fact, for some -- objectivists let's call them -- it's not.

Culture tends to argue that it forbids only that which is unnatural. But from a biological perspective, nothing is unnatural. Whatever is possible is by definition also natural. A truly unnatural behaviour, one that goes against the laws of nature, simply cannot exist, so it would need no prohibition.

No, really, actually think this through for once.

One of history’s few iron laws is that luxuries tend to become necessities and to spawn new obligations.

"We don't own them...they own us!"

History is something that very few people have been doing while everyone else was ploughing fields and carrying water buckets.

As for those who punch in and punch out...?

We did not domesticate wheat. It domesticated us.

Does it know that?