A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.
Personal pleasure and gross revenue looked at last to lie along the same demand curve, at least as far as home entertainment went.
The reality is that dying isn’t bad, but it takes forever.
351. As in a combination of the First and Twelfth Steps, goes the AA joke: ‘My Life is Unmanageable and I’d Like to Share it With You.
How much must a person want out, to put his head in a microwave oven? A dim woman all the kids had known of in Boaz had put her cat in a microwave to dry it after a tick-bath and set the oven just on Defrost and the cat ended up all over the woman’s kitchen’s walls. How would you rig the thing so it would activate with the door open? Is there just some sort of refrigerator-light button you could hold down and secure with tape? Would the tape melt?
But facing a dragon does not mean swaggering up to it unarmed and insulting its mom.
Thomas Carlisle.
I know bashing, Pat, and this was unabashed bashing at its most fascist.
Here is how to avoid thinking about any of this by practicing and playing until everything runs on autopilot and talent’s unconscious exercise becomes a way to escape yourself, a long waking dream of pure play. The irony is that this makes you very good, and you start to become regarded as having a prodigious talent to live up to.
As, if you will give the permission, does this love you speak of, M. Tine’s grand love. It means only the attachment. Tine is attached, fanatically. Our attachments are our temple, what we worship, no? What we give ourselves to, what we invest with faith.
Choose your attachments carefully. Choose your temple of fanaticism with great care.
It strikes me that EXIT signs would look to a native speaker of Latin like red-lit signs that say HE LEAVES.
I believe the influence of Kierkegaard on Camus is underestimated. I believe Dennis Gabor may very well have been the Antichrist. I believe Hobbes is just Rousseau in a dark mirror. I believe, with Hegel, that transcendence is absorption.
It’s a pivotal, it’s a seminal, religious day when you get to both hear and feel your destiny at the same moment.
Hal likes to get high in secret, but a bigger secret is that he’s as attached to the secrecy as he is to getting high.” “filmic mind” “Everybody was tired in a good way.” “someone sometime let you forget how to choose, and what.” “novocaine of the soul” “The original sense of addiction involved being bound over, dedicated” “The addict.
And the dope often gave him a painful case of pleurisy if he smoked it for more than two straight days of heavy continuous smoking.
For irony – exploiting gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are – is the time-honored way artists seek to illuminate and explode hypocrisy.
But if we can’t think ourselves,... that means we, ourselves, are things that can’t think themselves, and so are the proper objects for our thought; we fulfill the game’s condition, we are ourselves Other. So if we can think ourselves, we can’t; and if we can’t; we can. KABLAM,... There go the old crania.
Golf. A golf man. Is my tone communicating the contempt? Billiards on a big table, Jim. A bodiless game of spasmodic flailing and flying sod. A quote unquote sport. Anal rage and checkered berets.
Adjust. Adjust? Stay the same. No? Is not stay the same? It is cold? It is wind? Cold and wind is the world. Outside, yes? On the tennis court the you is the player: this is not where there is cold wind. I am saying. Different world inside. World built inside cold outside world of wind breaks the wind, shelters the player, you, if you stay the same, stay inside.
No, she simply felt – at times, mind you, not all the time, but at sharp and distinctive intuitive moments – as if she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were, it seemed at such times, not really under her control. There was nothing pure.