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04-22-2002, 02:51 AM
| | Fallen angel & loving it! | | Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Hell, MI
Posts: 322
| |
At another Midwestern historical society, out in a pole barn, a collection was stacked twelve feet high and twenty feet wide near rows of shaft-drive bicycles and the disassembled pieces of a nineteenth-century machine shop. There were thousands of volumes of local papers and a run of The New York Times. Shawn Godwin, an employee of the society at the time, wrote me that this “cube of history” was made to disappear by order of the head archivist: the volumes were chainsawed in half and fed into the steam engine that powered a vintage sawmill exhibit. “I asked one of the more sympathetic assistant directors if it would be possible to sneak a few of the volumes away,” Godwin writes. “He indicated that if I was discreet and did not make a big deal about it it might be okay.” Godwin saved a small stack and tried to avoid looking at the column of smoke rising from the sawmill.
. . .
Amid the general devastation, there are some librarians of courage and foresight whose accomplishments are as yet unsung. The Boston Public Library, owing to the belief of Charles Longley—the recently retired curator of microtexts and newspapers—that his institution’s accumulated newspaper files are “part of the City’s own heritage and the Library would be remiss in not retaining them,” not only has held on to all its existing collections but continued to lay away all the recent output of Boston and selected Massachusetts papers, wrapped in brown paper, right up through the present; and the library has taken ownership of important sets of bound Boston newspapers once owned by Harvard and other libraries in the region as well. Longley was lucky: his views were shared by the city’s longtime librarian, the late Philip McNiff; often a change in administration proves fatal to a great collection.
At Ohio State, a librarian named Lucy Caswell†, who wears quiet silk scarves and directs the Cartoon Research Library, is almost single-handedly attempting to rebuild a bound-volume collection of national scope—buying back for scholarly use material offered by dealers and collectors . . .
. . .
Where did all the spurned papers go? Many were thrown out—and continue to be thrown out as statewide filming projects progress—but a colossal residue rests at a company called Historic Newspaper Archives, Inc., the biggest name in the birth-date business. If you call Hammacher Schlemmer, say, or Potpourri, or the Miles Kimball catalog, to order an “original keepsake newspaper,” from the day a loved one was born, Historic Newspaper Archives will fill your order. In the company’s twenty-five thousand square feet of warehouse space in Rahway, New Jersey, innumerable partially gutted volumes wait in lugubrious disorder on tall industrial shelves and stacked in four-foot piles and on pallets. I paid a visit one winter afternoon. The Christmas rush was over, and the place was very quiet. Torn sheets, sticking out from damaged volumes overhead, slapped and fluttered in a warm breeze that came from refrigerator-sized heaters mounted on the ceiling. When an order came in for a particular date, a worker would pull out a volume of the Lewiston Evening Journal, say (once of Bowdoin College), slice out the issue, neaten the rough edges using a large electric machine called a guillotine (adorned on one side with photos of swimsuit models), and slip it in a clear vinyl sleve for shipping. Every order comes with a “certificate of authenticity” printed in florid script.
. . .
I told Hy Gordon that I thought some librarians had exaggerated the severity of newsprint’s deterioration. “Oh yeah, yeah, it doesn’t fall apart,” he agreed. “The ends might crack, but that’s all. The newspaper’s still fine.”
I said I was distressed that so many libraries were getting rid of their bound newspapers.
“Don’t be distressed,” he said. “There are a lot of things more important in life.”
Are there really? More important than the fact that this country has strip-mined a hundred and twenty years of its history? I’m not so sure. The Historic Newspapers Archives owns what is now probably the largest “collection” of post-1880 U.S. papers anywhere in the country, or the world, for that matter—a ghastly anti-library. They own it in order to destroy it.
. . .
There are nice things about microfilm, too—the congenial clicks of your neighbor’s forward button; the way the chosen image fuzzes and bows modestly offscreen as you press PRINT, as if it must retire to another room to change; the warbly whine of the reel’s motor when the glass plate lifts to let the film rewind at straightway speed; the loud confident slaps of the freed leader that proclaim to everyone in the room that someone has finished his or her research. Because microfilm readers frame text arbitrarily, conferring equal eye-weight on all segments of a page, you occasionally discover tiny items you wouldn’t have seen if you read the paper conventionally, favoring the areas that its editors and layout artists expected you to look at first. And of course questing scholars cheerfully endure the ocular and neckular ordeal of microfilm if they have good reason to—if they can’t go to a library where the originals are, or if they want to make copies, or if the paper itself is indeed so fragile that it can’t be touched or turned without damage. But librarians have lied shamelessly about the extent of paper’s fragility, and they continue to lie about it. For over fifty years they have disparaged paper’s residual strength, while remaining “blind as lovers” (as Allen Veaner, former editor of Microfilm Review, once wrote) to the failings and infirmities of film.
. . .
Why not both? Why can’t we have the benefits of the new and extravagantly expensive digital copy and keep the convenience and beauty and historical testimony of the original books resting on the shelves, where they’ve always been, thanks to the sweat equity of our prescient predecessors? We can’t have both, in Michael Lesk’s view, because the destruction of the old library will help pay for the creation of the new library. The fewer books that remain on the shelves, the lower the storage cost—that’s the first-order “benefit” of Lesk’s government-financed plan. And the fewer physical books that are on the shelves—the more they must fly by wire—the more the public will be obliged to consent to the spending of ongoingly immense sums necessary for global conversion, storage, networked delivery, and “platform migration.” Lesk used to work at Bellcore, the research group owned until recently by NYNIX and other Baby Bell phone companies; it isn’t entirely surprising that millions of dollars of the National Science Foundation’s grant money are going to the telecommunications networks, notably to the creation of a joint MCI WorldCom/NSF “very high performance Backbone Network Service,” or vBNS, and hookups thereto, that will connect phone companies, university science labs, and university libraries, for the benefit of all concerned.
None of this would disturb me—who can quarrel with high performance backbones?—if an attack on low-tech book spines wasn’t also part of the plan.
Nicholson Baker : Double Fold: Libraries & the Assault on Paper
† i think this is the person who wrote the foreward for the latest Calvin and Hobbes book . . .
__________________
Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom, look carefully — see who it is that they want you to butcher.
Remember, the smell of burning will not sicken you if they persuade you that it will thaw the world.
Beware, the blood of a child does not smell so bitter if you have shed it with a high moral purpose.
So that when they come to sell you their bloody corruption you will gather the spit of your chest . . . and plant it in their faces. |
04-30-2002, 03:03 AM
| | Fallen angel & loving it! | | Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Hell, MI
Posts: 322
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Our general policy at restaurants, if there was nothing Western-looking available, was to order whatever dish had been most thoroughly processed and cooked and otherwise altered from its natural eyeball-intensive state. Even then we could never be sure. One evening in Kyoto we ate at a restaurant where you ate various things on a stick. You sat at a counter, and three cooks bustled around preparing things, and every three or four minutes they’d place a stick with something on the end of it in front of each customer. (When you were done eating, you paid an amount based on the number of empty sticks you had.)
The three cooks spoke a little English, so when they placed a new set of sticks in front of us, they’d announce what it was. “CRAB!” they’d say. Or: “POTATO!” We were enjoying this, because it was interesting and the food tasted good, and so when they came around with maybe the tenth set of sticks, I unhesitatingly took a big bite. I was chewing away at some crunchy substance when the three cooks, looking very pleased with themselves, announced: “CRICKET!”
David Barry : Dave Barry Does Japan
__________________
Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom, look carefully — see who it is that they want you to butcher.
Remember, the smell of burning will not sicken you if they persuade you that it will thaw the world.
Beware, the blood of a child does not smell so bitter if you have shed it with a high moral purpose.
So that when they come to sell you their bloody corruption you will gather the spit of your chest . . . and plant it in their faces. |
04-30-2002, 09:11 AM
|  | Epinions Members | | Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Malden, MA, USA
Posts: 8,461
| |
As for Gil Hodges, in custody of first-
"He'll do it by himself." Now a specialist-
versed in an extension reach far into the box seats-
he lengthens up, leans and gloves the ball. He defeats
expectation by a whisker. The modest star
irked by one misplay, is no hero by a hair;
in a strikeout slaughter when what could matter more,
he lines a homer to the signboard and has changed the score.
excerpted from "Hometown Piece for Messrs. Alston and Reese" by Marianne Moore
Last edited by quasar; 04-30-2002 at 09:16 AM.
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05-03-2002, 12:37 AM
|  | Premium Member | | Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: New York
Posts: 1,313
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This is how I came to learn, then, dandled on a former
adept's knee, how Blessed Elua came to be; how when
Yeshua ben Yosef hung dying upon the cross, a soldier
of Tiberium pierced his side with the cruel steel of a
spearhead. How when Yeshua was lowered, the women
grieved, and the Magdalene most of all, letting down the
ruddy gold torrent of her hair to clothe his still, naked
figure. How the bitter salt tears of the Magdalene fell
upon soil ensanguinated and moist with the shed blood of
the Messiah.
And from this union the grieving Earth engendered
her most precious son; Blessed Elua, most cherished of
angels.
from Kushiel's Dart by Jacqueline Carey |
05-03-2002, 03:09 AM
| | Fallen angel & loving it! | | Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Hell, MI
Posts: 322
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The Others are neat, dry, and gallantly composed. I am a disgrace. I'm dizzy and mawkish, awkwardly frightened, puffy fat, and reeking of sweat like I'm rotting away even as I run this miserable race. The others slobber on themselves like dogs, they puff out their bellies as they watch me, but I know that what they really see is the naked me, the me that’s red-faced and trembling with fear, me addicted to obscene fantasies, me masturbating, me anxious, the me who’s a coward and liar. As the Others look at me and laugh, they scream out, “We know all about you. You’re done in by the poison of self-consciousness, done in by your budding sexual desires. You’re rotting away from the inside. We can see all the way to your indecent fetid crotch! You’re nothing but a lonely gorilla, masturbating in front of our very eyes!”
I’ve made it to the six-hundred-meter mark, and now the girls are watching me again. I pray that I’ll have a heart attack and die, but that kind of miracle doesn’t happen. Instead, I finally have to accept the fact that my wide-awake self-consciousness roars like a bear in the heat of my shame.
I stagger across the finish line a good hundred meters behind the other runners. Just as my pathetic relief at finishing the race dampens my breast with a liquid warmth, the coach smiles a wry smile and points behind me. I think I’m not going to smile, but I look back, wearing a vague little grin, and discover the long black trail I’ve made by pissing in my pants.
Like a storm in a forest, the sneering laughter of a whole world of Others howls around me! I’ve finished this ugly eight-hundred-meter race in utter desperation, giving it every atom of sincerity I possess, and this is the cruel welcome I receive. I may be a poor, ugly Seventeen, but the world of Others has treated me with cruelty, with more cruelty than even I deserve.
The coldness of my wet pants makes me sneeze. In total exhaustion, I sink into the pit of shame. I make up my mind to stop hanging on and trying to find some good in this world of Others. Why? Probably because if I don’t kindle an enemy spirit, if I don’t rake up hatred for them, I’m afraid I’m going to break down and cry.
Kenzaburo Oe : Seventeen
__________________
Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom, look carefully — see who it is that they want you to butcher.
Remember, the smell of burning will not sicken you if they persuade you that it will thaw the world.
Beware, the blood of a child does not smell so bitter if you have shed it with a high moral purpose.
So that when they come to sell you their bloody corruption you will gather the spit of your chest . . . and plant it in their faces. |
05-09-2002, 10:46 PM
| | Epinions Members | | Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Malden, MA, USA
Posts: 8,461
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Unix has always lurked provocatively in the background of the operating system wars, like the Russian Army. Most people know it only by reputation, and its reputation, as the Dilbert cartoon suggests, is mixed. But everyone seems to agree that if only it could get its act together and stop surrendering vast tracts of rich agricultural land and hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war to the onrushing invaders it could stomp them (and all other opposition) flat.
From In the Beginning Was the Command Line by Neal Stephenson |
05-10-2002, 02:43 AM
| | Fallen angel & loving it! | | Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Hell, MI
Posts: 322
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Ooooooooh, talk about synchronicity!  ”Every year, the Greeks had to pony up a few virgins and send them to Crete as tribute. Then the king put them into the labyrinth, and the minotaur ate them up. I used to read that story when I was a kid and wonder who the hell these guys were, on Crete, that everyone else was so scared of them that they would just meekly give up their children to be eaten, every year. They must have been some mean sons of bitches.
“Now, I have a different perspective on it. America must look, to those poor little buggers down there, about the same as Crete looked to those poor Greek suckers. Except that there’s no coercion involved. Those people down there give up their children willingly. Send them into the labyrinth by the millions to be eaten up. The Industry feeds on them and spits back images, sends out movies and TV programs . . . images of wealth and exotic things beyond their wildest dreams, back to those people, and it gives them something to dream about, something to aspire to . . .”
Finally the journalist gives up on being a journalist, just starts to slag L. Bob Rife openly. “That’s disgusting. I can’t believe that you can think about people that way.”
“Shit, boy, get down off your high horse. Nobody really gets eaten. It’s jut a figure of speech. They come here, they get decent jobs, find Christ, buy a Weber grill, and live happily ever after. What’s wrong with that?”
. . .
5) Cash pool donations, as with all monetary transactions within the U.S. Government, must use official U.S. currency—no yen or Kongbucks!
Naturally, this will lead to a bulk problem if people try to use the donation bucket as a dumping ground for bundles of old billion- and trillion-dollar bills. The Building and Grounds people are worried about waste-disposal problems and the potential fire hazards that may ensue if large piles of billions and trillions begin to mount up. Therefore, a key feature of the new regulation is that the donation bucket must be emptied every day—more often if an excessive build-up situation is seen to develop.
In this vein, the B&G people would also like me to point out that many of you who have excess U. S. currency to get rid of have been trying to kill two birds with one stone by using old billions as bathroom tissue. While creative, this approach has two drawbacks:
1) It clogs the plumbing, and
2) It constitutes defacement of U. S. currency, which is a federal crime.
DON’T DO IT.
. . .
Suddenly, they’ve been nailed with a spotlight so big and powerful that they can’t look anywhere near it.
Then it’s dark again, and a gunshot from Vic’s rifle is searing and reverberating across the water.
“Nice shooting, Vic,” Fisheye says.
“It’s, like, one of them drug dealer boats,” Vic says, looking through his . . . sight. “Five guys on it. Headed our way.” He fires another round. “Correction. Four guys on it.” Boom. “Correction. They’re not headed our way anymore.” Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. “Correction. No boat.”
Neal Stephenson : Snow Crash
__________________
Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom, look carefully — see who it is that they want you to butcher.
Remember, the smell of burning will not sicken you if they persuade you that it will thaw the world.
Beware, the blood of a child does not smell so bitter if you have shed it with a high moral purpose.
So that when they come to sell you their bloody corruption you will gather the spit of your chest . . . and plant it in their faces. |
05-10-2002, 02:13 PM
|  | Epinions Members | | Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 18
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I just finished reading Guilty Pleasures by Laurell K. Hamilton again. Here are just a few of my favorite quotes.
"If you keep a gun in your purse, you get killed, because no woman can find anything in her purse in under twelve minutes. It's a rule!"
" 'Anita are you alright?' Why do people ask that when the answer is obviously 'no'?"
"If I was on the right track, I'd attract attention soon. Which meant that someone would try to kill me soon. Wouldn't that be fun?"
"The most frightening thing I have seen all afternoon was the price of designer clothing."
__________________
Lead me not into temptation for I can find it myself. |
05-12-2002, 08:59 AM
| | Epinions Members | | Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Malden, MA, USA
Posts: 8,461
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Then the bell, breaking the hush, tolls once,
And the ambulance with its terrible cargo
Rocking, slightly rocking, moves away
-- Karl Shapiro, "Autowreck"
A beautiful poem about the aftermath of a violent car crash.
Janice |
05-12-2002, 09:49 AM
| | Banned | | Join Date: Jul 2000
Posts: 9,648
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Quote: |
Christian faith is a way of life. It is a way of life that in involves words and deeds, words acted out in deeds, and deed interpreted by words. To paraphrase the eighteenth-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, words without deeds are empty; deed without words are blind. It might be easy, if it were remotely possible, to dispense with trying to understand our faith and get busy doing what we ought to do. But it is just at that juncture, of knowing what we ought to do and ought not to do, that disagreement looms and conversation becomes imperative.
| from Way of Blessing, Way of Life
- Clark Williamson, who retires this year after 36 years as systematic theology professor at Christian Theological Seminary. |
05-16-2002, 01:00 AM
| | Fallen angel & loving it! | | Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Hell, MI
Posts: 322
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10
And yet he had not a helm, nor a hauberk either,
not a pisane, not a plate that was proper to arms;
not a shield, not a shaft, for shock or for blow,
but in his one hand he held a holly-bundle,
that is greatest in greenery when the groves are leafless,
and an axe in the other, ugly and monstrous,
a ruthless weapon aright for one in rhyme to describe:
the head was as large and as long as an ellwand,
a branch of green steel and of beaten gold;
the bit, burnished bright and broad at the edge,
as well shaped for shearing as sharp razors;
the stem was a stout staff, by which sternly he gripped it,
all bound with iron about to the base of the handle,
and engraven in green in graceful patterns,
lapped round with a lanyard that was lashed to the head
and down the length of the haft was looped many times;
and tassels of price were tied there in plenty
to bosses of the bright green, braided most richly.
Such was he that now hastened in, the hall entering,
pressing forward to the dais—no peril he feared.
To none gave he greeting, gazing above them,
and the first word that he winged: ‘Now where is,’ he said,
‘the governor of this gathering? For gladly I would
on the same set my sight, and with himself now talk
            in town.’
       On the courtiers he cast his eye
       and rolled it up and down;
       he stopped, and stared to espy
       who there had most renown.
Author unknown (tr. J. R. R. T.) : Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
__________________
Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom, look carefully — see who it is that they want you to butcher.
Remember, the smell of burning will not sicken you if they persuade you that it will thaw the world.
Beware, the blood of a child does not smell so bitter if you have shed it with a high moral purpose.
So that when they come to sell you their bloody corruption you will gather the spit of your chest . . . and plant it in their faces. |
05-20-2002, 03:15 AM
| | Fallen angel & loving it! | | Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Hell, MI
Posts: 322
| |
Most libraries don’t have MIT Fold Testers, though—and anyway, you wouldn’t want to be cutting strips out of your library’s books with Barrow’s abandon; you need something quicker and less extreme, albeit variable and imprecise. You also want something that undergraduates and other low-wagers can do with minimal training. And that’s how the library world settled on the double-fold test.
Anyone could do it. Open a book to a random page and fold its lower right corner in toward you, forming a triangle against the paper, until you feel it crease under your thumb. Then fold it back in the opposite direction until it folds against the far side of the page. That is one double fold. Do that until the paper breaks, or until you reach some stopping point, as specified by your library’s preservation department—one double fold, two, four, five. Double folding may seem oddly familiar to some, for it is how kindergarteners are taught to divide a piece of paper without scissors. Now, however, it is used to survey research collections in order to determine their “usability” and hence their fate.
. . .
This is of course utter horseshit and craziness. A leaf of a book is a semi-pliant mechanism. It was made for non-acute curves, not for origami. If you wanted to test the effective springiness of a watch spring or a Slinky, would you bend a short segment of it back and forth until it broke? If you had a tree in your yard that survived storms by bending and dipping in the wind, would you consider cutting it into firewood because one of the twigs snapped when you bent it into two? Would you check the resilience, and hence the utility, of a diving board by counting how many times you could fold it back on itself before it failed? No, you would not. In fact, a diving board that you could double-fold ten times might be an unacceptably floppy diving board.
Nicholson Baker : Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper
__________________
Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom, look carefully — see who it is that they want you to butcher.
Remember, the smell of burning will not sicken you if they persuade you that it will thaw the world.
Beware, the blood of a child does not smell so bitter if you have shed it with a high moral purpose.
So that when they come to sell you their bloody corruption you will gather the spit of your chest . . . and plant it in their faces. |
05-20-2002, 08:02 PM
|  | Epinions Members | | Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Richmond Hill, GA
Posts: 2,329
| |
In honor of summer, I present this quote from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables:
In winter, there is no heat, no light, no noon, evening touches morning, there is fog, and mist, the window is frosted, and you can't see clearly. The sky is a dungeon window. The whole day is a cellar. The sun has the look of a beggar. Horrible season! Winter changes into stone the water of heaven and the heart of man. |
05-21-2002, 08:16 PM
| | Epinions Members | | Join Date: Jan 2001 Location: Malden, MA, USA
Posts: 8,461
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Boggis and Bunce and Bean
One fat, one short, one lean
These horrible crooks
So different in looks
Were nonetheless equally mean
from my favorite Roald Dahl book, Fantastic Mr. Fox |
05-26-2002, 12:11 AM
| | Fallen angel & loving it! | | Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Hell, MI
Posts: 322
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According to standard library theory, your rank-and-file book is assumed to have no intrinsic value; it is a dented and tarnished word canteen whose contents may be poured off at will into other, often smaller receptacles. A relatively few books—ones that bear a famous person’s signature or marginalia, for example—may qualify as objects of artifactual value, and these objects often live in rare-book departments. In practice . . . this categorization is influenced mainly by book dealers’ price lists: “Books of high market value will receive expensive conservation treatment, and other books will be microfilmed or photocopied and then thrown out. Such a policy is not worthy of a research library.” The distinctions between rare books and utilitarian word-ware is not only impossible to make—because the degree of future rare-bookishness is unforeseeable now, as is the degree of their informational interest—but harmful, as well: “I think it is undeniable that the common attitude of disregard for the physical evidence in books has produced an insensitivity to the destruction of books that would not be condoned by professionals dealing with any other category of artifact,” Tanselle writes.
The truth is that all books are physical artifacts, without exception, just as all books are bowls of ideas. They are things and utterances both. And libraries, Tanselle believes, since they own, whether they like it or not, collections of physical artifacts, must aspire to the condition of museums. All their books are treasures, in a sense; the general stacks become a sort of comprehensive rare-book room—not staffed and serviced as rare-book rooms are, obviously, but understood as occupying the same kin of unreformattable sensorium. Only by “approaching books as museum objects do we most fully and productively read them,” Tanselle provocatively writes. Once a large research library makes the decision to add a particular book to its collection, it has a responsibility to try to keep that physical book in its collection forever. That duty continues in force even if publishing undergoes revolutionary changes and libraries buy only electronic texts from some moment forth. The keeping needn’t involve expensive measures, however: “Most books are not frequently used, and neglect can sometimes be an artifact’s best friend.”
. . .
E-futurists of a certain sort—those who talk dismissively of books as tree-corpses—sometimes respond to observations about digital expense and impermanency by shrugging and saying that if people want to keep reading some electronic copy whose paper source was trashed, they’ll find the money to keep it alive on whatever software and hardware wins out in the market. This is the use-it-or-lose-it argument, and it is a deadly way to run a culture. Over a few centuries, library books (and newspapers and journals) that were ignored can become suddenly interesting, and heavily read books, newspapers, and journals can drop way down in the charts; one of the important functions, and pleasures, of writing history is that of cultural tillage, or soil renewal: you trowel around in unfashionable holding places for things that have lain untouched for decades to see what particularities they may yield to a new eye. We mustn’t model the digital library on the day-to-day operation of a single human brain, which quite properly uses-or-loses, keeps uppermost in mind what it needs most often, and does not refresh, and eventually forgets what it very infrequently considers—after all, the principal reason groups of rememberers invented writing and printing was to record accurately what they sensed was otherwise likely to be forgotten.
Nicholson Baker : Double Fold: Libraries and the assault on Paper
__________________
Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom, look carefully — see who it is that they want you to butcher.
Remember, the smell of burning will not sicken you if they persuade you that it will thaw the world.
Beware, the blood of a child does not smell so bitter if you have shed it with a high moral purpose.
So that when they come to sell you their bloody corruption you will gather the spit of your chest . . . and plant it in their faces. |
05-31-2002, 08:04 AM
| | Fallen angel & loving it! | | Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Hell, MI
Posts: 322
| |
At its highest level, Wu Wei is indefinable and practically invisible, because it has become a reflex action. In the words of Chuang-tse, the mind of Wu Wei “flows like water, reflects like a mirror, and responds like an echo.”
Just like Pooh. “Ahem. I say, ’Just like Pooh.’”
“Wh—what?” said Pooh, waking up suddenly and falling out of the chair. “What’s like who?”
“What flows like water, reflects like a mirror, and responds like an echo?”
“Oh, a riddle,” said Pooh. “How many guesses do I get?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Let’s just see what happens.”
“What could it be?” he mumbled. “Flows like water . . .”
Using Wu Wei, you go by circumstances and listen to your own intuition. “This isn’t the best time to do this. I’d better go that way.” Like that. When you do that sort of thing, people may say you have a Sixth Sense or something. All it really is, though, is being Sensitive to Circumstances. That’s just natural. It’s only strange when you don’t listen.
Benjamin Hoff : The Tao of Pooh
__________________
Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom, look carefully — see who it is that they want you to butcher.
Remember, the smell of burning will not sicken you if they persuade you that it will thaw the world.
Beware, the blood of a child does not smell so bitter if you have shed it with a high moral purpose.
So that when they come to sell you their bloody corruption you will gather the spit of your chest . . . and plant it in their faces. |
06-03-2002, 01:21 AM
| | Fallen angel & loving it! | | Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Hell, MI
Posts: 322
| |
Pratchett turns phrases so much that I wonder if they’ve ever complained about getting dizzy . . .
Old Mother Dismass’s clothes had that disarray of some who, because of a detached retina in her second sight, was living in a variety of times all at once. Mental confusion is bad enough in normal people, but much worse when the mind has an occult twist. You just had to hope it was just her underwear she was wearing on the outside.
It was getting worse, Nanny knew. Sometimes her knock would be heard on the door a few hours before she arrived. Her footsteps would turn up several days later.
Terry Pratchett : The Sea and the Little Fishes, from Legends³, ed. Robert Silverberg
__________________
Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom, look carefully — see who it is that they want you to butcher.
Remember, the smell of burning will not sicken you if they persuade you that it will thaw the world.
Beware, the blood of a child does not smell so bitter if you have shed it with a high moral purpose.
So that when they come to sell you their bloody corruption you will gather the spit of your chest . . . and plant it in their faces. |
06-16-2002, 08:10 AM
| | Fallen angel & loving it! | | Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: Hell, MI
Posts: 322
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If writing is language and language is desire and longing and suffering, and it is capable of great passion and also great nuances of passion—the passion of the mind, the passion of the body—and if syntax reflects states of desire, is hope, is love, is sadness, is fury, and if the motions of sentences and paragraphs and chapters are these as well, and if the motion of the line is about desire and longing and want; then why when we write, when we make shapes on paper, why then does it so often look like the traditional, straight models, why does our longing look for example like John Updike's longing?
. . .
Is it because we've lost faith in our belief that language is capable of a kind of utopia, speaking to myriad versions of inner and outer reality?
Or is it that we on the margins long secretly for nothing more than to be embraced by the mainstream? To become the center?
Is it that we want the security, the emotional, the financial security that comes with those who tailor their visions or in some way comply with the Agreement.
If language is desire, if syntax and rhythm and tone and color create worlds of desire, if we see, if we live out on the margin, then how come we so often write between the lines? We who are ostracized, estranged, despised, denied rights of every kind? Why do we write as if we were inside?
. . .
If through language, through literature, through what we make we refuse to accept our limitations, if we are wild and unruly and unswerving in our conviction and irreverence, will those who try to contain us get it finally?
Might the old novel, one day, like the old ways of thinking about gender and race and sexuality, simply appear silly, outdated, quaint?
Might writing by women, by people of color, by gay men and lesbians be an active refusal of the dominant code, a subversion of meaning as it has been traditionally constructed, for something perhaps more strange, elusive, other?
Carole Maso : from Break Every Rule:Essays On Language, Longing, & Moments of Desire
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Remember when you hear them beginning to say Freedom, look carefully — see who it is that they want you to butcher.
Remember, the smell of burning will not sicken you if they persuade you that it will thaw the world.
Beware, the blood of a child does not smell so bitter if you have shed it with a high moral purpose.
So that when they come to sell you their bloody corruption you will gather the spit of your chest . . . and plant it in their faces. |
06-16-2002, 10:47 AM
|  | Agent for Clio | | Join Date: Jul 2000 Location: Houston
Posts: 863
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If this were the phrase chain, this quote from my current (re-)reading would be most apposite to the Maso quote:
What we see ... is the horrible co-existence of a subtle and incessant intellectual activity with an incapacity to understand anything. This doom he has brought upon himself; in order to avoid seeing one thing he has, almost voluntarily, incapacitated himself from seeing at all. . . . He says 'Evil be thou my good' (which includes 'Nonsense be thou my sense') and his prayer is granted.
C. S. Lewis, Preface to Paradise Lost.
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MSP
'It's a revolution, damn it! We're going to have to offend somebody!' - John Adams, 1776 (The Musical), Peter Stone & Sherman Edwards
Fiat justicia et ruat coelum.
Oderint dum metuant.
Ut veniant omnes. |
06-24-2002, 05:01 PM
|  | Epinions Members | | Join Date: Oct 2001 Location: Central California
Posts: 6,263
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I went on to the east a few days later to do a quick piece about a hot springs resort in the Philippines. I went straight to the famous waterfall, and though the h | |
