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The powers of ordinary men

2010-08-14T14:25:00.003-05:00

are circumscribed by the everyday worlds in which they live, yet even in these rounds of job, family, and neighborhood they often seem driven by forces they can neither understand nor govern. 'Great changes' are beyond their control, but affect their conduct and outlook none the less. The very framework of modern society confines them to projects not their own, but from every side, such changes now press upon the men and women of the mass society, who accordingly feel that they are without purpose in an epoch in which they are without power.

The Power Elite by C. Wright Mills

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James

2010-02-28T14:26:00.001-06:00

Some people think 1801 goin' be different from 1800

Still, though, hate and love be closer cousin than like and dislike.

White man fury bigger than white man justice.

Along The Road by Aldous Huxley

2010-01-16T15:17:00.001-06:00

Your genuine traveler, on the other hand, is so much interested in real things that he does not find it necessary to believe in fables. He is insatiably curious, he loves what is unfamiliar for the sake of its unfamiliarity, he takes pleasure in every manifestation of beauty.

One can work up a thrilling emotion about distant and unknown people- an emotion which it is impossible to recapture after personal acquaintance, but which yields place to understanding and consequent affection or antipathy.

No modern man, even if he loathed the country, could resist the appeal of the innumerable advertisements, published by railways, motor car manufacturers, thermos flask makers, sporting tailors, house agents and all the rest whose livelihood depends on his frequently visiting the country.

We drove in, and immediately faint ghostly oboes began to play around us; we were in Sabbioneta among the Gonzaga ghosts.

Every good painter invents a new way of painting.

The best picture in the world is painted in fresco on the wall of a room in the town hall.

Bad art is of two sorts: that which is merely dull, stupid and incompetent, the negatively bad; and the positively bad, which is a lie and a sham.

Antic Hay by Aldous Huxley

2010-01-16T15:11:00.003-06:00

"You don't suppose any serious-minded person imagines a revolution is going to bring liberty, do you?"

"Dreams in nineteen twenty-two." He shrugged his shoulders.

"They're dirt and we're capitalists..." He laughed.
Gumbril laughed too. It was the first time that he had ever thought of himself as a capitalist, and the thought was exhilarating.

Blood beats in the ears. Beat, beat, beat. A slow drum in the darkness, beating in the ears of one who lies wakeful with fever, with the sickness of too much misery.

Grief doesn't kill, love doesn't kill; but time kills everything, kills desire, kills sorrow, kills in the end the mind that feels them; wrinkles and softens the body while it still lives, rots it like a medlar, kills it too at last.

Gumbril looked at his watch. "Half past one."
Mrs. Viveash sighed. "Can't possibly go to bed," she said, "for another hour at least."

His thoughts were an interminable desert of sand, with not a palm in sight, not so much as a comforting mirage.

the pleasures and sorrows of work by alain de botton

2009-11-07T20:28:00.005-06:00

"Watching these sessions on closed circuit television, I came to feel that what was unfolding in the damp room next door was of historical significance. Symons had devoted his life to paying an exceptional degree of attention to the most minor feelings of another person. After millenia in which action had been privileged over reflection, and intelligence primarily restricted to the discussion of arid abstract ideas, an ordinary human's everyday confusions had at last found a forum in which they were being accorded the methodical consideration they deserved. Among all the other, better-established businesses catering to elements far down our hierarchy of needs- businesses offering assistance with gardening and cleaning, accountancy and computers- here, finally, was an enterprise devoted to the interpretation of the critical, yet troublingly indistinct, radio-transmissions of the psyche."

"It was hard not to feel some of the same sadness that might attend the departure of an ocean liner or the lowering of a coffin." pg 158

"For thousands of years, it had been nature- and its supposed creator- that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing sense of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime... We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves... We had learnt to feel respect for circuit boards and pity and guilt towards glaciers."

"There is no more ten in the morning, no more July, but only the tree before him, the clouds above, the sun slowly traversing the sky and the small gap between one branch and another, whose resolution and completion will constitute a whole day's work."

"How different everything is for the craftsman who transforms a part of the world with his own hands, who can see his work as emanating from his being and can step back at the end of a day or lifetime and point to an object- whether a square of canvas, a chair or a clay jug- and see it as a stable repository of his skills and an accurate record of his years, and hence feel collected together in one place, rather than strung out across projects which long ago evaporated into nothing one could hold or see."

"'Have you ever noticed water?' he asks. 'Properly noticed it, I mean- as if you had never seen it before?'"

"How cheerful one would have needed to be in such a place in order not to regret existence."

"...there are ultimately few of us out on the high seas, and many of us in the harbour, counting the ropes and untangling the anchor chains."

"Underlying these innovations is the belief that workplace dynamics are no less complicated or unexpectedly intense than family relations, with only the added difficulty that whereas families are at least well-recognised and sanctioned loci for hysteria reminiscent of scenes from Medea, office life typically proceeds behind a mask of shallow cheerfulness, leaving workers grievously unprepared to handle the fury and sadness continually aroused by their colleagues."

"For my part, led on by the priorities of the Slovenian newspaper, I went to a few press conferences. There was almost always an initial problem with the microphone."

BookMarks: Reading in Black and White, A memoir by Karla FC Holloway

2009-11-07T15:06:00.003-06:00

"Make me. Remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now. Toni Morrison, Jazz"

"Reading encourages an intimacy like Ayana's hunch over the book in her lap or her collapse into a small brown ball of body and book, where the distinction between the two of them dissolves."

"Malcolm X credits prison with being the space where reading began to matter to him, and the passionate and fully engaged language that he used to characterize both the habit of reading in prison and its consequence was something I imagined as possible for my son as well. I latched onto a prison reading plan that I would assure by getting him books any way that I could."

"Angela Davis, in a singular commentary on reading and prison written by an African American woman in this tradition of bookmarks, writes against the trend of using books as an escape in a critique that testifies to the focused politics of both her incarceration and her professional life. The library collection in the Women's Detention Center in New York failed her interests, specifically because it appealed to those who may have wanted to use books as a diversion from the prison's physical confinement." pg 84

"The sonnet is abbreviated in Caged Bird, where she cites only the first lines, but the entire sonnect 29 reveals a bit more about her choice and her desire:

When, in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth, sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

It is Angelou who has placed these lines into a racialized context, asserting Shakespeare's whiteness and making it matter in her discussion here."

"As a scholar and a teacher, [J. Saunders] Redding explained through his booklist the racial responsibilities and challenges of the nation's reading. Others for whom the public persona mattered more used the booklist to help their white readers mark them as a certain kind of African American- iconoclastic, erudite, traditionally trained, humble, assertive, or extraordinarily qualified. The books they listed may have the consequence of marking them as the exception in a country whose social history would ordinarily be poised to discount, or undervalue, the judgment and capabilities of its black citizens."

literally

2009-11-04T18:02:00.000-06:00

to a husband at war - i hate myself

highlights from Black Boy by Richard Wright

2009-11-01T09:17:00.000-06:00

Many of the religious symbols appealed to my sensibilities and I responded to the dramatic vision of life held by the church, feeling that to live day by day with death as one's sole thought was to be so compassionately sensitive toward all life as to view all men as slowly dying, and the trembling sense of fate that welled up, sweet and melancholy, from the hymns blended with the sense of fate that I had already caught from life.

Wherever I found religion in my life I found strife, the attempt of one individual or group to rule another in the name of God. The naked will to power seemed always to walk in the wake of a hymn.

I was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle. I was feeling the very thing that the state of Mississippi had spent millions of dollars to make sure that I would never feel; I was becoming aware of the thing that the Jim Crow laws had been drafted and passed to keep out of my consciousness; I was acting on impulses that southern senators in the nation's capital had striven to keep out of Negro life; I was beginning to dream the dreams that the state had said were wrong, that the schools had said were taboo.

I was gambling: freedom or the chain gang. There were times when I felt that I could not breathe.

But what strange world was this? I concluded the book with the conviction that I had somehow overlooked something terribly important in life. I had once tried to write, had once reveled in feeling, had let my crude imagination roam, but the impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience. Now it surged up again and I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing. It was not a matter of believing or disbelieving what I read, but of feeling something new, of being affected by something that made the look of the world different.

The millions that I would fear are those who do not dream of the prizes that the nation holds forth, for it is in them, though they may not know it, that a revolution has taken place and is biding its time to translate itself into a new and strange way of life.

Acting upon the loftiest of impulses, filled with love for those who suffer, urged toward fellowship with the rebellious, committed to sacrifice, why was it that there existed among Communists so much hate, suspicion, bitterness, and internecine strife? I stood in the midst of people I loved and I was afraid of them.

I headed toward home alone, really alone now, telling myself that in all the sprawling immensity of our mighty continent the least-known factor of living was the human heart, the least-sought goal of being was a way to live a human life. Perhaps, I thought, out of my tortured feelings I could fling a spark into this darkness. I would try, not because I wanted to but because I felt that I had to if I were to live at all.

"Somewhere,

2009-10-27T20:13:00.000-05:00

in the dead of the southern night my life had switched onto the wrong track and, without my knowing it, the locomotive of my heart was rushing down a dangerously steep slope, heading for a collision, heedless of the warning red lights that blinked all about me, the sirens and the bells and the screams that filled the air."

cool.

2009-10-15T20:50:00.000-05:00

shut the fuck up - the coathangers (yousendit)
tonya harding - the coathangers (yousendit)

the ruinous evidence

2009-10-11T15:42:00.000-05:00

"How did this happen? their descendants will ask, stumbling upon the evidence, the ruins. The ruinous evidence. Who made these things? Who lived in them? Who destroyed them?"
- from oryx and crake by margaret atwood

----

the jungle is a skyscraper - ornette coleman (yousendit)

how to learn about sewing machines, sort of:

2009-04-22T14:03:00.000-05:00

i recently picked up three big spools of thread and was really excited by the deal i was getting.

since the spool pin on my machine is pretty long, and i've been able to use longish spools of thread in the past with no problem, i didn't think twice about buying these large spools. well, i got them home and the spool pin was too short-- shucks!

didn't i feel like a rube/newb when i did a search for "overlock thread" (yes, they were even labeled as such) and realized what i had bought wasn't even meant for the kind of machine i have? well, reading about overlock machines (and seeing this awesome graphic of an overlock stitch on wikipedia) kind of made me want one, but c'est la vie. i wanted to figure out a way to use the 9000 yds of thread i just bought, because that would be an awful lot of sewing by hand. what about a coat hanger?

i twisted it around a couple of times, and tried to get it secure/not vibrating and making an awful noise. it does work, though i had to mess with the thread tension a little. it's not really used to pulling this way. am i going to completely mess up my machine doing this?

the more i thought about this, the more i wondered how people customize their machines to make them do what they want. all i really found is this awesome steampunk sewing machine.

first post

2008-11-16T00:09:00.000-06:00

hi there.