The worst thing you can do

is remind her you exist.

"Slavery" has no plural;

and he who has scorned it is free, – no matter amid how large a mob of over-lords he stands.

– Seneca, Moral letters to Lucilius/Letter 28

At least she’d be spared the discomfort

of watching him try to become an artist.

— William Gibson, as recounted by Joshua Rothman

Is this

a version of me worth remembering?

Si monumentum requiris,

circumspice.

— Epitaph of Sir Christopher Wren, architect

The unknowable isn’t fact—

it’s something we decide.

– Ryan F. Mandelbaum, What We Will Never Know

And fire,

on fire to reach you.

– Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds

The error's

when a man presumes to state
That what he sees and God are separate.

– Farid ud-Din Attar, The Conference of the Birds

Biography

has brought a new terror to death.

— John Arbuthnot, at least according to Eddie Campbell in From Hell #11

Laws are like cobwebs,

for if any trifling or powerless thing falls into them, they hold it fast; but if a thing of any size falls into them it breaks the mesh and escapes.

— Anacharsis

Fools all,

who do not know how much better the half is than the whole, or what profit there is in mallow and asphodel. But it is another mistake to try and carve from life every passion and desire. To bear fruit, one must learn to weep and feast.

– Simon Sarris, The Sage's Garden

In this way,

God and I spare each other.

– Natasha Oladokun, I Asked God for the Moon

The superior artist

is the one who knows how to be influenced. 

— Clement Greenberg

The many

misadventures.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think,

is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.

— HP Lovecraft

Death

is the goal of life.

— Schopenhauer

Love is fire.

Mind is smoke.

– from Attar's The Conference of the Birds, the Valley of the Beloved, translated by Ari Honarvar

We are now connected by something so tenuous,

nothing can break it.

– John Updike, as recounted in John Updike, His Stories, and Me by Molly Fisk

Just a lot of questions

asked during a fire.

– Laurie Anderson on "The Star-Spangled Banner"

People like me

and I want it to stop.

Storytelling reveals meaning

without committing the error of defining it.

—Hannah Arendt

The greatest gift you can give

is the weapon that can destroy you. 

You are alive inside

your closed eyes.

Everything we want

will require unfathomable violence.

– a fake quote on the internet

Follow an impulse,

and then build rightness around it. 

– Jia Tolentino, After a Year Without Crowds, Caroline Polachek Takes the Stage, describing Dubner Maggid's fable – "First I shoot the arrow, then I draw the target."

Waiting for the algorithm

to find me.

Words fail us.

 Only words will save us.

Like a dagger

through the heart of man.

The petty allure

of dissatisfaction.

Monument

to misery. 

A dealer of obscurities;

arcane learnings, hidden knowledge, interesting facts. Your go-to guy for the source of all uncertainties, and the top-selling pop acts of 1991. 

War

 as a service.

As easy to catch as your breath

and as difficult to touch as air.

It is tiring and unhealthy

to lose your Saturday afternoons: but to have them free because you don't matter, that is much worse.

C.S. Lewis, The inner ring

Being taken seriously

means missing out on the chance to be taken frivolously.

– a paraphrase of J. Jack Halberstam, The Queer Art of Failure

Polluted

by the imagination of money.

– Patrick Nathan, Dirt: Step inside the unusual meme machine

Everything beams with so much common sense

and leaves him dazzled.

– Joseph Roth

Tyrants conduct monologues,

above a million solitudes.

– Camus

From violence

everything originates. 

A language

for grief. 

What's the point of truth

if it destroys hope?

– AJ Daulerio

Let heaven exist, though my place be in hell.

Let me be outraged and annihilated, but for one instant, in one being, let Your enormous Library be justified.

– Luis Borges, The library of babel

I want to sift through your fingers,

to vanish, to be unseen.

– Isabel Fall, How twitter can ruin a life

Human minds

are the universe’s only instruments for reflecting on itself. 

– Peter Schjeldahl, The art of dying

We invite in

what we expect.

– Edwin Markham, "Americanitis" – the national disease

The problem

is when things are good.

A universal experience

you go through absolutely alone.

The whole world at your fingertips.

The ocean at your door.

– Bo Burnham, Inside

God, how we get our fingers

 in each other’s clay. 

That’s friendship, each playing the potter to see what shapes we can make together.

– Ray Bradbury, Something wicked this way comes

We can understand things better.

We can never understand things fully. 

– David Deutsch

How many good things do we not do

out of fear of being seen as a villain.

I mean, after all,

you have to consider we’re only made out of dust.

– Philip K Dick, The three stigmata of palmer eldritch

Freedom that was a thing to use

They’ve made a thing to save 
And staked it in and fenced it round 
Like a dead man’s grave.

– Archibald MacLeish

To live is so startling

it leaves little room for anything else.

– Emily Dickinson

And with my own feeling that the process of self-creation

involved a fair amount of violence to myself.

– Agnes Callard, Against advice

The myth of advice

is the possibility that we can transform one another with the most glancing contact.

– Agnes Callard, Against advice

All the things

a photograph can't tell you.

There's a small list of absolutely lovely people

that I have hated for no reason.

We are the antidote

to an apathetic universe.

– Mark Russell, Fantastic Four: Life Story #1

Love has to stop

somewhere short of suicide.

– Dodsworth

If the endpoint of contemporary citizenship is to own things,

and the endpoint of contemporary architecture is to store things, we should rightfully name things the architects of the 21st century.

– Daisy Alioto, Dirt: Coping with things

Good for you,

you look happy in hell.

– a mishearing of Olivia Rodrigo's 'Good 4 u'

Order is chaos

yet again, eventually.

Chaos is order

not yet defined.

You don't want

a friend like me.

Instead of making things just as useful,

we've made things just as irrelevant.

I was made for the library,

not the classroom.

– Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the world and me

They're putting information

on the internet.

The aesthetics

of awkwardness.

We know the answers.

We just don't like how they apply to us.

The ultimate hidden truth of the world

is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.

– David Graeber

Instead of analyzing the world in order to change it,

you just monitor it for risk.

– Adam Curtis

There is truth here

but impossible to tell exactly where.

All that you touch, You Change.

All that you Change
Changes you.

The only lasting truth
Is Change. 

God
Is Change. 

– Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower

You don't sing to feel better. You sing 'cause that's a way of understanding life.

Ma Rainey's Black Bottom – 3/5

You'll forgive me, but I memorized "Harlem" by Langston Hughes dozens of years ago and I always struggled to figure out what it meant. Ma Rainey helps me get there. "What happens to a dream deferred?" aka, where do you put your rage? You can't aim your anger at the people who deserve it, the ones with the boot on your throat, because they'll just press harder. So you aim it at the people around you; occupants of the same leaky boat. If you put them on the bottom, at least it means you're not there. If you can't be with the ones you hate, hate the ones you're with. I overall didn't really love watching this movie because it's just a play put on film, and Chadwick Boseman is playing to the back row; not allowing for any nuance or subtlety that film might provide. But the anger! The reaching for, the hanging onto what little power is available. "Or does it explode?"

I am a spectator at the unfolding of my thought;

I watch it, I listen to it.

– Arthur Rimbaud

He knows all things, past, present, and future.

He also knows all beings. But no one knows Him.

– Bhagavad Gita

I will participate in the game.

It is a wonderful, wonderful opera – except that it hurts.

– Joseph Campbell

That vast ground

of silence.

– Joseph Campbell

When I grow up,

I want to be everything.

Oh, hell no, your Majesty!

Coming 2 America – 2/5

What laziness, what lethargy, what apathy! It is not altogether bad but it is mostly worthless. But what potential! The barber shop guys still work. Randy Jackson should have worked. Wesley Snipes showed up to work. Good morning, my neighbors. Yes, yes, fuck you, too. 

It's a first thought.

Just not your first thought.

If tomorrow never comes.

Boss level – .5/5

This was bad.

When we all fall asleep, where do we go?

Billie Eilish: A Little Blurry – 3.5/5

I walk away a fan! Her and her music are so close to combustible, like it's one match away from turning to ash. She is this beautiful, volatile mixture of being hurt and openness – that is to say, the willingness to be hurt. She is a gleefully open wound. I hope it doesn't scar.

What is youth? A dream. What is love? The content of the dream.

Another Round – 4/5

I am mostly pleased that this is not a damning portrait of alcohol. It is good, and it is bad. And that goodness, we don't really talk about it seriously. The lifted conversation, the bad mood that rolls off the shoulders, the thick barrier between you and the outside world rubbed thin. We become passionate, we become funny, we become brave. And yes, angry and sad and those other things. I like that the movie admits that sometimes we need help, and here is this thing, this common thing, within grasp, except for the societal constructs that says we shouldn't, it's improper in this setting. And maybe. But also maybe everyone is different and we've all got to figure out what person it is possible to be; and if we need a little help to be that, then so be it. We've all got to find our own way, we need to learn to admit when we need help; and that applies to both the good drinking and the bad.

I'm real when it's useful.

Zack snyder's justice league – 1.5/5

It's fascinating! It's indulgent!! It's a collection of scenes that were included purely because they had been filmed!!! It's Superman realizing he needs to be a symbol of hope so he chooses the all-black outfit!!!! It's an extra two hours to be able to say it's marginally better!!!!! We did it!!!!!!

God loves me. I know he loves me. I want him to stop.

The last temptation of christ – 2/5

As fascinated as I am about the topic, this was not some great and interesting thing for me. I wish I could say what it was. I like Jesus as the doubter, I like Judas as not the betrayer but as the hand of god, leading things to where they're supposed to go. Does Christ mean as much without the crucifixion? Great question. This version of an answer, I just didn't feel it in my bones. If our relationship with god is a conversation, this felt like one I wasn't a part of. 

I guess it feels different when it's someone you love.

Promising young woman – 2.5/5

It's an odd mixture of tones, serious and lighthearted, grave and quirky, which I don't mind, it keeps you off guard, but I'm left not knowing what it wants me to think. Is there no hope here? Is everyone equally guilty? It's all-or-nothing approach makes me feel more sympathy for the bad guys, and I don't really want that. I guess I don't need for a thriller to provide solutions, or absolution. It's probably too much to expect. 

History isn't here yet. It's coming, but we got here early this time.

First cow – 4/5

Friendship isn't some grand thing. To take Lynda Barry out of context – it is the little thing. "Its spark and breach so ordinary, we do not question it. The atom split. The little thing." The power of an atomic sun in just enjoying someone's company, the unstoppable cosmic chain of events set in motion eons ago that allowed two people to meet in just this place at just this time. Two people who like each other, and the miracle of it all.

Life began for me,

when I ceased to admire and began to remember.

– Willa Cather

Well, I think being shy basically means being self-absorbed to the extent that it makes it difficult to be around other people.

The end of the tour – 3/5

I think there's a great movie to be told about David Foster Wallace, and this only touches on the potential of that. It's clear that the thoughts that consume/consumed him is reflected in his work, but it feels enjoyable albeit small here. It's a nice conversation and it feels like a nice conversation but I think it deserves more. And so I think a better movie would have been to combine his interview and his books and his articles into one meta-narrative, some larger epic about not just him but the entire world's inability to communicate effectively with another living person, and what it means to drown in America's great chemical cocktail of loneliness, despair, and hope. "The author looms above his page And thinks it strange that at his age, He can not find the proper words To describe his only world."

I love crazy ideas. They made me rich.

Godzilla vs Kong – 2.5/5

This was stupid but the fights were fun. There's just enough of a silly mythology within Alpha Titan / Hollow Earth bullshit that it leaves me excited to learn more. 

I write songs for the people who do jobs in the towns that I'd never move to.

Bo Burnham: Make Happy – 4.5/5

There is an underlying current of self-hatred throughout this thing that I adore. It exists in this wonderful middle place of knowing how to please others but not knowing how to please yourself. It is a desire for an audience tackling the need for an audience at all. It is being so lost in the liminal space that you don't know whether you're coming or going. It is pleasing and pandering and painful as you see someone so elegantly unwind themself; and like a magic trick, you barely realize what's happening until it's done. Ultimately – if you're constantly wondering and worried about how to make someone else happy, then you'll only become what they want from you, and the only cost is yourself. 

You can't lose something you never had.

How to lose a guy in 10 days – 1.5/5

My internal timeline may be wrong, but this movie feels like the segue point between the high concept romantic comedies of that late 90s early 2000s to the "we're just two charming people enjoying each others' company" that came along around the time of Knocked Up. When these two awful, lying people aren't being themselves, I hated this movie. But there's one scene, where for a very short five minutes they are just allowed to be the charming things that they are, that this movie has the breath of life. It proves out that a romantic comedy can be just interesting enough when it's just about watching two people fall in love.

I remember.

Minari – 4/5

I feel like I grew up inside this movie. The trailer, the yellow refrigerator, the Mountain Dew, the peeing in bed; those were all mine. I've rarely seen myself in movies as I saw myself in this movie about people who look nothing like me. So that's nice. Nostalgia aside, there is a rich world with rich characters and a lovely grandma and a denouement that almost almost almost touches something special. For a hot minute, it was about two people who simply had contradictory views of how to live the rest of their lives. Staying together out of a love that was no longer there; surrounded by reminders of their love in their children but only staying together out of that memory of a love. That was good. I'd like to have seen how that turned out. It's braver to leave someone than to rush in to a burning building to save them. But hey, if it felt like this all the time, it'd be hard for me to leave, too. It makes me want to go back.

The planned obsolescence

of the human species.

Why would you do that to them?

They had something to care about that wasn't you.

He speaks

in summations.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” she says.

“They’ll do anything to get themselves out of the misery of the world that they’ve created for us."

– Claire, Leave Your Body at the Door How ketamine became the drug of choice for our dissociated moment

Oh, plenty of hope, an infinite amount of hope —

but not for us.

– Kafka

You can be anything.

Even nothing.

Memory

just doesn't hit like it used to.

If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is,

Infinite. 

A memorable

 fancy.

– William Blake, The marriage of heaven and hell

Simone Weil, in her essay on affliction,

says that pain is like the moment when an apprentice hurts himself for the first time on the job; at such moments workers say, “It is the trade entering his body.”

Every word

wants to be understood.

The pursuit

of whims.

I have a great life.

I wish you were in it.

None of us are smart enough

to not do it again.

Style is what you do

 with what's wrong with you.

– Sharon Stone, from her autobiography

Henceforth, I will paraphrase this and therefore make it my own by saying "Style is what you do with what you don't have."

The present

is a kaleidoscope.

– Isabel Allende, The house of the spirits

Every book

is the wreck of a perfect idea. 

- Iris Murdoch, The black prince

There's always

someone lower.

There is something about language

that hurts the thing it describes.

- Laurie Stone, My life as an animal

Forgive me.

I may have made this joke before.

If I don't have you

At least I'll still have me.

- Cyn, 'I'll still have me'

Original

 sentience.

- Duncan Trussell

Sometimes a lie

 is just not yet true.

Oh my soul, do not aspire to immortal life,

but exhaust the limits of the possible.

– Pindar

Hope has two beautiful daughters.

Their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain the way they.

– St. Augustine

Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it,

I will always stand on the side of the egg.

– Haruki Murakami

The purpose of a story

is to sound an alarm.

– Haruki Murakami

There are men whom one hates

until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armor, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.

- Gerald Kersh

Make game of that

which makes as much of thee.

- The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald

If we are all made of atoms,

 then we each carry in us the potential to become atom bombs.

Our shamefaced concern

for the opinion of our friends.

- Alan Moore, 'The Birth Caul'

We don’t have love,

we have pain. 

With everyone on board

 we can only sink faster.

For the ear tests words

as the tongue tastes food.

- The Book of Job

No one leaves home

unless home is the mouth of a shark.

Warsan Shire, “Home”

As I ride out into the wide open spaces

Where a cloud and her shadow
Are the main characters
Lost somewhere deep in my memories,
Night is with day.

- Henry Real Bird, Night and day

Design in nature is but a concatenation of accidents,

culled by natural selection until the result is so beautiful or effective as to seem a miracle of purpose. 

- Michael Pollan, but quoted by Chris Lord/Phil Miller

And this felt good to Cora,

the way it felt good to tongue a canker sore.

- Erin Somers, Ten year affair

Our killer’s back again

and they care about us genuinely.

Identity itself

is configured as a condition to be uncovered rather than articulated or expressed.

- Isabel Munson, Mirror of your mind

God in his heaven

 and us in our hell.

The greedy and the generous have the same end.

The dead know nothing of what we say to them; 
Still, in that silence let me write: dear friend.

- "Another Anniversary," Elaine Feinstein

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results,

we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains. I have now to prove that society in England daily and hourly commits what the working-men's organs, with perfect correctness, characterise as social murder, that it has placed the workers under conditions in which they can neither retain health nor live long; that it undermines the vital force of these workers gradually, little by little, and so hurries them to the grave before their time. I have further to prove that society knows how injurious such conditions are to the health and the life of the workers, and yet does nothing to improve these conditions. That it knows the consequences of its deeds; that its act is, therefore, not mere manslaughter, but murder… 

- Friedrich Engels

I want people to examine their relationships

 as one might examine art.

You know how one's thoughts

 can be a pack of wolves.

- Iris Murdoch

It was better

 when it was really bad.

- graffiti in Bosnia, Sebastian Junger's "Tribe"

I say:

What are they looking for in heaven, all these blind people? 

- Two Brothers

Souls

 grown dizzy. 

Beautiful

 dirt. 

This talisman is fragile, and the day will come when it will collapse miserably.

Then the ancient stony gods will rise from the forgotten debris and rub the dust of a thousand years from their eyes, and finally Thor with his giant hammer will jump up and smash the Gothic cathedrals.

- Heinrich Heine

Often wrong,

 never in doubt.

- Mike D's family motto

The human cost

 of the mattress price wars. 

Threading

 the infinite. 

- Tartarus #10

The one you feed.

The New Mutants - 2/5

It's bad, but I also don't want to discount the good things in it. It's got the aesthetics of a CW show, and that's meant to be an insult as well as a compliment. The characters, barring the main, are characters! A lot comes across in their one note. Sam Guthrie is Southern troubled, Rahne Sinclaire is Catholic troubled, Roberto daCosta is rich boy troubled, and Anna Taylor-Joy's Illyana Rasputin is instantly crush-able. I like them. There's a season-long plot in here; too bad it was thrown away in a movie.

He comforts her. They spark. That's the lightning. They kiss. Thunder.

 Top Hat – 2.5/5

It's baby's first Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers' joint. And if it's the best, as they say, I don't think I entirely understand the pairing. He, I get, all lightness, all air. And what's said of her is that she did it all backwards, and high heels. Props to you, ma'am, indeed, no disrespect intended, but that sounds like work, and Fred Astaire as seen on-screen has never worked a day in his life. You were keeping up and he, simply, was. 

This movie I will also use as a jumping-off point for why I have lately found it difficult to write these little things. I used to think a whole of a movie was everything, looking for perfection from front to back and everything against that was a half-a-point docked. And well, not to overly simplify a bigger rationale and how larger cultural trends fit into it, but it's fine to just have some good spots. There's some good spots in here. 

Watched 1/9/21

A Low and Distant Sound Gradually Swelling and Increasing

Tickled – 2.5/5

"Funny video about Extreme Endurance Tickling takes a sinister turn." It's a fun thing to say you're watching and that's about the tall and short of it. 

Watched 1/7/21

Of stillness, the kingdom of God.

The sound of metal – 3.5/5

What do I want to say, I've forgotten how to do this. 

It makes me wonder why more movies haven't used metal as a backdrop? Pain! Anger! No room for subtlety! It's all at the front; everything is left on the stage. The movie is a good match for the genre; the frustration, the sweatiness, the ringing in your ear. Beyond that, I think the movie could have brought its story closer to the genre. It becomes a layer instead of the layer; addiction and girlfriends just aren't as interesting to me as perhaps a passion to play. A need to scream because you don't know how to speak. Riz Ahmed is great and deserves his props, but Paul Raci is the heart and soul. He is the stillness the movie harps on about; he's found his words and doesn't need to say them aloud.

Watched 1/3/21

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters:

how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; 

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. 

Musée des Beaux Arts, W.H. Auden

Take it that you have died today,

And your life's story is ended; and henceforward regard what further time may be given you as an unconvenanted surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature. 

Marcus Aurelius

It was better

 When it was really bad.

He wants the adventure

 But not the trouble. 

In every word

 A world.