June 2013
16 posts
“If I had not existed, someone else would have written me, Hemingway, Dostoyevsky, all of us. Proof of that is that there are about three candidates for the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays. But what is important is Hamlet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, not who wrote them, but that somebody did. The artist is of no importance. Only what he creates is important, since there is nothing new to be said. Shakespeare, Balzac, Homer have all written about the same things, and if they had lived one thousand or two thousand years longer, the publishers wouldn’t have needed anyone since.”
—William Faulkner (via theparisreview)
“It’s so hard to see into the future.”
—AC
I’m kind of obsessed with Nic Cage. He’s the only actor since Marlon Brando that’s actually done anything new with the art of acting; he’s successfully taken us away from an obsession with naturalism into a kind of presentation style of acting that I imagine was popular with the old troubadours. If I could erase his bottom half bad movies, and only keep his top half movies, he would blow everyone else out of the water. He’s put a little too much water in his beer, but he is still one of the great actors of our time. And working with him was an absolute pleasure. In fact, one of my favorite scenes I’ve ever done is the last scene in LORD OF WAR.
Ethan Hawke on Nicolas Cage
"American Apparel seemed to me a tweaked-out metaphor for the country itself, the way it had strategically shifted the hero of its exceptionalism narrative from its factory to its cast of disposable young people who are endowed with little besides their looks and the desire to broadcast their youthful insouciance to a wider audience." →
cjr.org
“A writer’s search for journalism in the age of branding,” by Maureen Tkacik
“We were slant rhyming when we were eight.”
—CL, on our childhood
May 2013
54 posts
“A ‘Bummel’,” I explained, “I should describe as a journey, long or short, without an end; the only thing regulating it being the necessity of getting back within a given time to the point from which one started. Sometimes it is through busy streets, and sometimes through the fields and lanes; sometimes we can be spared for a few hours, and sometimes for a few days. But long or short, but here or there, our thoughts are ever on the running of the sand. We nod and smile to many as we pass; with some we stop and talk awhile; and with a few we walk a little way. We have been much interested, and often a little tired. But on the whole we have had a pleasant time, and are sorry when ‘tis over.”
—Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men on the Bummel (1900)
“Providence pervades god’s world. The workings of chance are part of nature, the web and woof of the dispositions of providence. From providence flows all; and side by side with it is necessity and the advantage of the Universe, of which you are a part. To every part of nature that which Nature brings, and which helps toward its conservation, is good. The conservation of the world-order depends not on the changes of the elements, but also on those of the compounded wholes. Be content with what you have, find there your principles of life. No more thirsting after books, that you may die not murmuring but in serenity, truly and heartily grateful to the gods.”
—Marcus Aurelius, To Himself
“It’s been said many times before, but it bears repeating: Memorial Day is not a day for celebrating the military. It’s a day for honoring the military dead. A more appropriate gesture [than wearing camouflage uniforms] would be an MLB-wide black armband. An even better gesture would be a pregame moment of silence, without anything on the uniform. But as is so often the case nowadays, merchandising and pandering trump common sense.”
—Paul Lukas, Uni Watch (via mightyflynn)
“A wise old owl lived on an oak
The more he saw, the less he spoke
The less he spoke, the more he heard
Why can’t we all be like that wise old bird?” —
The more he saw, the less he spoke
The less he spoke, the more he heard
Why can’t we all be like that wise old bird?” —
English nursery rhyme (via lunaraurora)
Haha, Owl Jolson is the direct opposite of this.
Our Sages whose Books are their Wives,
May hunt the Philosopher’s Stone,
And be proud of their Continent Lives,
As if that themselves had none.
But if they would come at the Prize,
They ought to be Jolly and drink,
For the true Modern Way to be Wise
Is neither to Read or to Think.
The Blockhead must lose his Aim,
The studies Old Aristotle
For the ways that we rise to Fame,
Are the Petticoat, Dice and Bottle
Thus if you would climb to Pow’r
And be a True Whig of Trust,
Your way is to Drink and Whore,
And neither be Learn’d of Just.
— Edward Ward, The Tipling Philosophers (1710)
Play
Sippin' that New Yorker Cartoon Haterade
- Okay, so this is dumb and vaguely misogynistic.
- Wow, a cartoon about people liking their phones and being on them all the time. This is really making a splash and saying something…if it were 2003.
- So it’s some sort of glider dog or something? Is there a visual joke here I am not getting?
- Why would there be penicillin in a salad?
ML: I’m drunk, I’m drunk.
JM: I mean we did just drunk dial 1998 World Series MVP Scott Brosius.
Gincomprehensible.
ML: I want my French to be better.
ML: That way I could fulfill my destiny as a good descendant of Normans.
JC: Then just go insult a Greek.
ML: The Greeks and Normans never did get along, did they?
JC: That seems to be the fundamental message of The Alexiad.
ML: I thought the fundamental message of The Alexiad was that Anna Komnene is my dream woman.
JC: A bloodthirsty Byzantine princess fluent in Attic Greek with a keen sense of historical drama.
JC: That is another message, yes.
Play
“I patently object to any article that starts with ‘when you’re a critic…’”
—
SR on Ben Greenman’s waste-of-space piece, “Hiding in the Deaf Spot” (via ieatedthepurpleone)
While I admit kind of enjoying reading the article, the enjoyment was mostly because I love to hate this guy’s attitude. The comment on the article “If the New Yorker stopped paying you to write about music you can’t be bothered to listen to, that would not be a tremendous loss either” really sums it up.
p.s. previous post about this.
(via bubblypotentially)
