thompson, hunter s.

"I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me"

[h. s. thompson]

agee, james

"...for this human sphere is all one such interlocked and marvelously variegated and prehensile a disease and madness, what man in ten million shall dare to presume he is cleansed of it or more so than another, shall dare better than most hesitantly to venture, that one form of this ruin is more than a millionth preferable to another?"

[j. agee, let us now praise famous men]

barthes, roland

"It is as if the Photograph always carries its referent with it, both affected by the same amorous or funereal immobility, at the very heart of the moving world: they are glued together, limb by limb, like the condemned man and the corpse in certain tortures; or even like those pairs of fish (sharks, I think, according to Michelet) which navigate in convoy, as though united by an eternal coitus."

[r. barthes, camera lucida]

foucault, michel

ooh, foucault is so irresistible! even after years away, i'm still so swayed by his sweet words.

"Silence itself--the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers--is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies."

[m. foucault, the history of sexuality, volume i]

also, note to self: find a way to disagree with those you love (see: foucault, barthes, benjamin) when you think they are wrong. because you do disagree with them often enough. that will improve you.

mangum, jeff

oh, spontaneous tears. i forgot the painful ambiguity in the last line of this:

"When we break, we'll wait for our miracle,
God is a place where some holy spectacle lies,
When we break, we'll wait for our miracle,
God is a place you will wait for the rest of your life."

[j. mangum, "two-headed boy, part II"]

richardson, james

In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass
as you would expect. People confuse
their consciences with ghosts and witches.
Old men throw everything away
because they panic and can't feel their lives.
They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,
cliffs, lightning, and die - yes, finally - in glad pain.

You marry a woman you've never talked to,
a woman you thought was a boy.
Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows
once, twice. Your children are lost,
they come back, you don't remember how.
A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue
comes back to life. Oh God, it's all so realistic
I can't stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.

Such a relief, to burst from the theatre
into our cool, imaginary streets
where we know who's who and what's what,
and command with Metrocards our destinations.
Where no one with a story struggling in him
convulses as it eats its way out,
and no one in an antiseptic corridor,
or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains,
staggers through an Act that just will not end,
eyes burning with the burning of the dead.

[James Richardson, "In Shakespeare"]

o'hara, frank

I know so much
about things, I accept
so much, it's like
vomiting. And I am
nourished by the
shabbiness of my
knowing so much
about others and what
they do, and accepting
so much that I hate
as if I didn't know
what it is, to me.
And what it is to
them I know, and hate.

[frank o'hara, "spleen"]