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"]

nietzsche, friedrich

"For the New Year. --I still live, I still think: I still have to live, for I still have to think. Sum, ergo cogito: cogito, ergo sum. Today everybody permits himself the expression of his wish and his dearest thought; hence I, too, shall say what it is that I wish from myself today, and what was the first thought to run across my heart this year--what thought shall be for me the reason, warranty, and sweetness of my life henceforth. I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer."

[f. nietzsche, gay science]

baudrillard, jean [03.08.07]

"Two bodies side by side, which are not asleep and know it: a strange kind of communication sets in between them, formed of respect for simulated sleep, and yet it needs to betray itself by some furtive sign -- a breathing pattern which is not that of real sleep or movements which are not those of a dreaming body. Neither, however, wants to break the spell. It is a conspiracy in the dark, an emotional conspiracy filled with delicious tension.

There has been much discussion of the uninterpretable answer to the question: 'are you lying?' But ask someone next to you, very softly as not to wake him: 'are you asleep?' If he replies that he is, then that makes him a liar. But he can reply by pretending to be asleep, which is not actually lying, but pretending to lie. There is a big difference, since this is a lovers' game. The question itself is a lovers' game because it assumes the partner is not asleep while making every effort not to wake him. Besides, these are the same questions: do you love me? are you lying to me? are you asleep? And the reply -- yes, I love you, yes, I'm lying, yes, I'm asleep -- is equally paradoxical. but it is not untruthful. It simply comes from another world which is not the truth of the first. 'Yes I'm asleep. Yes I'm lying. Yes, I love you' all these answers reflect a marvelous somnambulism and, all in all, a very clear grasp of the relations we establish with reality when we are sleeping, lying or in love."

[baudrillard, Cool Memories]