HUNTER S. THOMPSON
____________________
Human beings are the only creatures on Earth that claim a God and the only thing that behaves like it there isn't one.
Tuesday, November 30, 2021
Dmitri Shostakovich
FROM JEWISH FOLK POETRY, OP. 79
FROM JEWISH FOLK POETRY, OP. 79
Svetlana Sumatchova, Marianna Trassova, Konstantin Pluzhnikov, Fyodor Kuznetsov, Yuri Serov
1. Lament For A Dead Baby
2. Caring For Mum And Auntie
3. Lullaby
4. Before A Long Separation
5. Warning
6. Father Abandoned
7. Poverty Song
8. Winter
9. Good Life
10. A Girl’s Song
11. Happiness
2. Caring For Mum And Auntie
3. Lullaby
4. Before A Long Separation
5. Warning
6. Father Abandoned
7. Poverty Song
8. Winter
9. Good Life
10. A Girl’s Song
11. Happiness
Monday, November 29, 2021
Sunday, November 28, 2021
BERTRAND RUSSELL
In Praise of Idleness
In Praise of Idleness
____________________
One of the commonest things to do with savings is to lend them to some Government. In view of the fact that the bulk of the public expenditure of most civilized Governments consists in payment for past wars or preparation for future wars, the man who lends his money to a Government is in the same position as the bad men in Shakespeare who hire murderers.
Saturday, November 27, 2021
BERTRAND RUSSELL
In Praise of Idleness
____________________
While I am as convinced a Socialist as the most ardent Marxian, I do not regard Socialism as a gospel of proletarian revenge, nor even, primarily, as a means of securing economic justice. I regard it primarily as an adjustment to machine production demanded by considerations of common sense, and calculated to increase the happiness, not only of proletarians, but of all except a tiny minority of the human race.
Friday, November 26, 2021
BERTRAND RUSSELL
In Praise of Idleness
In Praise of Idleness
____________________
A prominent citizen in a small city state, such as Athens or Florence, could without difficulty feel himself important. The earth was the center of the Universe, man was the purpose of creation, his own city showed man at his best, and he himself was among the best of his own city. In such circumstances Æschylus or Dante could take his own joys or sorrows seriously. He could feel that the emotions of the individual matter, and that tragic occurrences deserve to be celebrated in immortal verse.
But the modern man, when misfortune assails him, is conscious of himself as a unit in a statistical total; the past and the future stretch before him in a dreary procession of trivial defeats. Man himself appears as a somewhat ridiculous strutting animal, shouting and fussing during a brief interlude between infinite silences.
Thursday, November 25, 2021
BERTRAND RUSSELL
In Praise of Idleness
In Praise of Idleness
____________________
A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries. A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos that the more tragic parts of life become endurable.
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
Tuesday, November 23, 2021
ANAÏS NIN
A Spy in the House of Love
A Spy in the House of Love
____________________
We do not grow absolutely, chronologically. We grow sometimes in one dimension, and not in another; unevenly. We grow partially. We are relative. We are mature in one realm, childish in another. The past, present, and future mingle and pull us backward, forward, or fix us in the present. We are made up of layers, cells, constellations.
Monday, November 22, 2021
Sunday, November 21, 2021
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Nausea
Nausea
____________________
Thursday morning in the library:
A little while ago, going down the hotel stairs, I heard Lucie, who, for the hundredth time, was complaining to the landlady, while polishing the steps. The proprietress spoke with difficulty, using short sentences, because she had not put in her false teeth; she was almost naked, in a pink dressing-gown and Turkish slippers. Lucie was dirty, as usual; from time to time she stopped rubbing and straightened up on her knees to look at the proprietress. She spoke without pausing, reasonably:
“I’d like it a hundred times better if he went with other women,” she said, “it wouldn’t make the slightest difference to me, so long as it didn’t do him any harm.”
She was talking about her husband: at forty this swarthy little woman had offered herself and her savings to a handsome young man, a fitter in the Usines Lecointe. She has an unhappy home life. Her husband does not beat her, is not unfaithful to her, but he drinks, he comes home drunk every evening. He’s burning his candle at both ends; in three months I have seen him turn yellow and melt away. Lucie thinks it is drink. I believe he is tubercular.
“You have to take the upper hand,” Lucie said.
It gnaws at her, I’m sure of it, but slowly, patiently: she takes the upper hand, she is able neither to console herself nor abandon herself to her suffering. She thinks about it a little bit, a very little bit, now and again she passes it on. Especially when she is with people, because they console her and also because it comforts her a little to talk about it with poise, with an air of giving advice. When she is alone in the rooms I hear her humming to keep herself from thinking. But she is morose all day, suddenly weary and sullen.
“It’s there,” she says, touching her throat, “it won’t go down.”
She suffers as a miser. She must be miserly with her pleasures, as well. I wonder if sometimes she doesn’t wish she were free of this monotonous sorrow, of these mutterings which start as soon as she stops singing, if she doesn’t wish to suffer once and for all, to drown herself in despair. In any case, it would be impossible for her: she is bound.
Saturday, November 20, 2021
THE DEEPER YOU DIG
John Adams and Toby Poser
USA, 2019
Rare that I comment here on the films I watch - generally assume I don't watch too much shit - but this is REALLY a good one. Husband, wife, daughter filmmaking team who have given us a current horror film that, if not 110 percent original, has a style AND ending that will blow you away. So refreshing.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
Nausea
____________________
This is odd: I have just filled up ten pages and I haven’t told the truth—at least, not the whole truth. I was writing “Nothing new” with a bad conscience: as a matter of fact I boggled at bringing out a quite harmless little incident. “Nothing new.” I admire the way we can lie, putting reason on our side. Evidently, nothing new has happened, if you care to put it that way: this morning at eight-fifteen, just as I was leaving the Hotel Printania to go to the library, I wanted to and could not pick up a paper lying on the ground. This is all and it is not even an event. Yes —but, to tell the whole truth, I was deeply impressed by it: I felt I was no longer free. I tried unsuccessfully to get rid of this idea at the library. I wanted to escape from it at. I hoped it would disappear in the bright light. But it stayed there, like a dead weight inside me. It is responsible for the preceding pages.
Friday, November 19, 2021
CHUANG TZU / THOMAS MERTON
The Way of Chuang Tzu
"The Breath of Nature"
____________________
When great Nature sighs, we hear the winds
Which, noiseless in themselves,
Awaken voices from other beings,
Blowing on them.
From every opening
Loud voices sound. Have you not heard
This rush of tones?
There stands the overhanging wood
On the steep mountain:
Old trees with holes and cracks
Like snouts, maws, and ears,
Like beam-sockets, like goblets,
Grooves in the wood, hollows full of water:
You hear mooing and roaring, whistling,
Shouts of command, grumblings,
Deep drones, sad flutes.
One call awakens another in dialogue.
Gentle winds sing timidly,
Strong ones blast on without restraint.
Then the wind dies down. The openings
Empty out their last sound.
Have you not observed how all then trembles and subsides?
Yu replied: I understand:
The music of earth sings through a thousand holes.
The music of man is made on flutes and instruments.
What makes the music of heaven?
Master Ki said:
Something is blowing on a thousand different holes.
Some power stands behind all this and makes the sounds die
down.
What is this power?
Thursday, November 18, 2021
Wednesday, November 17, 2021
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
____________________
With Lenin it was always a substantial commitment. I always have a certain admiration for people who are aware that somebody has to do the job. What I hate about these liberal, pseudo-left, beautiful-soul academics is that they are doing what they are doing fully aware that somebody else will do the job for them.
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