Playing
Various Artists
MOJO Presents WHITE WINTER HYMNAL
15 Songs For Cold Days and Long Nights
Fleet Foxes, The Waterboys, The Chill, Thea Gilmore, Galaxie 500, Vashti Bunyan, Rachel Unthank & The Winterset, The Watersons, PG Six, Blind Willie McTell, Albion Christmas Band, Laura Cannell, Joanna Newsom, Sam Lee, Elizabeth Fraser, Plinth
ALAIN DE BOTTON
The Architecture of Happiness
We need a home in the psychological sense as much as we need one in the physical: to compensate for a vulnerability. We need a refuge to shore up our states of mind, because so much of the world is opposed to our allegiances. We need our rooms to align us to desirable versions of ourselves and to keep alive the important, evanescent sides of us.
PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY
(1963)
There is nothing in the record of the past two years when both Houses of Congress have been controlled by the Republican Party which can lead any person to believe that those promises will be fulfilled in the future. They follow the Hitler line - no matter how big the lie; repeat it often enough and the masses will regard it as truth.
MING HAORAN
"Memories of Early Winter"
The leaves are falling, the wild geese flying south
The water is cold here, the wind from the North.
I remember my home, where the Xiang River bends
Hidden by the clouds of Chu.
I weep for my village, ’til my tears are spent
I spy a lonely sail that stares at the sky
Indulge me, where is the delta ferry?
The lake is peaceful and boundless.
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
[When asked about the dangers of Internet trolls being able to say whatever they want because of false profiles]
What interests me in this phenomenon – let's call them 'staged identities' – is how there can be more truth in the mask that you adopt than in your real, inner self. I always believed in masks; I never believed in the emancipatory potential of this gesture of 'let's tear off the masks.'
Let me give you a simple example. Let us say that I'm in reality a shy, impotent, stupid person, afraid…but then, in Internet reaction, I adopt a screen persona of a brutal, racist guy who humiliates people, beats women and so on…It's too easy to say, 'Oh, I'm really a coward, but there I imagined to be a powerful macho.' What if it's the opposite? What if I really am that brutal guy – but in real life, because of social pressure and so on, I oppress it so that the true mask is my authentic, real self? And the truth comes out precisely in the guise of a fiction.
MAX JACOB
"Story Without a Moral"
Once there was a locomotive so good that it stopped to let pedestrians pass. One day an automobile bumped over its tracks. The engineer whispered into the ear of his steed: “Shouldn’t we take it to law?” “It is young,” said the locomotive, “it doesn’t know.” It contented itself with spitting a little disdainful steam on the out-of-breath “sportsman.”
-
Translated from the French by Elizabeth Bishop
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK
Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World
The really difficult thing to accept is the fact that the ongoing epidemic is a result of natural contingency at its purest, that it just happened and hides no deeper meaning. In the larger order of things, we are just a species with no special importance
IAIN PEARS
The Dream of Scipio
When all this is over, people will try to blame the Germans alone, and the Germans will try to blame the Nazis alone, and the Nazis will try to blame Hitler alone. They will make him bear the sins of the world. But it's not true. You suspected what was happening, and so did I. It was already too late over a year ago. I caused a reporter to lose his job because you told me to. He was deported. The day I did that I made my little contribution to civilization, the only one that matters.
EMILY DICKINSON
"As if some little Arctic flower"
As if some little Arctic flower,
Upon the polar hem,
Went wandering down the latitudes,
Until it puzzled came
To continents of summer,
To firmaments of sun,
To strange, bright crowds of flowers,
And birds of foreign tongue!
I say, as if this little flower
To Eden wandered in —
What then? Why, nothing, only,
Your inference therefrom!
LUCY GREALY
"Ward 10"
Nothing melodramatic, it’s just when the sunlight
came in through the wired windows and laid itself
down on the green floor, it was nice, we liked it
there, then, playing our games. And like kids
anywhere, we were bad, always sneaking off
to buy chocolate in the lobby, over to Maternity
to make faces at babies, and one morning,
after a previous evening of hushed, excited planning
based on an overheard conversation,
we took the elevator all the way down to the lower basement
to wind our way through the deserted tunnels linking buildings,
nervous, fearless explorers among the bare floodlights
and echoes, looking for signs pointing
toward the animal labs. The night before
we’d lain in our beds unable to sleep with the image
of what we must have thought would be
some sort of petting zoo. We got giggly lost three times
before the stink of sheep’s pee found us,
and then we found them, bleating in their concrete
strawless pens, raw geometries shaved
in their sides. In the next room were cages
and cages of cats, most of them silent, some
with electrodes sewn in their heads.
We could hear monkeys nearby, but instead chose
to finally read the signs we’d laughed at minutes before:
we were unauthorized personnel, we weren’t
supposed to be there. We went back to the ward
to find the nurses laughing, scolding.
They thought we’d somehow found out
the hated technician who took blood
was coming that morning, and that we’d sneaked off
to buy Hershey bars in the gift sbop instead.
Always loving, they applauded our ingenuity:
“How did you know?” We hadn’t, but
played along anyway.
“Guess,” we told them.
*
Before I knew high school I knew words
like vincristine, cytotoxin, sarcoma, failing.
I understood the basic theory of radiation,
the vacuum principle of hypodermics,
that it would be a long time
before I would say out loud
the names of my friends again.
Listen, Michael, Tina: I’m the one who made it.
I don’t know the reason for this.
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