Even in absurdity, sacrament. Even in hardship, holiness. Even in doubt, faith. Even in chaos, realization. Even in paradox, blessedness
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"Life expands or shrinks in proportion to one's courage." ~Anain Nin
Burroughs: My Mother and I Would Like to Know “We been tipped off a nude reefer party is going on here. Take the place apart, boys, and you folks keep your clothes on or I'll blow your filthy guts out.” We put out false alarms on the police short wave directing patrol cars to nonexistent crimes and riots which enables us to strike somewhere else. Squads of false police search and beat the citizenry. False construction workers tear up streets, rupture water mains, cut power connections. Infra-sound installations set off every burglar alarm in the city. Our aim is total chaos. Loft room, map of the city on the wall. Fifty boys with portable tape recorders record riots from TV. They are dressed in identical grey flannel suits. They strap on the recorders under gabardine topcoats and dust their clothes lightly with tear gas. They hit the rush hour in a flying wedge, riot recordings on full blast, police whistles, screams, breaking glass, crunch of night sticks, tear gas flapping from their clothes. They scatter, put on press cards, and come back to cover the action. Bearded Yippies rush down a street with hammers, breaking every window on both sides, leave a wake of screaming burglar alarms, strip off the beards, reverse collars, and they are fifty clean priests throwing gasoline bombs under every car - WHOOSH a block goes up behind them. In fireman uniforms, arrive with axes and hoses to finish the good work. In Mexico, South and Central America, guerrilla units are forming an army of liberation to free the United States. In North Africa, from Tangier to Timbuktu, corresponding units prepare to liberate Western Europe and the United Kingdom. Despite disparate aims and personnel of its constituent members, the underground is agreed on basic objectives. We intend to march on the police machine everywhere. We intend to destroy the police machine and all its records. We intend to destroy all dogmatic verbal systems. The family unit and its cancerous expansion into tribes, countries, nations, we will eradicate at its vegetable roots. We don't want to hear any more family talk, mother talk, father talk, cop talk, priest talk, country talk or party talk. To put it country simple, we have heard enough bullshit. jaybird found this for you @ 11:51 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
When William Blake died in 1827, his widow Catherine appointed Frederick Tatham his literary and artistic executor. No sooner had Tatham accepted the position than he was, in the words of William Michael Rossetti, brother of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, "beset" by "Swedenborgians, Irvingites, or other extreme sectaries", and compelled to thrust "a gag into the piteous mouth of Blake's corpse". What these timid souls feared was that Blake's remains would disclose his intense, frequently obsessive and occasionally pornographic interest in sex. Tatham's job amounted to a full-scale expurgation of what Blake's less unbuttoned followers considered obscene. Blake had left many drawings and manuscripts containing his most explicit sexual, religious and political expressions - all three were linked for him - and Tatham felt obliged to destroy these. The loss was irreparable, but some of the cover-up - literally - was less extreme. Joined by Blake's friend John Linnell, on some works Tatham only erased the offending words or images. When this proved impracticable they resorted to a fig leaf. Blake's original nude self-portrait for his Milton exhibited an erect and oddly blackened penis. One of Blake's prudish descendants mitigated the shock caused by the poet's proud member by drawing knickers over it. Thankfully, modern technology has restored much of this censored material, and what emerges is a vivid recognition that for Blake, sex was at the centre of his spiritual and domestic life. jaybird found this for you @ 12:59 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
Isadore Upinsky: "On Impending Spring and the Turvy Side of a Topsy Life."  The thing about it is, is that the moon will always rise, the tides will always ebb and flow, and Spring will always come. As it happens this year, there are certain configuarations of human events which tumble about the mind and through the winds: war, famine, crumbing institutions, and earthquakes of social change. Yet, these configuations will change and scatter and blow so that each year, there is great uniqueness- and great similarity. The human dance is ongoing, ever changing, ever continuous. Until, of course, the Universe is done with our particular talents and quirks. [from an uncirculated anthology of his work, circa 1972] jaybird found this for you @ 22:49 in Authors, Books & Words , Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
Kurt Vonnegut's "Stardust Memory" A key to great writing, he adds, is to “never use semi-colons. What are they good for? What are you supposed to do with them? You’re reading along, and then suddenly, there it is. What does it mean? All semi-colons do is suggest you’ve been to college.” Make sure, he adds, “that your reader is having a good time. Get to the who, when, where, what right away, so the reader knows what is going on.” As for making money, “war is a very profitable thing for a few people. Jesus used to be so merciful and loving of the poor. But now he’s a Republican. “Our economy today is not capitalism. It’s casino-ism. That’s all the stock market is about. Gambling. “Live one day at a time. Say ‘if this isn’t nice, I don’t know what is!’ “You meet saints every where. They can be anywhere. They are people behaving decently in an indecent society. “I’m going to sue the cigarette companies because they haven’t killed me,” he says. His son lived out his dream to be a pilot and has spent his career flying for Continental. Now they’ve “screwed up his pension.” The greatest peace, Vonnegut wraps up, “comes from the knowledge that I have enough. Joe Heller told me that. “I began writing because I found myself possessed. I looked at what I wrote and I said ‘How the hell did I do that?’ “We may all be possessed. I hope so.” jaybird found this for you @ 21:20 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
Sedaris: Suitable for framing She examined all of the painting, and then parts of it, her fingers dabbing in sympathy as she studied the brushstrokes. “What are you thinking about?” I once asked. And she said, “Oh, you know, the composition, the surfaces, the way things look realistic when you’re far away but weird when you’re up close.” “Me, too,” I said, but what I was really thinking was how grand it would be to own a legitimate piece of art and display it in my bedroom. Even with my babysitting income, paintings were out of the question, so instead I invested in postcards, which could be bought for a quarter in the museum shop and matted with shirt cardboard. This made them look more presentable. I was looking for framing ideas one afternoon when I wandered into a little art gallery called the Little Art Gallery. It was a relatively new place, located in the North Hills Mall and owned by a woman named Ruth, who was around my mom’s age, and introduced me to the word “fabulous,” as in: “If you’re interested, I’ve got a fabulous new Matisse that just came in yesterday.” This was a poster rather than a painting, but still I regarded it the way I thought a connoisseur might, removing my glasses and sucking on the stem as I tilted my head. “I’m just not sure how it will fit in with the rest of my collection,” I said, meaning my Gustav Klimt calendar and the cover of the King Crimson LP tacked above my dresser. jaybird found this for you @ 19:39 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
Phillip K. Dick: If You Find This World Bad, You Should See Some of the Others May I tell you how much I appreciate your asking me to share some of my ideas with you. A novelist carries with him constantly what most women carry in large purses: much that is useless, a few absolutely essential items, and then, for good measure, a great number of things that fall in between. But the novelist does not transport them physically because his trove of possessions is mental. Now and then he adds a new and entirely useless idea; now and then he reluctantly cleans out the trash -- the obviously worthless ideas -- and with a few sentimental tears sheds them. Once in a great while, however, he happens by chance onto a thoroughly stunning idea new to him that he hopes will turn out to be new to everyone else. It is this final category that dignifies his existence. But such truly priceless ideas. . . perhaps during his entire lifetime he may, at best, acquire only a meager few. But that is enough; he has, through them, justified his existence to himself and to his God. An odd aspect of these rare, extraordinary ideas that puzzles me is their mystifying cloak of -- shall I say -- the obvious. By that I mean, once the idea has emerged or appeared or been born -- however it is that new ideas pass over into being -- the novelist says to himself, "But of course. Why didn't I realize that years ago?" But note the word "realize." It is the key word. He has come across something new that at the same time was there, somewhere, all the time. In truth, it simply surfaced. It always was. He did not invent it or even find it; in a very real sense it found him. And -- and this is a little frightening to contemplate -- he has not invented it, but on the contrary, it invented him. It is as if the idea created him for its purposes. I think this is why we discover a startling phenomenon of great renown: that quite often in history a great new idea strikes a number of researchers or thinkers at exactly the same time, all of them oblivious to their compeers. "Its time had come," we say about the idea, and so dismiss, as if we had explained it, something I consider quite important: our recognition that in a certain literal sense ideas are alive. What does this mean, to say that an idea or a thought is literally alive? And that it seizes on men here and there and makes use of them to actualize itself into the stream of human history? jaybird found this for you @ 20:33 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
Choose Your Villain Note the eerie similarities between Goldstein and whomever the posterboy of the day is for All That Is Wrong In America: In the novel Goldstein is rumored to be a former top member of the ruling (and sole) Party who had broken away early in the movement and started an organization known as "The Brotherhood", dedicated to the fall of The Party. However, in the course of the novel, the reader never learns if "The Brotherhood" or Goldstein himself actually ever existed, even though he is led to believe that neither Goldstein, nor the "Brotherhood," nor "Big Brother" exists outside of suggestion.  jaybird found this for you @ 21:23 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
Decades-old mystery: Who visits Poe's grave?  Continuing a decades-old tradition, a mystery man paid tribute to Edgar Allan Poe by placing roses and a bottle of cognac on the writer's grave to mark his January 19 birthday. Some of the 25 spectators drawn to a tiny, locked graveyard in downtown Baltimore for the ceremony climbed over the walls of the site and were "running all over the place trying to find out how the guy gets in," according to Jeff Jerome, the most faithful viewer of the event. Jerome, curator of the Poe House and Museum, said early Thursday he had to chase people out of the graveyard, fearing they would interfere with the mystery visitor's ceremony. "In letting people know about this tribute, I've been contributing to these people's desire to catch this guy," Jerome said. "It's such a touching tribute, and it's been disrupted by the actions of a few people trying to interfere and expose this guy." The cryptic visits began in 1949. Jerome has seen the ceremony every January 19 since 1976. Poe was born in 1809. "They had a game plan," Jerome said of the spectators. "They knew from previous years when the guy would appear." jaybird found this for you @ 13:04 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
Gibran: Your thought and mine Your thought is a tree rooted deep in the soil of tradition and whose branches grow in the power of continuity. My thought is a cloud moving in the space. It turns into drops which, as they fall, form a brook that sings its way into the sea. Then it rises as vapour into the sky. Your thought is a fortress that neither gale nor the lightning can shake. My thought is a tender leaf that sways in every direction and finds pleasure in its swaying. Your thought is an ancient dogma that cannot change you nor can you change it. My thought is new, and it tests me and I test it morn and eve. You have your thought and I have mine. Your thought allows you to believe in the unequal contest of the strong against the weak, and in the tricking of the simple by the subtle ones. My thought creates in me the desire to till the earth with my hoe, and harvest the crops with my sickle, and build my home with stones and mortar, and weave my raiment with woollen and linen threads. Your thought urges you to marry wealth and notability. Mine commends self-reliance. Your thought advocates fame and show. Mine counsels me and implores me to cast aside notoriety and treat it like a grain of sand cast upon the shore of eternity. Your thought instils in your heart arrogance and superiority. Mine plants within me love for peace and the desire for independence. Your thought begets dreams of palaces with furniture of sandalwood studded with jewels, and beds made of twisted silk threads. My thought speaks softly in my ears, “Be clean in body and spirit even if you have nowhere to lay your head.” Your thought makes you aspire to titles and offices. Mine exhorts me to humble service. You have your thought and I have mine... jaybird found this for you @ 16:59 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
Shakespeare's smoke and mirrors tricks solved “You notice at once that Macbeth is full of optical illusions — there are floating daggers, the ghost of Banquo, ghostly kings, and ghostly cauldrons. I thought, surely if that’s the case, Shakespeare is probably saying to himself, ‘What sort of special effects are available to make these more spectacular?’.” This train of thought took Professor Wright to the library at the University of Cambridge where he picked up a copy of Euclid’s Geometry edited by John Dee. A contemporary of Shakespeare, Dee is now regarded as one of the fathers of the modern age because of his talent for what was then called natural magic – science. He was especially interested in how specially modified mirrors could create tricks of the light, making things appear as if by magic.
Professor Wright argues that Shakespeare would undoubtedly have been aware of such tricks of the light when writing Macbeth, and may even have used a device like Dee’s to create the effect of a floating dagger. Similar optical effects might also have been deployed to create the many ghosts who pop up during the play. jaybird found this for you @ 09:00 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
Good behavior: I Broke the Law at Walden Pond--Twice So I camped in the trees surrounding Walden Pond that night. Aware that I might be breaking some regulation, I snuck into the forest, the leaves rustling under my tires. I felt like one of Robin Hood’s band of merry men, gleefully trespassing in Sherwood Forest. I broke the law, crushed a few autumn leaves in the process, brought no harm to anyone, and left the next morning. We break laws every day and neither the world nor our souls are worse for wear. Indeed, to be a law-abiding citizen often requires a citizen to either commit crimes ourselves or become silent accomplices to crimes committed by those we’ve foolishly empowered. The biggest lawbreakers are usually powerful state officials, those who formulate malignant laws that require others to perform felonious tasks and then penalize anyone who resists. As Thoreau noted, in such cases: “I say, break the law.” jaybird found this for you @ 20:22 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
Vonnegut: Your Guess Is as Good as Mine Most of you, if not all of you, like me, feel inadequately educated. That is an ordinary feeling for a member of our species. One of the most brilliant human beings of all times, George Bernard Shaw said on his 75th birthday or so that at last he knew enough to become a mediocre office boy. He died in 1950, by the way, when I was 28. He is the one who said, “Youth is wasted on the young.” I turned 83 a couple weeks ago, and I must say I agree. Shaw, if he were alive today, would envy us the solid information that we have or can get about the nature of the universe, about time and space and matter, about our own bodies and brains, about the resources and vulnerabilities of our planet, about how all sorts of human beings actually talk and feel and live. This is the information revolution. We have taken it very badly so far. [via metafilter] jaybird found this for you @ 08:02 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
Pinter: Art, truth and politics It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence. What follows is fitful, uncertain, even hallucinatory, although sometimes it can be an unstoppable avalanche. The author's position is an odd one. In a sense he is not welcomed by the characters. The characters resist him, they are not easy to live with, they are impossible to define. You certainly can't dictate to them. To a certain extent you play a never-ending game with them, cat and mouse, blind man's buff, hide and seek. But finally you find that you have people of flesh and blood on your hands, people with will and an individual sensibility of their own, made out of component parts you are unable to change, manipulate or distort. So language in art remains a highly ambiguous transaction, a quicksand, a trampoline, a frozen pool which might give way under you, the author, at any time. But as I have said, the search for the truth can never stop. It cannot be adjourned, it cannot be postponed. It has to be faced, right there, on the spot. jaybird found this for you @ 20:50 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
Philip K. Dick: How To Build A Universe That Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos. There should be more of it. Do not believe -- and I am dead serious when I say this -- do not assume that order and stability are always good, in a society or in a universe. The old, the ossified, must always give way to new life and the birth of new things. Before the new things can be born the old must perish. This is a dangerous realization, because it tells us that we must eventually part with much of what is familiar to us. And that hurts. But that is part of the script of life. Unless we can psychologically accommodate change, we ourselves begin to die, inwardly. What I am saying is that objects, customs, habits, and ways of life must perish so that the authentic human being can live. And it is the authentic human being who matters most, the viable, elastic organism which can bounce back, absorb, and deal with the new. [via metafilter] jaybird found this for you @ 16:27 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
Isadore Upinsky: On Religion and Mysticism "The main purpose of most religion is to prevent people from killing themselves for the sheer thrill of it, unless that suicide lends a regime some degree of political credence. The main purpose of most mysticism, however, is to encourage people to completely and utterly annihilate their sense of self in order to view the whole of the Universe--- which is quite possible, literally. They do so in a way that does not prop up human institution, but the creative institutions of love, passion and freedom that humans can so barely grasp these days." ~From "Falling through a Whole" jaybird found this for you @ 08:28 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
 "I feel like a certain kind of horse's ass, like somebody born rich. I don't deserve it, and those who crashed and burned didn't deserve it, either. So I'm the asshole who broke the bank at Monte Carlo." jaybird found this for you @ 08:11 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
wordplay: Weird and wonderful vocabulary from around the world "The Greeks had a word for it," we used to say, when stumped for the precise way to describe something. Now, thanks to Adam Jacot de Boinod and his collection of bizarre foreign words, we discover that the Malays, Hawaiians and Sumatrans had, and still have, words for it too. There is a word for the fold of skin under your chin (alang - it's Nicaraguan). There is a word for the ring you put in the nose of a calf in order to stop it suckling its mother (oorxax, and, as you know, it's from the Khakas region of Siberia). There is, thank God, a word that sums up that annoying thing you do when your taxi is 20 minutes late and you're too restless to wait for the doorbell to ring. It's iktsuarpok - "to go outside often to see if someone is coming." jaybird found this for you @ 08:00 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
Calvino's belief in the transforming powers of literature runs in harness with his hesitations over the newly extrovert role of the writer in society. His instinct was to let the work speak for itself and to seek anonymity for himself. There is a slight awkwardness therefore, in publishing and reading pieces which Calvino made no effort to publish himself, outside of their original moment in newspapers, or as prefaces, journalism and letters. [via mefi] jaybird found this for you @ 12:45 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
This American Life: After the Flood Surprising stories from survivors in New Orleans. We give people who were in the storm more time than daily news coverage can to tell their stories and talk about what they're thinking. This leads to a number of ideas that haven't made it into the regular news coverage. jaybird found this for you @ 08:15 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
The Venerable Robert Anton Wilson: Premature Illumination "Faith-based organizations say we don't need any more research, we know enough now, we can be dogmatic, whereas researchers say we don't know enough now, investigate, research," argues Wilson. "Faith is a reason to become stupid: 'From this point forward, I will remain stupid.' To me, faith-based organizations are responsible for everything I see wrong with this planet. Research-based organizations are responsible for everything I like about it. Before the French Revolution, the average life expectancy was 37 years. Now it's 78 years. All due to research-based organizations. Not at all due to faith-based organizations. All faith-based organizations give you is George Bush. Research-based organizations give you cures for disease." jaybird found this for you @ 12:23 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
Twain: Letters from the Earth "Very well, then, let us proceed. We have witnessed a wonderful thing; as to that, we are necessarily agreed. As to the value of it -- if it has any -- that is a matter which does not personally concern us. We can have as many opinions about it as we like, and that is our limit. We have no vote. I think Space was well enough, just as it was, and useful, too. Cold and dark -- a restful place, now and then, after a season of the overdelicate climate and trying splendors of heaven. But these are details of no considerable moment; the new feature, the immense feature, is -- what, gentlemen?" "The invention and introduction of automatic, unsupervised, self-regulating law for the government of those myriads of whirling and racing suns and worlds!" "That is it!" said Satan. "You perceive that it is a stupendous idea... jaybird found this for you @ 06:52 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
terra: tongue in cheek
jaybird found this for you @ 16:19 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
lawrence ferlinghetti Great Oracle, why are you staring at me, Great Oracle, sleeping through the centuries, O long-silent Sybil, Far-seeing Sybil, forever hidden, jaybird found this for you @ 11:58 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
william carlos williams  Of asphodel, that greeny flower, like a buttercup upon its branching stem- save that it's green and wooden- I come, my sweet, to sing to you. more -> jaybird found this for you @ 12:35 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
dillard The other side of Dillard's mysticism explores with the unanswerable questions, such as -- why must there be pain and suffering? She wonders why God would create creatures in such great numbers that some must die of famine, or why God would create 10% of the earth's creatures as parasites -- creatures that live only by destroying other life - and she provides lots of examples of the gruesome ways that parasites devour their prey. Dillard feels that we give children the wrong idea in regards to the nature of reality -- and muses that perhaps stuffed teddy bears should come with little stuffed lice, to paint a true picture of the way things are. {PTC, 233} However, at the same time she is cursing God for the creation of parasites, she also understands that "these parasites are companions for life...more life to the universal dance." {PTC, 234} The existence of two such diametrically opposed facets of nature is confusing to her, and she finds herself dwelling on this paradox. jaybird found this for you @ 12:23 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
hart crane We will make our meek adjustments, For we can still love the world, who find We will sidestep, and to the final smirk And yet these fine collapses are not lies We can evade you, and all else but the heart: The game enforces smirks; but we have seen jaybird found this for you @ 12:19 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
john aubrey Mrs. E. W. daughter of Sir W. W. affirms that Mrs. J. (her father's Mr. Trahern, B.D. (chaplain to Sir Orlando Bridgman, Lord Keeper) a When Sir Kichard Nepier, M.D. of London, was upon the road coming jaybird found this for you @ 11:39 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
fernando pessoa The poet is an inventor. And those who read what he writes And thus in the wheel ruts jaybird found this for you @ 16:12 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
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