non-contextual

nevver:

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children’s Crusade, Kurt Vonnegut

2 months ago -

3881

He thought about the people he knew, with their excellent young bodies, their summerhouses, their cool clothes, their potent drugs, their liberalism, their orgasms, their haircuts. Everything they did was either pleasurable in itself or engineered to bring pleasure down the line. Even the people he knew who were ‘political’ and who protested the war in El Salvador did so largely in order to bathe themselves in an attractively crusading light. And the artists were the worst, the painters and the writers, because they believed they were living for art when they were really feeding their narcissism.

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Marriage Plot (via venula)

(via vasuki)

4 months ago -

11

A book was never ‘read.’ Here, as elsewhere, language betrayed the true nature of the activity. To say that a book was read was to make the same mistake as the gambler who crowed about winning as though he’d taken it by force of hand or resolve. To toss the number-sticks was to seize a moment of helplessness, nothing more. But to open a book was not only to seize a moment of helplessness, not only to relinquish a jealous handful of heartbeats to the unpredictable mark of another man’s quill, it was to allow oneself to be written. For what was a book if not a long, consecutive surrender to the movements of another’s soul?

Achamian could think of no abandonment of self more profound. He read, and was moved to chuckle by ironies a thousand years dead, and to reflect pensively on claims and hopes that had far outlived the age of their import.”

The Warrior Prophet, R. Scott Bakker

7 months ago

“The value of the metal in a nickel is worth six point eight cents,” he said. “Did you know that?”

I didn’t.

“I just bought a million dollars’ worth of them,” he said, and then, perhaps sensing I couldn’t do the math: “twenty million nickels.”

“You bought twenty million nickels?”

“Uh-huh.”

“How do you buy twenty million nickels?”

“Actually, it’s very difficult,” he said, and then explained that he had to call his bank and talk them into ordering him twenty million nickels. The bank had finally done it, but the Federal Reserve had its own questions. “The Fed apparently called my guy at the bank,” he says. “They asked him, ‘Why do you want all these nickels?’ So he called me and asked ‘Why do you want all these nickels?’ and I said, ‘I just like nickels.’”

Michael Lewis (Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World)

7 months ago -

1

I like to read books. I like to listen to music. I collect records. And cats. I don’t have any cats right now. But if I’m taking a walk and I see a cat, I’m happy

Haruki Murakami

7 months ago

(via David Foster Wallace Books)

7 months ago

(via suburbanfervor)

7 months ago -

311

Outspoken liberals like to display their hatred of the lead players behind the War on Terror. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Blair: the villains of the piece. The truth is that, with a few notable exceptions, nobody covered themselves with glory. Opposition political parties failed to intervene; the military failed to stand behind its beliefs that operations in Iraq and Afghanistan required better resourcing, manpower and planning; the intelligence community failed to insist that caveats in its products were there for a reason. The media failed to inform the public there were serious problems. Perhaps the blame should be shared? There’s enough to go around.

Doubtless there is a case to be made that the world changed as a result of 9/11. But how it changed was not up to Bin Laden, al-Qaeda, or the Taliban. It was up to us. We could have reacted differently. We didn’t.

As a result, the situation in which we currently find ourselves is not one that has been thrust upon us. It’s one that we have chosen. Al-Qaeda doesn’t threaten our existence. It never did. Our reaction to it just might.

Dominic Streatfeild (A History of the World Since 9/11)

7 months ago -

1

(via Neal Stephenson: Science Fiction as a Literary Genre)

8 months ago

nprfreshair:

thisoriented:

Not many things in my life ever gave me a greater sense of achievement than getting a laugh out of Dave.

- Jonathan Franzen -

On today’s Fresh Air, Jonathan Franzen talks about his book Freedom and reflects on his relationship with David Foster-Wallace. [Also David Foster Wallace on Fresh Air]

8 months ago -

166

8 months ago

We all romp about, grieving, wondering, but with rare exception we mostly remain suspended in the Rhetorical Colloidal Forever that agglutinates between Might and Do.

Tony Kushner (Homebody/Kabul)

(Source: judefields)

9 months ago -

1

The border between the Real and the Unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.

robert anton wilson (via myskinisthin)

11 months ago -

4

The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you felt inside — you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people wouldn’t find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were. Logically, you would think that the moment a supposedly intelligent nineteen-year-old became aware of this paradox, he’d stop being a fraud and just settle for being himself (whatever that was) because he’d figured out that being a fraud was a vicious infinite regress that ultimately resulted in being frightened, lonely, alienated, etc. But here was the other, higher-order paradox, which didn’t even have a form or name — I didn’t, I couldn’t.

David Foster Wallace

1 year ago