Quotes

[MJRH]

Jonathan Franzen (way before social media)

And let us not mistake the means of civilization for the end of civilization; steam engine, telephone and the like, are all wonderful, but remember that their value depends entirely on the noble uses we make of them, on the noble spirit in which we employ them, not on the things themselves.
It is, no doubt, a great advantage to talk to a man at the Antipodes through a telephone; its advantage depends entirely on the value of what the two men have to say to one another. If one merely shrieks slander through a tube and the other whispers folly into a wire, do not think that anybody is very much benefited by the invention. -Oscar Wilde, Art and the Handicraftsman

[MJRH]

Wilde's analysis has light and shadow, addresses nobility as well as abuse. That's why it's so penetrating.

Don't read Franzen myself. Has he anything positive to say about the internet? Or is he so private he's gone and cocooned like so many before him?

[Faust]

Wilde is absolutely right and I always say that with technology (including social media), mans is the measure of all things. It can be good or it can be awful.

Franzen is notorious for being crabby about technology. I think looking backwards he understands how silly he sounded on many points, so he's loosened up a bit.
But, I think here his grip is not with technology per se but with how it has allowed people to spill their guts in public and how the public gobbles it all up. It's an old tabloid tradition, only now anyone can be a star (or so they believe). I thought this commencement speech by him was wonderful.

Nevertheless, I think he's a wonderful writer, and his novels are an absolute must. He is one of the very few earnest writers left, writers that actually want to say something that means something.

Anyway, I think he's going past bitching about technology and onto cats killing birds. He's an avid bird watcher and advocate. I wouldn't be surprised if he hates humanity so much that he has turned to birds. We are beyond salvation, but the birds... In any case, this only confirms the first Saul Bellow quote, that the novelists who are the most bitter about humanity write best fiction.

[MJRH]

Well, as long as nobody tells him birds also kill birds he'll be fine...

The speech was well-done, you'd posted it before..? It was constructive criticism, recommending a change in action instead of simply condemning an action. Important difference. Bitter novelists often make for simply bitchy novelists, but the best turn their bitterness to account.

A few quotations.

There is no solution because there is no problem. -Duchamp

Much of what we call evil is due entirely to the way men take the phenomenon. It can so often be converted into a bracing and tonic good by a simple change of the sufferer's inner attitude from one of fear to one of fight. Refuse to admit the badness of the facts; despise their power; ignore their presence; turn your attention the other way; and so far as you yourself are concerned, though the facts may still exist, their evil character exists no longer. Hurrah for the Universe!--God's in his Heaven, all's right with the world. [...] To the heroic mind, too, the objects are sinister and dreadful, unwelcome, incompatible with wished-for things. But it can face them if necessary, without for that losing its hold upon the rest of life. -William James

Let go Hell; and your fall will be broken by the roof of Heaven. -Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

"When you have all the wisdom you need, then you are ready to enjoy the pleasures of the senses, those involved in eating, bathing, sleeping, going to the bathroom, making love, watching sunsets, and so on. But we philosophers hold those things to be merest dross." Doctor Faustus speaking. Robert Sheckley and Roger Zelazny, If At Faust you Don't Succeed

The key to the treasure is the treasure. –John Barth, Dunyazadiad

[d'avant-garde]

"May the bridges I burn light the way"

[Faust]

"May the bridges I burn light the way"

Or as I say, "We'll burn that bridge when we get to it."

"Bad taste leads to crime." - Stendhal

[petricor]

“Our culture has accepted two huge lies. The first is that if you disagree with someone’s lifestyle, you must fear or hate them. The second is that to love someone means you agree with everything they believe or do. Both are nonsense. You don’t have to compromise convictions to be compassionate.”
— Rick Warren (go figure)

[yubbermax]

"I would rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth." -Steve McQueen

[petricor]

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject." Winston Churchill

[MJRH]

Zeno, Distended

Of all the striking statements made by De Selby, I do not think that any of them can rival his assertion that 'a journey is an hallucination.' ... His theory, insofar as I can understand it, seems to discount the testimony of human experience and is at variance with everything I have learnt myself on many a country walk. Human existence De Selby has defined as 'a succession of static experiences each infinitely brief', a conception which is thought to have arrived at from examining some old cinematograph films which belonged probably to his nephew. [Footnote: These are evidently the same films which he mentions in Golden Hours as having 'a strong repetitive element' and as being 'tedious'. Apparently he had examined them patiently picture by picture and imagined that they would be screened in the same way, failing at that time to grasp the principle of the cinematograph.] From this premise he discounts the reality or truth of any progression or serialism in life, denies that time can pass as such in the accepted sense and attributes to hallucinations the commonly experienced sensation of progression as, for instance, in journeying from one place to another or even 'living'. If one is resting at A, he explains, and desires to rest in a distant place B, one can only do so by resting for infinitely brief intervals in innumerable intermediate places. Thus there is no difference essentially between what happens when one is resting at A before the start of the 'journey' and what happens when one is 'en route', i.e., resting in one or other of the intermediate places. He treats of these 'intermediate places' in a lengthy footnote. They are not, he warns us, to be taken as arbitrarily-determined points on the A-B axis so many inches or feet apart. They are rather to be regarded as points infinitely near each other yet sufficiently far apart to admit of the insertion between them of a series of other 'inter-intermediate' places, between each of which must be imagined a chain of other resting-places—not, of course, strictly adjacent but arranged so as to admit of the application of this principle indefinitely. The illusion of progression he attributes to the inability of the human brain—'as at present developed'—to appreciate the reality of these separate 'rests', preferring to group many millions of them together and calling the result motion, an entirely indefensible and impossible procedure since even two separate positions cannot obtain simultaneously of the same body. Thus motion is also an illusion. He mentions that almost any photograph is conclusive proof of his teachings. (Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman)

[1994]

"So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.”
- Hermann Hesse, Bäume: Betrachtungen und Gedichte

"In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!"
- Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

“These portraits are a way of saying yes to the people who look like me.”
- Kehinde Wiley

"The site was a palimpsest, as was all the city, written, erased, rewritten. There had been communities here before Columbus ever set sail, before Verrazano anchored ships in the narrows, or the black Portuguese slave trader Esteban Gómez sailed up the Hudson; human beings had lived here, built homes, and quarreled with their neighbors long before the Dutch ever saw a business opportunity in the rich furs and timber of the island and its calm bay. Generations rushed through the eye of the needle, and I, one of the still legible crowd, entered the subway. I wanted to find the line that connected me to my own part in these stories."
- Teju Cole, Open City

[Faust]

"We have no holy places in America, so we make do with the profane." -Saul Bellow

[MJRH]

"You are quiet," he says, "what are you thinking?" And how does Marie tell the lover that in the underground world there is not any language, not Portuguese or English, there is only grey soil, black insects, the slanted muted light of the sun through closed linds, candlelight, the white-dark walls of the inside of the village house, perhaps she has a book by her side: but there is not an aural world, there are no conversations outside of her ears, everything is inside, she is deep within herself now, and the aural world is often, she finds she is still finding it, an agony. "Of nothing," she says to him. —Micheline Aharonian Marcom, A Brief History of Yes

All night we wept and we drank, and drunk I could say the things bubbling in my heart, all those swell words, all the clever similes, because you were crying for the other guy and you didn't hear a word I said, but I heard them myself, and Arturo Bandini was pretty good that night, because he was talking to his true love, and it wasn't you, and it wasn't Vera Rivken either, it was just his true love. —John Fante, Ask the Dust

There are places in the heart that do not yet exist; suffering has to enter in for them to come to be. —Leon Bloy

[MJRH]

Tallulah Bankhead ♥

"Let's not quibble! I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, 'I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right.'"

"I'm as pure as the driven slush."

"I read Shakespeare and the Bible and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education."

[Faust]

You can't let the big 'they' impose its bigotry on you any more than you can let the little 'they' become a 'we' and impose its ethics on you. Not the tyranny of the 'we' and its 'we'-talk and everything that the 'we' wants to pile on your head. Never for him the tyranny of the 'we' that is dying to suck you in, the coercive, inclusive, historical, inescapable moral 'we' with its insidious E pluribus unum. Instead the raw 'I' with all its agility. Self-discovery. Singularity. The passionate struggle for singularity. The singular animal. The sliding relationship with everything. Not static but sliding. Self-knowledge but concealed. What is as powerful as that?" - Philip Roth, The Human Stain