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Sam Selvon - The Lonely Londoners

2009-08-12T22:52:00.005+01:00

Things does have a way of fixing themselves, whether you worry or not. If you hustle, it will happen, if you don't hustle, it will still happen. Everybody living to dead, no matter what they doing while they living, in the end everybody dead.

Pierre Choderlos de Laclos - Dangerous Liaisons

2009-08-10T23:50:00.003+01:00

Very well: war.

Kurt Vonnegut - Palm Sunday

2009-08-06T21:19:00.007+01:00

'Are we foolish to be so elated by books in an age of movies and television? Not in the least, for our ability to read, when combined with libraries like this one, makes us the freest of women and men - and children.

'(That is such a strange word on a printed page, incidentally: "freest -f-r-e-e-s-t." I'm glad I'm not a foreigner.)

'Anyway - because we are readers, we don't have to wait for some communications executive to decide what we should think about next - and how we should think about it. We can fill our head with anything from aardvarks to zucchinis - at any time of night or day.

'Even more magically, perhaps, we readers can communicate with each other across space and time so cheaply. Ink and paper are as cheap as sand or water, almost. No board of directors has to convene in order to decide whether we can afford to write down this or that. I myself once staged the end of the world on two pieces of paper- at a cost of less than a penny, including wear and tear on my typewriter ribbon and the seat of my pants.

'Think of that.

'Compare that with the budgets of Cecil B. DeMille.

'Film is simply one more prosthetic device for human beings who are incomplete in some way. We live not only in the Age of Film, but in the Age of False Teeth and Glass Eyes and Toupees and Silicone Breasts - and on and on.

'Film is a perfect prescription for people who will not or cannot read, and have no imagination. Since they have no imaginations, those people can now be shown actors and scenery instead - with appropriate music and all that.

'But again, film is a hideously expensive way to tell anybody anything - and I include television and all that. What is more: Healthy people exposed to too many actors and too much scenery may wake up one morning to find their own imaginations dead.

'The only cure I know of is a library - and the ability to read.

'Reading exercises the imagination - tempts it to go from strength to strength.

'So much for that.

'It would surely be shapely on an occasion like this if something holy were said. Unfortunately, the speaker you have hired is a Unitarian. I know almost nothing about holy things.

'The language is holy to me, which again shows how little I know about holy things.

'Literature is holy to me, which again shows how little I know about holiness.

"Our freedom to say or write whatever we please in this country is holy to me. It is a thing we give to ourselves.

'Meditation is holy to me, for I believe that all the secrets of existence and nonexistence are somewhere in our heads - or in other people's heads.

'And I believe that reading and writing are the most nourishing forms of meditation anyone has so far found.

'By reading the writings of the most interesting minds in history, we meditate with our own minds and theirs as well.

'This is to me is a miracle.

'The motto of this noble library is the motto of all meditators throughout time: "Quiet, please."

'Thus ends my speech.

'I thank you for your attention.'

excerpt from speech, "The Noodle Factory" (opening of new library at Connecticut College; October the 1st 1976)

Mark Hodkinson - The Last Mad Surge Of Youth

2009-07-31T20:12:00.004+01:00

"But maybe that's what's given us both the edge, especially you with the music, having to fight for things and not getting them on a plate".

"Possibly, but I could have done without it thank you very much. We were a long time in that fucking school. As it happens, we were OK, we made it through, but what about the ones who didn't? The kid who killed himself on the railway line, others that had the shit kicked out of them every day. Do you remember the psychopath Robert Smithson who used to hang kids off the bridge over the motorway? While we were suffering all that, other kids elsewhere, rich kids, were being told that they were great, kept away from the nutters, and, lo, they're now running the country. Most of the top blokes at record companies went to public schools. Fancy that, they're even running rock 'n' roll, the branch of the corporate family business that's supposed to champion the underdog and provide a dissenting voice."

"Do you ever get accused of having a chip on your shoulder?"

"Of course I do. That's how they disempower you. They're clever. They have ways of discrediting arguments that get too close to the truth. Do you know what is our greatest weakness, the working-class? We want to be liked. They don't have that problem, the middle-class. They like themselves enough as it is. We're always seeking approval, doffing the cap. We're too easily hurt and put off doing anything."

pomona books

Paul Kingsnorth - Real England

2009-07-27T07:15:00.002+01:00

The question and now is: what can be done to help them succeed? How can we save the Real England? Firstly, it seems to me, we all need to take back control of our own lives. We need to break that dependency on the Thing and take responsibility for our own places. If we care about small shops we need to stop going to Sainsbury's. If we care about farms or orchards disappearing, we need to support them. If we care about our local area, we have to stand up and be counted. Blaming everyone and everything else won't cut it. Societies are made up of people - people like us. It's people who make cultures thrive or die. Blame the government, if you like, and blame Tesco too: they certainly deserve it. But don't think that is a substitute for looking in the mirror and asking yourself what you have done, and what you can do.

realengland

George Orwell - Such, Such Were the Joys

2009-07-22T22:07:00.004+01:00

There was the joy of waking early on summer mornings and getting in an hour's undisturbed reading (Ian Hay, Thackeray, Kipling and H. G. Wells were the favourite authors of my boyhood) in the sunlit, sleeping dormitory. There was also cricket, which I was no good at but with which I conducted a sort of hopeless love affair up to the age of about eighteen. And there was the pleasure of keeping caterpillars — the silky green and purple puss-moth, the ghostly green poplar-hawk, the privet-hawk, large as one's third finger, specimens of which could be illicitly purchased for sixpence at a shop in the town — and, when one could escape long enough from the master who was ‘taking the walk’, there was the excitement of dredging the dew-ponds on the Downs for enormous newts with orange-coloured bellies. This business of being out for a walk, coming across something of fascinating interest and then being dragged away from it by a yell from the master, like a dog jerked onwards by the leash, is an important feature of school life, and helps to build up the conviction, so strong in many children, that the things you most want to do are always unattainable.

Alan Sillitoe -The Loneliness Of The Long Distance Runner

2009-07-19T23:50:00.010+01:00

By the time I’m half-way through my morning course, when after a frost-bitten dawn I can see a phlegmy bit of sunlight hanging from the bare twigs of beech and sycamore, and when I've measured my half-way mark by the short-cut scrimmage down the steep bush-covered bank and into the sunken lane, when still there's not a soul in sight and not a sound except the neighing of a piebald foal in a cottage stable that I can't see, I get to thinking the deepest and daftest of all. The governor would have a fit if he could see me sliding down the bank because I could break my neck or ankle, but I can't not do it because it's the only risk I take and the only excitement I ever get, flying flat-out like one of them pterodactyls from the 'Lost World' I once heard on the wireless, crazy like a cut-balled cockerel, scratching myself to bits and almost letting myself go but not quite. It's the most wonderful minute because there's not one thought or word or picture of anything in my head while I’m going down. I'm empty, as empty as I was before I was born, and I don't let myself go, I suppose, because whatever it is that's farthest down inside me don't want me to dig or hurt myself bad. And it's daft to think deep, you know, because it gets you nowhere, though deep is what I am when I've passed this half-way mark because the long-distance run of an early morning makes me think that every run like this is a life--a little life, I know--but a life as full of misery and happiness and things happening as you can ever get really around yourself--and I remember that after a lot of these runs I thought that it didn't need much know-how to tell how a life was going to end once it had got well started. But as usual I was wrong, caught first by the cops and then by my own bad brain, I could never trust myself to fly scot-free over these traps, was always tripped up sooner or later no matter how many I got over to the good without even knowing it. Looking back I suppose them big trees put their branches to their snouts and gave each other the wink, and there I was whizzing down the bank and not seeing a bloody thing.

photo: © John Hedgecoe

Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Reveries Of The Solitary Walker - 1776

2009-07-18T19:09:00.010+01:00

SECOND WALK

My afternoon went by amid these peaceful meditations, and as i was making my way home, very pleased with my day, when the flow of the reveries was suddenly interrupted by the event which i must now relate.

At about six in the evening I was on the hill leading down from Menilmontant, almost opposite the Jolly Gardener, when some people walking in front of me suddenly stepped aside and i saw a Great Dane rushing at full tilt towards me, followed by a carriage. It saw me too late to be able to check it's speed or change it's course. I judged that my only hope of avoiding being knocked down was to leap into the air at precisely the right moment to allow the dog to pass underneath me. This lightning plan of action, which I had no time either to examine or to put into practice. was my last thought before I went down. I felt neither the impact nor my fall, nor indeed anything else until I eventually came to.

It was nearly night when I regained consciousness. I was in the arms of two or three of the young men who told me what had happened. The Great Dane, unable to check its onrush, had run straight into my legs and it's combined mass and speed had caused me to fall forward on my face. My upper jaw, bearing the full weight of my body, had struck against the bumpy cobblestones, and my fall had been all the more violent because I was on a downhill slope, so that my head finished up lower than my feet. The carriage to which the dog belonged was directly behind it and would have run right over me had not the coachman instantly reined up his horses. So much I learned from those who had picked me up and were still holding me when I came to. But what I felt at that moment was too remarkable to be passed over in silence.

Night was coming on. I saw the sky, some stars, and a few leaves. This first sensation was a moment of delight. I was conscious of nothing else. In this instant I was being born again, and it seemed as if all I perceived was filled with my frail existence. Entirely taken up by the present, I could remember nothing; I had no distinct notion of myself as a person, nor had I the least idea of what had just happened to me. I did not know who I was, nor where I was; I felt neither pain, fear, nor anxiety. I watched my blood flowing as I might have watched a stream, without even thinking that the blood had anything to do with me. I felt throughout my being such a wonderful calm, that whenever I recall this feeling I can find nothing to compare with it in all the pleasures that stir our lives.

FIFTH WALK

When the lake was not calm enough for boating, I would spend the afternoon roaming about the island, stopping to sit now in the most charming and isolated corners where I could dream undisturbed, and now on the terraces and little hills, where I could let my eyes wander over the beautiful and entrancing spectacle of the lake and it's shores, crowned on one side by the near-by mountains and on the other extending in rich and fertile plains where the view was limited only by the more distant range of blue mountains.

As evening approached, I came down from the heights of the island, and I liked then to go and sit on the shingle in some secluded spot by the edge of the lake; there the noise of the waves and the movements of the water, taking hold of my senses and driving all the other agitation from my soul, would plunge it into a delicious reverie in which night often stole upon me unaware. The ebb and flow of the water, it's continuous yet undulating noise, kept lapping against my ears and my eyes, taking the place of all the inward movements which my reverie had calmed within me, and it was enough to make me pleasurably aware of my existence, without troubling myself with thought. From time to time some brief and insubstantial reflection arose concerning the instability of the things of this world, whose image I saw in the surface of the water, but soon these fragile impression gave way before the unchanging and ceaseless movement which lulled me and without any active on my part occupied me so completely that even when time and the habitual signal called me home I could hardly bring myself to go.

After supper, when the evening was fine, we all went out once again to walk on the terrace and breathe the coolness of the lake air. We would sit down to rest in the summer-house and laugh and talk and sing some old song which was fully the equal of all our modern frills and fancies, and then we would go off to bed satisfied with our day and only wishing for the next day to be the same.

freedom manifesto

2009-07-17T13:28:00.005+01:00

DEATH TO THE SUPERMARKETS
BAKE BREAD
PLAY THE UKULELE
OPEN THE VILLAGE HALL
Action is futile
Quit moaning
MAKE MUSIC
STOP CONSUMING START PRODUCING
BACK TO THE LAND
SMASH USURY
EMBRACE BEAUTY
EMBRACE POVERTY
HAIL THE CHISEL
IGNORE the STATE
REFORM IS FUTILE
ANARCHY IN THE UK
HAIL THE SPADE
HAIL THE HORSE
HAIL THE QUILL
LOVE THY NEIGHBOUR
BE CREATIVE
FREE YOUR SPIRIT
DIG THE EARTH
MAKE COMPOST
LIFE IS ABSURD
WE ARE FREE
BE MERRY

Anthony Burgess - The Wanting Seed - 1962

2009-07-17T00:16:00.004+01:00

He was thirty-five and had been a schoolmaster for nearly fourteen years. He earned just over two hundred guineas a month but was hoping, since Newick's death, to be promoted to the headship of the Social Studies Department. That would mean a substantial increase in salary, which would mean a bigger flat, a better start in the world for young Roger. Roger, he then remembered, was dead.

Elie Wiesel - Night

2009-07-13T01:40:00.006+01:00

I ran to look for my father. At the same time I was afraid of having to wish him a happy year in which i no longer believed. He was leaning against the wall, bent shoulders sagging as if under a heavy load. I went up to him, took his hand and kissed it. I felt a tear on my hand. Whose was it? Mine? His? I said nothing. Nor did he. Never before had we understood each other so clearly.

Susan Sontag - Regarding the Pain of Others

2009-07-12T01:25:00.004+01:00

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of it's raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision - the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees us for observation and for elective attention. But this is only to describe the function of the mind itself.
There's nothing wrong with standing back and thinking. To paraphrase several sages: "Nobody can think and hit someone at the same time."

John Dos Passos - The Big Money

2009-07-10T17:30:00.004+01:00

Mrs Duncan had a hard struggle to raise her children in the love of beauty and the hatred of corsets and conventions and manmade laws. She gave piano lessons, she did embroidery and knitted scarves and mittens.
The Duncans were always in debt.
The rent was always due.
Isadora's earliest memories were of wheedling grocers and butchers and landlords and selling little things her mother had made from door to door,
helping hanvalises out of back windows when they had to jump their bills at one shabbygenteel boardinghouse after another in the outskirts of Oakland and San Francisco.
The little Duncans and their mother were a clan; it was the Duncans against a rude and sordid world. The Duncans weren't Catholics any more or Presbyterians or Quakers or Baptists; they were Artists.

When the children were quite young they managed to stir up interest among their interest neighbours by giving theatrical performances in a barn; the older girl Elizabeth gave lessons in society dancing: they were Westerners, the world was a goldrush: they weren't ashamed of being in the public eye. Isadora had green eyes and reddish hair and a beautiful neck and arms. She couldn't afford lessons in conventional dancing, so she made up dances of her own.

John Dos Passos - Nineteen Nineteen

2009-07-06T12:30:00.009+01:00

Late that fall Eveline came home one evening tramping through the mud and the foggy dusk to find that Eleanor had a French Solider to tea. She was glad to see him, because she was always complaining that she wasn't getting to know any French people, nothing but professional relievers and Red Cross women who were just too tiresome; but it was some moments before she realised it was Maurice Millet. She wondered how she could have fallen for him even when she was a kid, he looked so middleaged and pasty and oldmaidish in his stained blue uniform. His large eyes with their girlish long lashes had heavy violet rings under them. Eleanor evidently thought he was wonderful still, and drank up his talk about l'elan supreme du sacrifice and l'harmonie mysterieuse de la mort. He was a stretcherbearer in a base hospital at Nancy, had become very religious and had almost forgotten his English. When they asked him about his painting, he shrugged his shoulders and wouldn't answer. At supper he ate very little and drank only water. He stayed till late in the evening telling them about miraculous conversions of unbelievers, extreme unction on the firing line, a vision of the young Christ he'd seen walking among the wounded in a dressingstation during a gasattack. Apres la guerre he was going into a monastery. Trappist, perhaps. After he left, Eleanor said it had been the most inspiring evening she'd ever had in her life; Eveline didn't argue with her.

John Updike - Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car

2009-06-30T00:48:00.002+01:00

I slept badly: I missed my wife's body, that weight of pure emotion beside me

Sir Robert Falcon Scott Memorial - Waterloo Place

2009-06-28T17:20:00.013+01:00

one of my favourite non-fiction books is Scott of the Antarctic by Reginald Pound. The day after I'd finished it, we were wandering around London, and without aiming for it, or even knowing where it was, we found ourself stood under a Scott memorial sculpture in Waterloo place:

Most beautiful of all, it turns out that the memorial was sculpted by his wife, Kathleen shortly after his death.

memorial at moodmapper

Skerryvore - Home of Robert Louis Stevenson

2009-06-26T16:58:00.008+01:00

On holiday in Dorset, we are staying in a little flat in Westbourne. A stones throw from the flat I was amazed to find the site of "Skerryvore" where Robert Louis Stevenson lived between 1885 and 1887. The building itself was destroyed in the Second World War, but the foundations have been preserved and a small memorial has been erected based on the Lighthouse "Skerryvore" that the Stevenson family built in Scotland and after which the house was named.

Stevenson wrote Dr Jeckyl and Mr Hyde here along with Kidnapped. Having already read and Jeckyl and Hyde but never Kidnapped, I decided to buy a copy and read the first chapter in the grounds of the house where he wrote the novel; a strange, possibly pretentious but magical experience

Painting by John Singer Sargent entitled "Robert Louis Stevenson and His Wife" from 1885 which shows RLS pacing about in the drawing room at Skerryvore:

The Heart of Thomas Hardy

2009-06-24T18:56:00.012+01:00

We are on holiday in Dorset, and today visited the grave of Thomas Hardy (well his heart at least) in Stinsford, a tiny little town near Dorchester. Apparently, Hardy wanted to be buried in the same grave as his first wife, yet his executor insisted he be interred at Poet's corner in Westminster Abbey. The compromise was for his heart to be buried at Stinsford and his ashes in Poets corner. (my sister, kelly, saved the day with the lovely photo above as we deleted ours by mistake)

Afterwards - Thomas Hardy

When the Present has latched it's postern behind my
tremulous stay,
And the May month flaps it's glad green leaves like
wings,
Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,
'He was a man who used to notice such things'?

If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid's soundless blink,
The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight
Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,
'To him this must have been a familiar sight.'

If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and
warm
When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,
One may say, 'He strove that such innocent creatures
should come to no harm,
But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.'

If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand
at the door,
Watching the full-starred heavens their winter sees,
Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no
more,
'He was one who had an eye for such mysteries'?

And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the
gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in it's outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
'He hears it not now, but used to notice such things'?

John Dos Passos - The 42nd Parallel

2009-06-23T20:25:00.005+01:00

the methodist minister's wife was a tall thin woman who sang little songs at the piano in a spindly lost voice who'd heard you liked books and grew flowers and vegetables and was so interested because she'd once been an episcopalian and loved beautiful things and has had stories she had written published in a magazine and she was younger than her husband who was a silent blackhaired man with a mouth like a mousetrap and tobaccojuice on his chin and she wore thin white dresses and used perfume and talked in a bell-like voice about how things were lovely as a lily and the moon was as bright as a bubble full to bursting behind the big pine when we walked back along the shore and you felt you ought to put your arm round her and kiss her only you didn't have the nerve walking slow through the sand and the pine needles under the big moon swelled to bursting like an enormous drop of quicksilver and she talked awful sad about the things she had hoped for and you thought it was too bad

you liked books and Gobbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire and Captain Marryat's novels and wanted to go away and to sea and to foreign cities Carcassonne Marakesh Isfahan and liked things to be beautiful and wished you had the nerve to hug and kiss Martha the colored girl they said was half Indian old Emma's daughter and little redhead Mary I taught how to swim if I only had the nerve breathless nights when the moon was full but Oh God not lillies

James Joyce - Ulysses

2009-06-16T12:55:00.012+01:00

16th of June is Bloomsday

Then all melted away dewily in the grey air: all was silent. Ah! She glanced at him as she bent forward quickly, a pathetic little glance of piteous protest, of shy reproach under which he coloured like a girl He was leaning back against the rock behind. Leopold Bloom (for it is he) stands silent, with bowed head before those young guileless eyes. What a brute he had been! At it again? A fair unsullied soul had called to him and, wretch that he was, how had he answered? An utter cad he had been! He of all men! But there was an infinite store of mercy in those eyes, for him too a word of pardon even though he had erred and sinned and wandered. Should a girl tell? No, a thousand times no. That was their secret, only theirs, alone in the hiding twilight and there was none to know or tell save the little bat that flew so softly through the evening to and fro and little bats don't tell.

Cissy Caffrey whistled, imitating the boys in the football field to show what a great person she was: and then she cried:

--Gerty! Gerty! We're going. Come on. We can see from farther up.

Gerty had an idea, one of love's little ruses. She slipped a hand into her kerchief pocket and took out the wadding and waved in reply of course without letting him and then slipped it back. Wonder if he's too far to. She rose. Was it goodbye? No. She had to go but they would meet again, there, and she would dream of that till then, tomorrow, of her dream of yester eve. She drew herself up to her full height. Their souls met in a last lingering glance and the eyes that reached her heart, full of a strange shining, hung enraptured on her sweet flowerlike face. She half smiled at him wanly, a sweet forgiving smile, a smile that verged on tears, and then they parted. Slowly, without looking back she went down the uneven strand to Cissy, to Edy to Jacky and Tommy Caffrey, to little baby Boardman. It was darker now and there were stones and bits of wood on the strand and slippy seaweed. She walked with a certain quiet dignity characteristic of her but with care and very slowly because--because Gerty MacDowell was ...

Tight boots? No. She's lame! O!

Reginald Pound - Scott Of The Antarctic

2009-06-14T19:01:00.010+01:00

Scott has felt "obliged to request the omission of compliments' from the evening's speeches. What he appreciated, none the less, was the "really genuine recognition" of his attitude to the scientific work of the Expedition. A day of goodwill and happy fellowship was brought to a close on a note of awe. The eastern sky was "massed with swaying auroral light", the most vividly beautiful display in Scott's experience. "There is infinite suggestion of in this phenomenon, and in that lies it's charm; the suggestion of life, form, colour, and movement never less than evanescent, mysterious, - no reality. It is the language of mystic signs and portents - the inspiration of the gods - wholly spiritual - divine signalling. Might not the inhabitants of some other world (Mars) controlling mighty forces thus surround our globe with fiery symbols, a golden writing which we have not the key to decipher?"

Aurora Australis did not always stir his imagination to lyrical flight. It is easier to picture him watching the stupendous show and brooding on the dilemma of man's free will trapped in the seemingly mindless machinery of the universe. The mysterious light incessantly rolled and rippled, as if proclaiming the doctrine of eternal recurrence, interrupted by sudden agitations suggesting encephalic recordings on the cosmic scale. We leave him standing there solitary in the polar night, a man of unconquerable spirit asking himself his perennial conundrum: What is it all about?

Who is man and what his place,

Anxious asks the heart perplext,

In the recklessness of space,

Worlds with worlds thus intermixt,

What is he, this atom creature,

In the infinitude of nature?

- F. T Palgrave*

* Lines copied out by Scott on the last page of his journal for that period.

How could ANYONE resist reading this?

2009-06-04T22:56:00.010+01:00

Front cover and spine:

Back Cover:

THE OUTER LIMITS OF HORROR

From the undead vampire in the Romanian mausoleum, Boris Dragosani tries to draw an evil force so powerful he will gain supremacy in the ultra-secret paranormal agency he works for in Russia. His official job is as a NECROSCOPE - his specialty is tearing secrets from the souls of newly-dead traitors.

And England too has her necroscope - her communicator with the dead. When Harry Keogh is recruited from by the British Secret Service to take on the paranormal menace from behind the Iron Curtain, the stage is set for the most horrifying, violent supernatural confrontation ever...

Leonard Cohen - Report to R.S.B

2009-06-02T21:21:00.008+01:00

Peace did not come into my life.

My life escaped

and peace was there.

Often I bump into my life,

trying to catch it's breath,

pay a bill,

or tolerate the news,

tripping as usual

over the cables

of someone's beauty -

My little life:

so loyal,

so devoted to it's obscure purposes -

And, I hasten to report,

doing just find without me.

Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - The Leopard

2009-05-26T22:12:00.004+01:00

We're not blind, my dear Father, we're just human beings. We live in a changing reality to which we try to adapt ourselves like seaweed bending under the pressure of water. Holy Church has been granted an explicit promise of immortality; we, as a social class, have not. Any palliative which may give us another hundred years of life is like eternity to us. We may worry about our children and perhaps our grandchildren; but beyond that we can hope to stroke with these hands of ours we have no obligations. I cannot worry myself about what will happen to any possible descendants in the year 1960.

The Church, yes, She must worry for She is not destined not to die. Solace is implicit in Her desperation. Don't you think that if now or in the future She could save herself by sacrificing us She wouldn't do so? Of course She would, and rightly.

William Gibson - Idoru

2009-05-24T21:11:00.003+01:00

Lo told me a story once, about a job he'd had. He worked for a soup vendor in Hong Kong, a wagon on the sidewalk. He said the wagon had been in business for over fifty years, and their secret was that they'd never cleaned the kettle. In fact, they'd never stopped cooking the soup. It was the same seafood soup they'd been selling for fifty years, but it was never the same, because they added fresh ingredients every day, depending on what was available. He said that was what his career as musician felt like, and he liked that about it.

William Blake - The Tyger

2009-05-21T19:30:00.010+01:00

Photo: William Blake mural at Goose Green, London, by www.stanpeskett.com & www.georgiapeskett.com

Tyger Tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

In what distant deeps or skies

Burnt the fire of thine eyes?

On what wings dare he aspire?

What the hand dare seize the fire?

And what shoulder and what art

Could twist the sinews of thy heart?

And when thy heart began to beat,

What dread hand and what dread feet?

What the hammer? what the chain?

In what furnace was thy brain?

What the anvil? What dread grasp

Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

When the stars threw down their spears,

And water'd heaven with their tears,

Did He smile His work to see?

Did He who made the lamb make thee?

Tyger, Tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night,

What immortal hand or eye

Dare frame thy fearful symmetry?

Thomas Pynchon - The Crying of Lot 49

2009-05-18T23:03:00.002+01:00

"I came", she said, "hoping you would talk me out of a fantasy".

"Cherish it!" cried Hilarius fiercely. "What else do any of you have? Hold it tightly by it's little tentacle, don't let the Freudians coax it away or the pharmacists poison it out of you. Whatever it is, hold it dear, for when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to cease to be".

Vincent Bugliosi - Helter Skelter

2009-05-10T13:33:00.004+01:00

In Independence, Sandra Good had told me that once, in the desert, Charlie had picked up a dead bird, breathed on it, and the bird had flown away. Sure, Sandy, sure, I replied. Since then I'd heard a great deal about Manson's alleged "powers"; Susan Atkins, for example, felt he could see and hear everything she did or said.

Midway through the arraignment I looked at my watch. It had stopped. Odd. It was the first time I could remember that happening. Then I noticed that Manson was staring at me, a slight grin on his face.

It was, I told myself, simply a coincidence.

Yamamoto Tsunetomo - Hagakure

2009-05-08T09:16:00.004+01:00

There is something to be learned from a rainstorm. When meeting with a sudden shower, you try not to get wet and run quickly along the road. But doing such things as passing under the eaves of houses, you still get wet. When you are resolved from the beginning, you will not be perplexed, though you still get the same soaking. This understanding extends to everything.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez- The Saint (Strange Pilgrims)

2009-04-30T20:10:00.007+01:00

Margarito Duarte had not gone beyond primary school, but his vocation for letters had permitted him a broader education through his impassioned reading of everything in print he could lay his hands on. At the age of eighteen, when he was village clerk, he married a beautiful girl who died not long afterward when she gave birth to their first child, a daughter. Even more beautiful than her mother, she died of an essential fever at the age of seven. But the real story of Margarito Duarte began six months before his arrival in Rome, when the construction of a dam required that the cemetery in his village be moved. Margarito, like all the other residents of the region, disinterred the bones of his dead to carry them to the new cemetery. His wife was dust. But in the grave next to hers, the girl was still intact after eleven years. In fact, when they pried the lid off the coffin, they could smell the scent of the fresh-cut roses with which she had been buried. Most astonishing of all, however, was that her body had no weight.

Great Things - Thomas Hardy

2009-04-26T10:39:00.010+01:00

Sweet cyder is a great thing,

a great thing to me,

Spinning down to weymouth town

By Ridgway thirstily,

And maid and mistress summoning

Who tend the hostelry:

O cyder is a great thing,

A great thing to me!

The dance is a great thing,

A great thing to me,

With candles lit and partners fit

For night-long revelry'

and going home when day-dawning

Peeps pale upon the lea:

O dancing is a great thing,

a great thing to me!

Love is, yea, a great thing,

A great thing to me,

When, having drawn across the lawn,

In darkness silently,

A figure flits like one a-wing,

Out from the nearest tree:

O love is, yes, a great thing,

A great thing to me!

Will these always be the great things,

Great things to me?.......

Let it befall that One will call,

'Soul, I have need of thee:'

What then? Joy-jaunts, impassioned flings,

Love, and it's ecstasy,

Will always have been great things,

Great things to me

Stuart Maconie - Adventures on the High Teas - In Search of Middle England

2009-04-25T23:29:00.006+01:00

And where once stoicism and 'mustn't grumble' were the watchwords of Middle England, it now seems that whatever upsets us, even inconveniences us - from the weather to cold-callers to radio programmes we don't like - some one must be to blame. Teachers, the government, pop groups, footballers: someone somewhere should pay for the fact that the world is not just how we like it. Once we'd have done something about it. Maybe switched channels, maybe thought hard about stuff, maybe exercised a little patience or equanimity. Now we want someone else to do something about it and fast. Someone should be sacked, someone should be carpeted, someone should apologise. An apology we won't accept of course, our arms folded, our ears closed.

If we call it grumpiness, we defuse it, render it harmless, even funny. Given the name of one of the seven dwarves, it sounds cuddly. It conjures up Rick Wakeman or Arthur Smith complaining about mobile ringtones or call centres, rather than reactionary cant about gay people or workers rights or art we don't understand. We used to be the people who said after the Luftwaffe had razed our street, after we'd lost a leg or a cup final and treated those imposters just the same, 'Mustn't grumble' . Now our motto is 'Always grumble' They should put it on coins.

The soundtrack to our lives is becoming an unmusical chorus of whining, a babyish low-level whimper of disapproval dressed up as common sense. Like babies, too, we have become monstrously self-regarding.

J. G. Ballard - 1930 - 2009

2009-04-20T20:01:00.005+01:00

"I wanted to rub humanity's face in its own vomit and force it to look in the mirror"

Mark Oliver Everett - Things the Grandchildren should know

2009-04-20T19:48:00.004+01:00

Life is so full of unpredictable beauty and strange surprises. Sometimes the beauty is too much for me to handle. Do you know the feeling? When something is just too beautiful? When someone says something or writes something or plays something that moves you to the point of tears, maybe even changes you.

Louis-Ferdinand Celine - Journey To The End Of The Night

2009-04-12T17:41:00.005+01:00

The rich don't have to kill to eat. They 'employ' people, as they call it. The rich don't do evil themselves. They pay. People do all they can to please them, and everybody's happy. They have beautiful women, the poor have ugly ones. Clothing aside, they're the product of centuries. Easy to look at, well fed, well washed. After all these years, life can boast no greater accomplishment

It's no use trying, we slide, we skid, we fall back on into the alcohol that preserves the living and the dead, we get nowhere. It's been proved. After all these centuries of watching our domestic animals coming into the world, labouring and dying before our eyes without anything more unusual ever happening to them either than taking up the same insipid fiasco where so many other animals had left off, we should have caught on.

Dave Eggers - After I was thrown in the river and before I drowned.

2009-04-06T18:19:00.003+01:00

The one big surprise is that as it turns out. God is the sun. It makes sense, if you think about it. Why we didn’t see it sooner I cannot say. Every day the sun was right there burning, our and other planets hovering around it, always apologizing, and we didn’t think it was God. Why would there be a God and also a sun? Of course God is the sun.

Stendhal - The Charterhouse of Parma

2009-04-05T09:59:00.001+01:00

As can be seen, Fabrizio was one of those unfortunate people who are tormented by their own imagination. This is a fairly common fault with people of intelligence in Italy. A French soldier of equal or even inferior courage would have gone straight on and crossed the bridge at once, without thinking beforehand of any possible difficulties; but he would also have brought all his coolness to bear on it, and Fabrizio was far from feeling cool or composed, when at the end of the bridge, a little man dressed in grey said to him: Go into the police office and show your passport

Stephen Fry - Moab is my Washpot.

2009-04-04T17:25:00.001+01:00

none of this is important in itself, but I feel somewhere that it has a lot to do with why I always feel so separate, why I always felt unable to join in, to let go, to become part of the tribe, why I have always sniped from the sidelines, why I have never, ever, lost my overwhelmingly self conscious self consciousness. It's not all bad. Heightened self consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self loathing - they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me