March 2010
25 posts
1 tag
“Concepts can at best only serve to negate one another, as one thorn is used to...”
– Ramesh Balsekar (via arsvitaest)
Fun etymologies Thursday →
superfluidity:
enormousair:
2. I’ve heard this etymology contested before. What does superfluidity have to say about it?
I think it’s pretty clear that the Greek word tragoidia comes from elements meaning “goat” and “song” but there is endless debate about why it should mean that.
Tragedians would typically submit three tragedies and one satyr play for competition. We seem to have only one...
“ “Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however...”
– Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld in The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966, p. 31. Originally published 1938. (via amiquote) (via msodradek)
“When Christianity is assumed to be an “answer” that makes the world...”
– Stanley Hauerwas (via azspot)
“If I could take a bite of the whole earth
And get a taste of it,
I’d be...”
– Fernando Pessoa, writing as Alberto Caeiro, “XXI. If I could take a bite of the whole earth,” The Keeper of Sheep, tr. Honig & Brown (Sheep Meadow Press, 1986), 33.
Thanks to tragos for the Tumblr complit staff pick.
I have never derived the least joy from my legs. In fact I strongly object to the bipedal condition. The fatter and wiser I grew the more I abominated the task of grappling with long drawers, trousers and pyjama pants. Had I been able to bear the stink and stickiness of my own unwashed body I would have slept with all my clothes on and had valets—preferably with some experience in the...
Fun etymologies Thursday
tragos:
tristn:
monkeytypist:
Tragedy originally meant “goat-song”.
You’ve got to be kidding!
Just two things to say about that:
1. I am a goat.
2. ‘oide’ means song, or ode.
My two things:
1. tragos is a goat.
2. I’ve heard this etymology contested before. What does superfluidity have to say about it?
Kollwitz on burn-out →
watchureyes:
“Now my work disgusts me so that I cannot look at it. At the same time total failure as a human being…I am stupid and without any thoughts. I see only unpleasant things. The spring days pass and I do not respond. A weariness in my whole body, a churlishness that paralyzes all the others. You don’t notice how bad you get when in such a state until you are beginning to rise out of it....
“Qu’il y ait ou non une solution aux problèmes, cela ne trouble qu’une minorité;...”
– Emil Cioran, Syllogismes de l’amertume (All Gall Is Divided), “L’escroc du Gouffre” (“The Swindler of the Abyss”), 1952, trans. Richard Howard. (via msodradek)
“If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the...”
– C. S. Lewis (via libraryland)
It’s a beautiful sentiment (and I’m not being snide), but I’ve never felt it to have any logical force.
Camus: “Chercher ce qui est vrai n’est pas chercher ce qui est souhaitable.” (“Seeking what is true is not seeking what is...
“Russia is an enormous plain across which wander mischievous men.”
– Chekhov, Notebook, tr. S.S. Koteliansky and Leonard Woolf, (Ecco, 1987), 98.
"What can be sadder than a discouraged artist...
Nabokov, The Original of Laura (Knopf, 2008), 44-5.
The basic premise of “common-sense” philosophers is, “Things are pretty much as they appear.”
But how do things appear?
“The search for solutions, easy or difficult, to problems is the stamp of...”
– Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (Simon & Schuster, 1987), 170-1.
February 2010
97 posts
poetbabble: →
And with these, the sense of the world’s concreteness, irreducible, immediate, tangible, of something clear and closer to us: of the world, no longer as a journey having constantly to be remade, not as a race without end, a challenge having constantly to be met, not as the one pretext for a despairing acquisitiveness, nor as the illusion of a conquest, but as the rediscovery of a meaning, the...
At the theatre, as the house lights dim
And then the cool, drawn-out anticipation, Not of the play itself, but the false dusk And equally false night when the houselights Obey some planetary rheostat And bring a stillness on. It is that stillness I wait for. Before it comes, Whether we like it or not, we are a crowd, Foul-breathed, gum-chewing, fat with arrogance, Passion, opinion, and appetite for blood. But in that...
fresherhells:
I have to interview people for a position today. Knowledge of Spanish is required. The first candidate claimed she minored in Spanish in college.
Me (in Spanish): Is this your first time in New York?
Her (in Spanish, if Spanish drove straight into a tree and suffered brain damage): I like spring in New York.
I can see the next candidate from here. She’s wearing fucking capri...
“As You Leave the Room
You speak. You say: Today’s character is not
A skeleton...”
– Wallace Stevens, from Opus Posthumous, poem dated 1947-1955? (via msodradek)
We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart!
Emerson, “Experience”
"The hurt gets worse and the heart gets harder..."...
—Warren Zevon, “Accidentally Like a Martyr”
“Ich sitze auf dem Leben, wie der schlechte Reiter auf dem Ross.
(I sit astride...”
– Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, tr. Winch (UofC, 1984), 36.
There are few things in this world better than laughing—really laughing—with someone you love.
Locomotive Hootenanny: Oh, you know, it's work. →
I had this remarkable realization while laughing with customers during a particularly ridiculous workday, yesterday. It was a day that exemplified Murphy’s law, and even included my coworker filleting the skin between her index finger and thumb. But I realized that my work area, that place behind a bar that separates a select few - myself and coworkers - from the masses, is not unlike being on a...
“It is not possible to define. Nothing ever has been finally found out. Because...”
– Charles. H. Fort, The Book of the Damned, 1919
Thanks to ontheborderland.
It's aquaponics, y'all
There are fish here, for one thing, shivering through the winter, and a jerry-built system of tanks, heaters, pumps, pipes and gravel beds. The greenhouse vents run on a $20 pair of recycled windshield wiper motors, and a thermostat system sends Mr. Torcellini e-mail alerts when the temperature drops below 36 degrees. Some 500 gallons of water fill a pair of food-grade polyethylene drums that...
the dream of a million girls
unrepentant:
Because it seems so incongruous, I get particular amusement out of the fact that for my mom (and so, to some extent, for our whole family) the Miss America pageant is an event on the scale of a minor holiday.
Now, just so no one gets any wrong ideas: we are exclusive to Miss America. Don’t even think we pay any attention to those lesser pageants, the ridiculous, trashy...
important new addition to yr textspeak/blogpatois...
stfuayfd: shut the fuck up about your fucking dog
also:
pstfuayfd: please shut the fuck up about your fucking dog
