Yup, still here

Not that anyone cares besides moi!

More to come.

Ryan

From Paris Review. (187, Winter 2008)

Interviewer

     Do you feel your books are getting better?

Ryan

     Progress − the idea of progress − doesn't mean anything to me.  I don't have to think my books are getting better.  I just want to keep going back to the same well to have another little drink. 

Full text

Li Tuan

"Her hands of white jade by a window of snow
Are glimmering on a golden-fretted harp--
And to draw the quick eye of Chou Yu,
She touches a wrong note now and then."
-Li Tuan

Dog

"All I was capable of seeing was the dog becoming iridescent; an intense light radiated from his body.  I saw again the water flowing through him, kindling him like a bonfire.  I got to the water, sank my face in the pan, and drank with him.  My hands were in front of me on the ground and, as I drank, I saw the fluid running through my veins setting up hues of red and yellow and green.  I drank more and more.  I drank until I was all afire; I was all aglow.  I drank until the fluid went out of my body through each pore, and projected out like fibers of silk, and I too acquired a long, lustrous, iridescent mane.  I looked at the dog and his mane was like mine.  A supreme happiness filled my whole body, and we ran together toward a sort of yellow warmth that came from some indefinite place.  And there we played.  We played and wrestled until I knew his wishes and he knew mine.  We took turns manipulating each other in the fashion of a puppet show.  I could make him move his legs by twisting my toes, and every time he nodded his head I felt an irresistible impulse to jump.  But his most impish act was to make me scratch my head with my foot while I sat; he did it by flapping his ears from side to side.  This action was to me utterly, unbearable [sic] funny.  Such a touch of grace and irony; such mastery, I thought.  The euphoria that possessed me was indescribable.  I laughed until it was almost impossible to breathe." 

From The Teaching of Don Juan, A Yaqui Way of Knowledge by Carlos Castaneda.

Potraying the Dead

William IV, Duke of Bavaria, by Hans Muelich. (33 by 25 cm). Bayerisches Nationalmuseum, Munich.

"This picture... shows a face distorted by agony as of a drowning man emerging from the wave-like folds of pillow and blanket.  The painful asymmetry of the open right eye and the closed left eye, of the sunken right cheek and the oedematous left cheek, the spoon-like protrusion of the lower lip are a mockery of all princely dignity.  Such ruthlessly realistic representation, instinct with deliberate horror, is surely without a parallel in the pictorial art of the whole western world;  hence this small painting belongs at least as much to the domain of forensic medicine as to the history of art.  We must point out, incidentally, that, according to a belief prevalent among practically all peoples of Europe, the open eye and mouth are an indication of the dead person expecting somebody, hence of an early death among the relatives."

From Anton Pigler's "Portraying the Dead: Graphic Art" which appeared in Acta Historiae Artium: Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, vol. IV; Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, Budapest, 1956; picture: pg. 10; text: pg. 11-12.

The shrimp f*cks to fry the cabbage

What wonderful fun in the land of mistranslation!

BUY! BUY! Buy... please.

Generation Sell by William Deresiewicz; New York Times, November 12, 2011.

"Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy."

Full Article.

Going In

The Joy of Quiet by Pico Iyer (New York Times, Sunday January 1, 2012)

"I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it's only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I'll have anything useful to bring to them."

You should read the entire article.

Chikamatsu Monzaemon

"The twittering yellow thrush rests on the corner of the mound. If a man fails to rest in the place meant for him, does it mean that he is inferior to this bird?"

Eco

From Paris Review, interview with Umberto Eco (185, Summer 2008)

INTERVIEWER

You are one of the world’s most famous public intellectuals. How would you define the term intellectual? Does it still have a particular meaning?

ECO

If by intellectual you mean somebody who works only with his head and not with his hands, then the bank clerk is an intellectual and Michelangelo is not. And today, with a computer, everybody is an intellectual. So I don’t think it has anything to do with someone’s profession or with someone’s social class. According to me, an intellectual is anyone who is creatively producing new knowledge. A peasant who understands that a new kind of graft can produce a new species of apples has at that moment produced an intellectual activity. Whereas the professor of philosophy who all his life repeats the same lecture on Heidegger doesn’t amount to an intellectual. Critical creativity—criticizing what we are doing or inventing better ways of doing it—is the only mark of the intellectual function.

Full Interview