blunt-cut hair

He pressed a button. A wall of books opened, and I walked like a lamb into that bustling pleasure palace known as Flossie’s. Red flocked wallpaper and a Victorian decor set the tone. Pale, nervous girls with black-rimmed glasses and blunt-cut hair lolled around on sofas, riffling Penguin Classics provocatively. A blonde with a big smile winked at me, nodded toward a room upstairs, and said, “Wallace Stevens, eh?” But it wasn’t just intellectual experiences. They were peddling emotional ones, too. For fifty bucks, I learned, you could “relate without getting close.” For a hundred, a girl would lend you her Bartok records, have dinner, and then let you watch while she had an anxiety attack. For one-fifty, you could listen to FM radio with twins. For three bills, you got the works: A thin Jewish brunette would pretend to pick you up at the Museum of Modern Art, let you read her master’s, get you involved in a screaming quarrel at Elaine’s over Freud’s conception of women, and then fake a suicide of your choosing – the perfect evening, for some guys. Nice racket. Great town, New York.

From The Whore of Mensa by Woody Allen (Thanks Mike -> Tom)

Henri Frédéric Amiel’s journal—a couple of quotes

(Wikipedia entry over here; translation of journal here.)

Stimulus oriented versus stimulus independent thought?

“[...] respect in yourself the oscillations of feeling. They are your life and your nature [...]. Do not abandon yourself altogether either to instinct or to will. Instinct is a siren, will a despot. Be neither the slave of your impulses and sensations of the moment, nor of an abstract and general plan; be open to what life brings from within and without, and welcome the unforeseen; but give to your life unity, and bring the unforeseen within the lines of your plan. Let what is natural in you raise itself to the level of the spiritual, and let the spiritual become once more natural. Thus will your development be harmonious [...]“

Society

“[...] what we call “society” proceeds for the moment on the flattering illusory assumption that it is moving in an ethereal atmosphere and breathing the air of the gods. All vehemence, all natural expression, all real suffering, all careless familiarity, or any frank sign of passion, are startling and distasteful in this delicate milieu; they at once destroy the common work, the cloud palace, the magical architectural whole, which has been raised by the general consent and effort.”

Silly SCUNT

“Orwell famously suggested that language preceded thought, such that if the word ‘freedom’, for example, is removed from the dictionary, then the very idea of freedom will disappear with it be and be lost to humanity. A smart tyranny, he said, would remove words like justice, fairness, liberty and right from usage. But my thought occurred to me when I saw a graffito which took up a whole gable end wall in London the other day. It proclaimed, in great big strokes of white paint: “One nation under CCTV”. A good angry point – the American dictum ‘one nation under god’ sardonically replaced with a comment about Britain’s unenviable position as the Closed Circuit Television capital of the world. But … the satirical shout all but fails for one simple reason: CCTV is such a bland, clumsy, rhythmically null and phonically forgettable word, if you can call it a word, that the swipe lacks real punch. If one believed in conspiracy theories, you could almost call it genius that there is no more powerful word for the complex and frightening system of electronic surveillance that we lump into that weedy bundle of initials. For if CCTV was called … I don’t know …. something like SCUNT (Surveillance Camera Universal NeTwork, or whatever) then the acronyms might have passed into our language and its simple denotation would have taken on all the dark connotations which would allow “One nation under scunt” to have much more impact as a resistance slogan than “One nation under CCTV”. “Damn, I was scunted as I walked home,” “they’ve just erected a series of scunts in the street outside,” “Britain is the most scunted country in the world” … etc etc. Or maybe, just maybe, we should stick to the idea of initials and borrow a set that have already taken on the darkest possible connotations of evil and tyranny. Surveillance System. SS. ‘Britain’s SS is bigger than that of any other country.’ ‘The SS has taken over the UK’.”

(Stephen Fry, Don’t Mind Your Language, November 2008)

On the importance of procrastination

“I had been preparing myself (though I did not always realize it) from the day that I was born, preparing myself, wrote Harsnet (typed Goldberg), but always aware of the dangers of beginning too soon. For there is nothing worse, he wrote, than beginning too soon. It is much worse to begin too soon, he wrote, than not to begin at all. Much worse to begin too soon than to begin too late. Much worse to begin too soon and realize one has begun too soon than to begin too late and realize one has begun too late. Much worse to begin too soon and realize one is inadequately prepared then to begin too late and realize one is over-prepared. Much worse to begin too soon and reach the end too quickly, typed Goldberg, squinting at the manuscript before him, than to begin at the right time and discover one has nothing to begin. That is why, wrote Harsnet, I have been preparing myself for that moment for a long time, that is why I have cleared the decks and prepared the ground, because unless the decks are cleared and the ground prepared there is little hope is succeeding in what one has planned to do, little hope of achieving anything of lasting value, though lasting is a relative term and so is value and whatever it is one has planned to do is certain to be altered in the process, which does not of course mean, he wrote, that one can start anywhere at any time. It is just because whatever one has planned to do is bound to be altered in the process that it is important to start at the right moment, he wrote. It is just because whatever one has planned is bound to change as one proceeds that it is fatal to start too soon or too late, though it may be no less fatal, he wrote (and Goldberg typed), to start at the right time, for then there is no excuse, no excuse whatsoever. I have done with excuses, wrote Harsnet (typed Goldberg), I have done with excuses towards myself and towards others, that is the meaning of the right time, he wrote, that I have done with excuses, that I have used up all the excuses and reached the bottom of excuses, that I have wrung the neck of excuses, that I have settled the hash of excuses. To begin at the right time, he wrote, means to be done with the excuses once and for all. Excuses, wrote Goldberg in the margin of his typescript with a felt-tip pen, an end to excuses…”

From The Big Glass by Josipovici

An optimistic interlude

(via FFFFOUND)

The media’s shackles

“Reclaim your mind from the media’s shackles. Read a book and resurrect yourself.”

(Rediscovered here: MyFox—from 26 Dec 2007)

An old note: Tisdagen den 9:e september 2003

Moving into accommodation with a flatmate who’s ”a little crazy”

Pink trousers perhaps? Strange taste in music? Sounded better than sleeping on a mattress on the floor, so why not, I thought. It wasn’t quite explained that ”a little crazy” meant every morning at 6 he would scream and shout, threatening to kill a girl in his room who (I hope) wasn’t really there. One morning he took a frying pan to the walls of the kitchen in an attempt to kill a wasp. (I initially thought he was murdering one of the other flatmates.) This was all made surreal by the fact that every time I saw him (i.e., when not in my room hiding from him and waiting for things to settle down) he seemed perfectly okay and spoke Aristocratic English with exaggerated politeness. ”Excuse me [he left out the "dear chap" sadly]. Terribly sorry for disturbing you. I appear to have mislaid my key. I wonder would you be kind enough to open the door for me?” This said moments after kicking everything in his room.  Mental health problem?  Conceptual artist?  I never found out.

Some time after this—same apartment

Four people moved into the same room (not a big room and with only one bed). When our landlady discovered this (she had rented the room to one person), she asked them to leave. They didn’t, so one morning at 9, six police officers came. They searched them and their room, and found they had three passports each under different names.

Nearly forgot

The basement—not a particularly hospitable basement—housed an alcoholic.  I think he was allowed to be there, but it was never quite clear. His drunken behaviour seemed comparatively normal.

FrenchFry

Writing a PhD thesis

Some inspiring words from Peter Hancock.

Writing a thesis is like being confined in a pit of your own sewage, well over your head. It is little comfort that it is your own sewage. Indeed by comparison, other people’s sewage is like the crystal waters off an island in the Bahamas.

…

Writing a thesis has parallels with giving birth to a child. There is a long and protracted labour, with little opening of the cervix. Then application of forceps, and finally a bloody and painful Caesarian. In a cow-shed. Using a piece of scaffolding. The midwife here is the thesis supervisor, before whom it is vain to try to maintain any dignity.

There is also the possibility that the thing will be dead on arrival, or too miserable and monstrous to let live. The examiners don’t want to do much more than cut the cord, hold it up by its feet and slap its arse. Or give it a couple of kicks of a shit-stained abbatoire boot. Else it gets slung out for the crows.

To be

From over here.