January 2012
37 posts
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“Minimalism’s just the other side of metafictional recursion. The basic problem’s still the one of the mediating narrative consciousness. Both minimalism and metafiction try to resolve the problem in radical ways. Opposed, but both so extreme they end up empty. Recursive metafiction worships the narrative consciousness, makes “it” the subject of the text. Minimalism’s even worse,...
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“Talent’s just an instrument. It’s like having a pen that works instead of one...”
– David Foster Wallace
Lapidarium notes: What Happened Before the Big... →
aminotes:
What Happened Before the Big Bang? The New Philosophy of Cosmology
Tim Maudlin: “There are problems that are fairly specific to cosmology. Standard cosmology, or what was considered standard cosmology twenty years ago, led people to the conclude that the universe that we see…
“But if you just look at the number of ways that we try like hell to alleviate...”
– David Foster Wallace
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Musings on fiction, art, TV and suffering
“I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. I guess a big part of serious fiction’s purpose is to give the reader, who like all of us is sort of marooned in her own skull, to give her imaginative access to other selves. Since an ineluctable part of being a human self is suffering, part of what we humans come to art...
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Musings on irony & cynicism
“Irony and cynicism were just what the U.S. hypocrisy of the fifties and sixties called for. That’s what made the early postmodernists great artists. The great thing about irony is that it splits things apart, gets up above them so we can see the flaws and hypocrisies and duplicates. The virtuous always triumph? Ward Cleaver is the prototypical fifties father? “Sure.” Sarcasm, parody,...
“A man’s ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and...”
– Albert Einstein (via lucifelle)
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“The trick to this solution is that you’d have to be 100% honest. Meaning not...”
– David Foster Wallace from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (via withtokyolove)
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“It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to...”
– Carl Sagan (via absea)
“A fellow who does things that count, doesn’t usually stop to count them.”
– A Variation of Sayings by Albert Einstein (via lucifelle)
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Colbert Leads Huntsman in S.C. →
cheatsheet:
So this happened/is happening.
“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
– Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
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“This is different. It’s like they do this initial intake interview, with...”
– The Pale King (David Foster Wallace)
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December 2011
51 posts
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retrophilia: The so-called ‘psychotically... →
tea-you-me:
The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a…
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“…..that life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump. I learned that the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy. This is an obvious truth, of course, though it is also one the ignorance of which causes great suffering.
But moreover, I discovered, in the only way that a man...
“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my...”
– Nietzsche (via lucifelle)
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“I don’t take anything for granted, and I appreciate everyone. And I think I can...”
– Derrick Rose after signing his 5-year $94 million dollar extension. For the next time someone tries to say the NBA is just a bunch of selfish divas. (via nbaoffseason)
“[She is] the only ‘thing’ in this world which is absolutely real to me and my...”
– Prince Philip on Queen Elizabeth
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