Sep. 5th, 2012

monk222: (Noir Detective)
"I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky."

-- Flannery O'Connor, in a letter to Maryat Lee, May 1960.

I guess not everyone is a fan. Maybe it is the Christian girl in Ms. O'Connor.
monk222: (Noir Detective)
"I hope you don’t have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest garbage pail. She makes Mickey Spillane look like Dostoevsky."

-- Flannery O'Connor, in a letter to Maryat Lee, May 1960.

I guess not everyone is a fan. Maybe it is the Christian girl in Ms. O'Connor.
monk222: (Flight)
Our illustrious mayor, Julian Castro, grabbed his opportunity with both hands and delivered a bravura performance with his keynote address. Then, our nation's First Lady, Michelle Obama, gave what is being considered the best speech ever delivered by a First Lady. We'll take a little taste from both.


_ _ _

Now, like many of you, I watched last week's Republican convention. They told a few stories of individual success. We all celebrate individual success. But the question is, how do we multiply that success? The answer is President Barack Obama.

Mitt Romney, quite simply, doesn't get it. A few months ago he visited a university in Ohio and gave the students there a little entrepreneurial advice. "Start a business," he said. But how? "Borrow money if you have to from your parents," he told them. Gee, why didn't I think of that? Some people are lucky enough to borrow money from their parents, but that shouldn't determine whether you can pursue your dreams. I don't think Governor Romney meant any harm. I think he's a good guy. He just has no idea how good he's had it.

We know that in our free market economy some will prosper more than others. What we don't accept is the idea that some folks won't even get a chance. And the thing is, Mitt Romney and the Republican Party are perfectly comfortable with that America. In fact, that's exactly what they're promising us.

-- Mayor Julian Castro

_ _ _

Barack knows the American Dream because he's lived it . and he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are, or where we're from, or what we look like, or who we love.

And he believes that when you've worked hard, and done well, and walked through that doorway of opportunity . you do not slam it shut behind you . you reach back, and you give other folks the same chances that helped you succeed.

So when people ask me whether being in the White House has changed my husband, I can honestly say that when it comes to his character, and his convictions, and his heart, Barack Obama is still the same man I fell in love with all those years ago.

He's the same man who started his career by turning down high paying jobs and instead working in struggling neighborhoods where a steel plant had shut down, fighting to rebuild those communities and get folks back to work . because for Barack, success isn't about how much money you make, it's about the difference you make in people's lives.

-- Michelle Obama

_ _ _

I think you have to be pretty rich and/or really hate colored people to prefer the Republicans.

monk222: (Flight)
Our illustrious mayor, Julian Castro, grabbed his opportunity with both hands and delivered a bravura performance with his keynote address. Then, our nation's First Lady, Michelle Obama, gave what is being considered the best speech ever delivered by a First Lady. We'll take a little taste from both.


_ _ _

Now, like many of you, I watched last week's Republican convention. They told a few stories of individual success. We all celebrate individual success. But the question is, how do we multiply that success? The answer is President Barack Obama.

Mitt Romney, quite simply, doesn't get it. A few months ago he visited a university in Ohio and gave the students there a little entrepreneurial advice. "Start a business," he said. But how? "Borrow money if you have to from your parents," he told them. Gee, why didn't I think of that? Some people are lucky enough to borrow money from their parents, but that shouldn't determine whether you can pursue your dreams. I don't think Governor Romney meant any harm. I think he's a good guy. He just has no idea how good he's had it.

We know that in our free market economy some will prosper more than others. What we don't accept is the idea that some folks won't even get a chance. And the thing is, Mitt Romney and the Republican Party are perfectly comfortable with that America. In fact, that's exactly what they're promising us.

-- Mayor Julian Castro

_ _ _

Barack knows the American Dream because he's lived it . and he wants everyone in this country to have that same opportunity, no matter who we are, or where we're from, or what we look like, or who we love.

And he believes that when you've worked hard, and done well, and walked through that doorway of opportunity . you do not slam it shut behind you . you reach back, and you give other folks the same chances that helped you succeed.

So when people ask me whether being in the White House has changed my husband, I can honestly say that when it comes to his character, and his convictions, and his heart, Barack Obama is still the same man I fell in love with all those years ago.

He's the same man who started his career by turning down high paying jobs and instead working in struggling neighborhoods where a steel plant had shut down, fighting to rebuild those communities and get folks back to work . because for Barack, success isn't about how much money you make, it's about the difference you make in people's lives.

-- Michelle Obama

_ _ _

I think you have to be pretty rich and/or really hate colored people to prefer the Republicans.

monk222: (Mori: by tiger_ace)
An interesting excerpt from the new biography on David Foster Wallace. I love how it gets at his over-writing, for want of a better word, as well as how it suggests a deep instability in his personality. A portrait of the troubled genius.


_ _ _

“Wallace did not hear subtle variations in no; he knew only one way to seduce: overwhelm. He would show up at Karr’s family home to shovel her driveway after a snowfall, or come unannounced to her recovery meetings. Karr called the head of the halfway house and asked her to let Wallace know his attentions were not welcome. Wallace besieged her with notes anyway. He called himself Sorrowful Werther. She was Sainte Nitouche, the saint who cannot be touched, a reference to her favorite book, Anna Karenina. She felt an affinity for him, considered him brilliant but also unsound. One day, she remembers, he arrived at a pool party she was at with her family with bandages on his left shoulder. She thought maybe he had been cutting himself and wouldn’t show her what was underneath—a tattoo with her name and a heart. He clearly felt he had made a commitment there was no retreating from. The details of the relationship were not clear to others though: Wallace told friends they were involved; Karr says no. She too steered Wallace to a new course in his fiction. “His interest in cleverness was preventing him from saying things,” she remembers. She told him not to be such a show-off, to write more from the heart. One time when he told her that he put certain scenes into his fiction because they were “cool,” she responded: “That’s what my f—king five year old says about Spiderman.”

-- D. T. Max, "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story"

monk222: (Mori: by tiger_ace)
An interesting excerpt from the new biography on David Foster Wallace. I love how it gets at his over-writing, for want of a better word, as well as how it suggests a deep instability in his personality. A portrait of the troubled genius.


_ _ _

“Wallace did not hear subtle variations in no; he knew only one way to seduce: overwhelm. He would show up at Karr’s family home to shovel her driveway after a snowfall, or come unannounced to her recovery meetings. Karr called the head of the halfway house and asked her to let Wallace know his attentions were not welcome. Wallace besieged her with notes anyway. He called himself Sorrowful Werther. She was Sainte Nitouche, the saint who cannot be touched, a reference to her favorite book, Anna Karenina. She felt an affinity for him, considered him brilliant but also unsound. One day, she remembers, he arrived at a pool party she was at with her family with bandages on his left shoulder. She thought maybe he had been cutting himself and wouldn’t show her what was underneath—a tattoo with her name and a heart. He clearly felt he had made a commitment there was no retreating from. The details of the relationship were not clear to others though: Wallace told friends they were involved; Karr says no. She too steered Wallace to a new course in his fiction. “His interest in cleverness was preventing him from saying things,” she remembers. She told him not to be such a show-off, to write more from the heart. One time when he told her that he put certain scenes into his fiction because they were “cool,” she responded: “That’s what my f—king five year old says about Spiderman.”

-- D. T. Max, "Every Love Story is a Ghost Story"

monk222: (Default)
“No one kills himself who has never wanted to kill another, or at least wished the death of another.”

-- Wilhelm Stekel

Thus Mr. Alvarez lays out the root of the famous proposition that suicide is violent anger directed inward. And perhaps this inversion is most successful when we realize that our anger is not really about any particular others, as one begins to see that it is oneself that is out of place, that does not belong, that is too weak, too ugly, too tired. How do you kill a country or a culture, the world?
monk222: (Default)
“No one kills himself who has never wanted to kill another, or at least wished the death of another.”

-- Wilhelm Stekel

Thus Mr. Alvarez lays out the root of the famous proposition that suicide is violent anger directed inward. And perhaps this inversion is most successful when we realize that our anger is not really about any particular others, as one begins to see that it is oneself that is out of place, that does not belong, that is too weak, too ugly, too tired. How do you kill a country or a culture, the world?

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