Monday 15 May 2023

Quotations

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The worst is not death but being blind, blind to the fact that everything about life is in the nature of the miraculous. The language of society is conformity; the language of the creative individual is freedom. Life will continue to be a hell as long as people who make up the world shut their eyes to reality.
Henry Miller (Stand Still Like the Hummingbird)


And when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?
Charles Bukowski. The answer, obviously, is it depends on you.

Oxford University decolonising inch by inch, with imperial measurements the next target
Mile, inch, yard, pound and ounce are 'tied deeply to idea of the Empire' and their presence in the curriculum could change, say scholars
Headline in Daily Telegraph 14 May 2021



(Funnily all these things, more or less, did happen.)

6 comments:

  1. Love the gay marriage meme!

    ReplyDelete
  2. “We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
    H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy

    “Brilliant thinking is rare, but courage is in even shorter supply than genius.”
    Peter Thiel

    Which particular pliable, nonsentient, inanimate object constitutionally incapable of saying no would you most like to have sex with? 
    According to Gallup polls, the most popular answer is Paris Hilton.
    https://www.takimag.com/article/another-brick-in-the-hole-tetris-sexuals/

    ReplyDelete
  3. Great quote from Bukovski: been there, done that.
    Check out this:
    Barfly-1987 𝐅𝐮𝐥𝐥 𝐌𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐞 HD (QUALITY)
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tqEWC2F8vs

    "Barfly" is a 1987 American black comedy film directed by Barbet Schroeder and starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway. The film is a semi-autobiography of poet/author Charles Bukowski during the time he spent drinking heavily in Los Angeles, and it presents Bukowski's alter ego Henry Chinaski. The screenplay, written by Bukowski, was commissioned by the Iranian-born Swiss film director Barbet Schroeder, and it was published (with illustrations by the author) in 1984, when film production was still pending.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barfly_(film)

    Splendid photography, good story, gorgeous Faye at her best.

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  4. As a boy I remember my stepfather and my grandfather huddling over The Tropic of Cancer in our living room. Though this book was initially published in 1934, due to censors not published in the United States until 1961. The two men were'nt very close, so Miller's novel was providing a strange moment of bonding. Like two naughty boys in hushed voices, they'd read passages to one another while suppressing giggles.
    I was nine at the time, and seeing two patriarchal figures, one well known for waving his belt about to enforce social norms, behaving sillily was a bit of a shock for me. Shows you the power of a literature...or perhaps, censorship. My mother inquired from the kitchen, "What is so funny?" My stepfather no longer could contain himself. Letting all familial propriety drop he read aloud laughing hysterically,"After me you can take on stallions, bulls, rams, drakes, St. Bernards. You can stuff toads, bats, lizards up your rectum." If I had been shocked before, I was more than shocked then. Somehow, adults as I had known them, had stepped over a line. To my further surprise, my mother thought it was funny too. However, my four foot eleven Scottish grandmother, who had been assisting in the kitchen, went stone cold...I mean, even colder than her normal state of subzero. She made an exasperated protestation, in a small voice,"Oh,Henry...", before returning to her food preparation. So, you see, for me, Henry Miller brings odd thoughts of lizards to mind.

    ReplyDelete