Pah

QOTD (final): life

Finn Family Moomintroll by Tove Jansson:

“Life is not peaceful,” said Snufkin, contentedly.

QOTD: life

Epicurus the Sage, “Helen’s Boys” by William Messner-Loebs:

Epicurus

Socrates’ trial has made it pretty hot for all philosophers.

Plato

I know you didn’t like him, but even you have to admit, his death validated his life.

Epicurus

I just wish his life had validated his life.

QOTD: life

Death:

I think some of it is probably contrasts. Light and shadow.

If you never had the bad times, how would you know you had the good times?

But some of it is just: if you’re going to be human, then there are a whole load of things that come with it. Eyes, a heart, days and life.

Death: The Time Of Your Life by Neil Gaiman.

TGIF picture: look up!

Flex Mentallo by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, et al:

QOTD: reality

Mark Fisher:

Everyone knows that the moment of vertigo in a Philip K Dick novel occurs not when one level of reality has been exposed as fake, but when the second level, the supposedly more real level, turns out to be inauthentic too. Here, we move beyond the familiar sense that ‘things are not as they seem’ to a mis en abyme in which, by implication, the status of reality as such is undermined. Dick’s signature concept is not the notion that this or that reality is fake but the idea that any reality whatsoever is false.

Steven Shaviro explains that ‘[f]or Dick, Being is not a plenitude. It is always somehow fake, or trashy, or incomplete, or unstable or radically inconsistent. And Dick’s novels describe, in excruciating detail, the lived experience of this unreality, or not-quite reality, that is not yet simply absence or nonexistence’. These experiences are not a consequence of finding oneself in a particular, low-grade reality; rather, they follow from living in any reality, which will be experienced as seedy and second-rate simply because one lives in it.

QOTD: surrealism

Andre Breton:

The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly as fast as you can, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level.

Yeah, right.

QOTD: childhood

Not so much a quote as an agreeance:

• I’m Billy Joe Jive: Super Crimefighting Ace!
• I don’t know why I keep coming to this place.
• Let’s sing a song of 10.
• Noo-ne-noo-ne-noo…
• Psssst… hey, bud. Wanna buy an O?
• Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip, uh-huh, uh-huh!
• I one the sandbox!
• I ran out of clay, Bert.
• One two three FOUR Five six Seven eight NINE Ten evelen tweeeeeeeeeee-elve!
• Do not try to thank me… I live to serve.
• Heeeeeeere fishy fishy fishy fishy fishy fishy!
• This… is NEAR.
• Ladies & gentlemen… the Teeny Little Super Guy.
• COOKIE MONSTER!
• You didn’t tap me, did you, statue?

From Sesame Street: 25 of My Favorite Memories by Mike Fireball.

Just go read the whole thing.

QOTD: humanism

John Pistelli:

Another concept you can find in an Orwell essay is that of carrying on the human heritage. He writes of this in Inside The Whale when he takes up the question of whether or not in a time of political crisis like the first half of the twentieth century it is morally permissible to write fiction or poetry that does not deal directly with the calamity. He’s ambivalent, but he says that if he were a soldier in the trenches, he would have much rather got hold of Prufrock than some war poem, because such writing undoes the negations of war, certifies the value of the concrete and the individual and the conscious that war annihilates; in short, carries on the human heritage.

TGIF picture: monstrous

Now you too can turn Anakin Skywalker to the Dark Side:

Now I know what a Lego figure with hideous burns and three amputated appendages looks like:

QOTD: humanism

George Orwell (via John Pistelli):

There must, [Ghandi] says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which - I think - most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one’s love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that “non-attachment” is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for “non-attachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is “higher”. The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all “radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.

QOTD: humour

Patrick Meaney:

[Spaced] makes a lot of homages to movies. Subtly dropping in the Han and Luke “Same as always,” “That bad, huh?” exchange from Jedi into a scene got a big laugh from me, but it’s inserted so subtly into the text that it works both as an homage and as just a line of dialogue.

I can’t believe I never noticed this! I had to rewatch the first episode after reading this to check. My favourite Star Wars reference is still:

Tim

Now we’ll going to go over the fence here. It’s about two metres high, so we’re going to have to do a bit of climbing.

Brian

It’s impossible.

Mike

It’s not impossible. I used to climb over my neighbour’s fence when I was a kid. It was about two metres.

QOTD: empathy

Gwyneth Jones (author of White Queen):

Characters in classic male-gendered science fiction are so absurdly impressed at an occult power they call empathy: whereby some superbeing or human freak can actually sense the way other people are feeling. (God give me strength: my cat can do that.)

QOTD: sex/gender

Gwyneth Jones (author of Life):

Sexual difference, like genetic difference, is individual: society blurs it out. We are all of us sexual mosaics to some degree or other, not just psychologically, but cell by cell. You perhaps have male liver cells, dear reader, while other scraps of your system are female. It’s a switch, not a dial, on every scale. The problems between men and women are not biological, they are moral. As gender roles come under closer observation, and sex-science uncovers the mindbendingly nitpicky details, this becomes more obvious, but it was always true: which is why many heterosexuals, such as myself (it’s not a crime, you know) have managed to get along, and love each other, even lifelong; even in the chinks of the most repressive social systems. It’s a question of gentleness: decent behaviour, fairplay and respect, not who does the cooking and who does the washing up.