This isn't literary, but I couldn't think of anywhere else to post it. "We're trying to elevate the consumer to a creative high." --A record salesman on NPR yesterday, explaining why he pipes the smell of chocolate into his "graze" format (the most explicit indication to date that they think of us as herds of cattle?) stores.
I heard that too. Along the lines of "anti-literary" sentences of this sort, I remember reading an interview with one of the guys who designed the ATM machine back in the last century. He said, "our purpose was to save the consumer from the trauma of inter-personal encounters." Man, was did he see a trend developing.
"Nothing can ever render the experience of being treed on top of a chest of drawers by an Aberdeen terrier pleasant, but it seemed to me that the least you can expect on such an occasion is that the animal will meet you halfway and not drop salt into the wound by looking at you as if he were asking if you were saved."
Later I catch this one kid, overpower him with some supersonic judo I learned from an old Lesbian Zen monk Naked Lunch
What we do know from the Ministry of Truth files before us is that when Strauss returned from the failed Kaliningrad mission he was rewarded by his own government. A letter signed by Wandel, dated June 1950, praised Strauss for having 'on his own initiative' diligently searched the Soviet zone for missing art treasures, including the Amber Room. Strauss now received as offical commission from the GDR government to head a new investigation into the fate of the Amber Room. A race was on, two parallel inquiries were under way. One was headed by a senior palace curator from Leningrad and the other by a senior cultural bureaucrat from the GDR. According to this file in the Ministry of Truth, Strauss began his new investigation by writing to every jeweller in the DGR, asking them to report an noticeable increase in the number of carved amber pieces coming on to the market since 1945. He was looking for evidence that the Amber Room had been brought to Germany and broken down. Strauss also ordered that every one of the new republic's 921 castles be searched and that all resettlers living in them be interrogated. Amber Room: The Fate of the World's Greatest Lost Treasure by Catherine Scott-Clark & Adrian Levy. Ch. seven 173 Pg. Tasty like pastries!
If we are getting restless under the taxonomy of a monocotyledonous wage doctrine and a cryptogamic theory of interest, with involute, loculicidal, tomentous and moniliform variants, what is the cytoplasm, centrosome or karyokinetic process to which we may turn, and in which we may find surcease from the metaphysics of normality and controlling principles? -Thorstein Veblen talking economics, of course.
Pretentious, platitudinous, unsystematic, simple-minded, long-winded, intellectually provincial, and perhaps even somewhat dishonest, he had, somehow, a way with the natives. Clifford Geertz, recapping other anthropologists' comments on Bronislaw Malinowski.
"Like so many middle-aged men, he carried the old man he would become in his face, soured and obscene, already muttering the objections and complaints that would be his in the final skirmish."
"What if hers was the only tongue ever to enter his mouth, rooting around like a dog with his head in a bucket of chicken?"
Good thread. "Perhaps you are right," Mr Compson said. "Maybe even the light of day, let alone this--" he indicated the single globe stained and bug-fouled from the long summer and which even when clean gave off but little light--"would be too much for it, for them. Yes, for them: of that day and time, of a dead time; people too as we are, and victims of a different circumstance, simpler and therefore, integer for integer, larger, more heroic and the figures therefore more heroic too, not dwarfed and involved but distinct, uncomplex who had the gift of loving once or dying once instead of being diffused and scattered creatures drawn blindly limb from limb from a grab bag and assembled, author and victim too of a thousand homicides and a thousand copulations and divorcements. Perhaps you are right. Perhaps any more light than this would be too much for it." But he did not give Quentin the letter at once. -------------------------------- This also goes a long way toward explaining my username.
Comes the most heartrending tale of all. As I have said Before General Custer with five companies went below the village to cut them off as he supposed but instead he was surrounded and all of them killed to a man 14 officers and 250 men There the bravest general of modder times met his death with his two brothers, brotherinlaw and nephew not 5 yards apart, surrounded by 42 men of E Company. Oh what a slaughter how many homes made desolate by the sad disaster everyone of them were scalped and otherwise mutilated but the General he lay with a smile on his face.
If a rabbit defined intelligence the way man does, then the most intelligent animal would be a rabbit, followed by the animal most willing to obey the commands of a rabbit. -Robert Brault, writer (b. 1938) (I got this from A Word a Day.)
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. (Because, has there even been a thread like this without it?)