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“Cooky Puss” was a joke for New York. “Licensed To Ill” was a joke for America. Or on America. It was hard to tell.
sasha still has it.
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"What in fact is racism? It is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: the break between what must live and what must die."
- Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (via thetumblinginsurrection) -
There's a fear that reality itself is not safe, that there are fakers moving into your own skin, somehow.
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There is almost always a long tail of possibility, however thin. What’s wrong with looking for it? Nothing, it seems to me, unless it means we have failed to prepare for the outcome that’s vastly more probable. The trouble is that we’ve built our medical system and culture around the long tail. We’ve created a multitrillion-dollar edifice for dispensing the medical equivalent of lottery tickets—and have only the rudiments of a system to prepare patients for the near-certainty that those tickets will not win. Hope is not a plan, but hope is our plan.
Gawande, getting better.
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There wasn't an iteration of myself that would recognize this entitled, richer, chubbier dude in a skinny tie or understand why he was screaming into his phone with such little shame or self-awareness.
sort of perfect.
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"To take taxis across the Green Line. To light up in a bloody great smile when Israeli jets break the sound barrier. To pretend to be unaffected when guns start firing round the corner. That’s why he went.”
The worn voice began to acquire a certain disregarding impetus. Soon it would fall into monologue, an inner speech that did not need a context or listener.
“To sit there with his beer, chatting with a colleague as the mortars rain down or whatever they do. Absolutely unmoved. I think he lived for such moments. They were the high points of Lebanon, as demonstrations were the high points of Panama when we were there. During the worst of the anti-American demonstrations he’d put on his Union Jack lapel badge and go walking right into it. How I came to hate that badge. He felt he couldn’t be harmed wearing it. And so he sits in someone’s office in Beirut when militiamen are active. To betray no sign of emotion. To chat. What’s the point of getting excited, he liked to say to me. Truly believing there is good sense in this. As if getting excited had something to do with deciding to get excited, making a conscious decision to get excited. They’re out there, hurling grenated, firing rockets. What’s the point of getting excited? What’s the point?"-Delillo, The Names (244)
The long way to say ‘asshole’.
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How To Stay Single Forever « Thought Catalog
AAAAAAAAAAAAND GET OUT OF MY HEAD.
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"If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting)."
- Franzen. Channeling DFW. -
The French call it nostalgie de la boue, or "yearning for the mud." It's a great phrase for describing what these white writers mean when they say they like the way Odd Future's music makes them "feel weird and awful." It's the same charge people got from listening to Biggie's robbery schemes on "Gimme the Loot," and the visceral thrill that made audiences get to their feet when Mike Tyson used to manhandle opponents in the ring. Consider it a kind of cultural tourism in which spectators get to feel dangerous without ever really approaching danger.
This is smart. Be smart.
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The real question is not how far a man would ride a bicycle to have sex. It’s how much ruin and butchery a woman will risk to have sex—which turns out to be as much ruin and butchery as the world has in it.
This is brutal.
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"Not that it was an experience confined to some narrow category, the rural poor, the dispossessed. Many kinds of people knew the experience. Dallas executives spoke in tongues in gospel meetings in the shimmering tinfoil Hyatt. Catholics knew the experience, and middle-class blacks of the charismatic renewal, and fellowships of Christian dentists. Imagine their surprise, these tax-paying people, he said, these veterans of patio barbecues, when they learned they were carriers of ectasy."
- Delillo, The Names (173) -
"Why is the language of destruction so beautful?” Owen said.
I didn’t know what he meant. Did he mean ordinary hardware - stun grenades, parabellum ammo? Or what a terrorist might carry, some soft-eyed boy from Adana, slung over his shoulder, Kalashnikov, sweet whisper in the dark, with a flash suppressor and folding stock. He say quietly, Owen did, working out an answer. The way was open to interpretation, broader landscapes. He would have a patient theory to submit on the adductive force of such sounds, how they stir the chemistry of the early brain. Or did he mean the language of the mathematics of war, nuclear game theory, that bone country of tech data and little clicking words."- Don Delillo, The Names (115) -
"He did mention that at Berkeley he was in a favorable position to study two of the esoteric wonders of our time, subjects that only an adept might begin to penetrate. Pure mathematics and the state of California. There were no analogies from the real world that might help him explain either of these."
-Don Dellilo, The Names (163)
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"All around us the human noise, the heat of a running crowd."
- The Names, Delillo (233) -
"
Possibly, to Tap, the strange language exposed the whole idea as gibberish, the idea of forecasts, the idea of talking before a camera about the weather. It had been gibberish in English as well. But he hadn’t realized it until now.
We sat in the blue glow, laughing.
"- The Names, Delillo (189)
decent
you should feel bad.
