January 2010
43 posts
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“At a point, however, of the increased richness of my now gloriously foul...”
– William Hope Hodgson, ‘The Psychology of Species’
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“Vermicast Tea”
– The leachate obtained from pure worm castings.
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Though I was wrong I am right, because had I been...
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It’s a commonplace of time-travel that it necessitates scrupulous care to avoid temporal cross contamination; that visitors from ahead are assiduous, leave nothing behind to risk changing the order of things, no pre-emptive stuff or knowledge; that implacable agencies police this, keep their ancestors’ moments clean of not-yettery with extreme prejudice.
The truth is...
Source & target
Liberal British culture’s thirst to be deliciously scandalised by risible provocations from literature’s lion remains unquenchable. Obedient outrage, then fatuous ‘debate’ trots along after like a little doggie, as absurd as convening a moral tribunal when a 5-year-old shouts ‘Bum poo willy!’
Comparisons, though. What will the old be like? The old will be...
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This Cuckolded Machine
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Consider time as moving in the reverse direction from that usually presumed. Shade, in that case, is not space hidden from light. Rather photons are the shit of shadows which have eaten interruptions.
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Meanwhile Gazans pick through their own rubble to offer the contraband candy they have smuggled past one blockade to the Haitians crushed under another.
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Heaven & Riorden Roett Forfend. (BBC Radio 4,...
“Slang is proof, in the people who create & use it, of an unconscious need...”
– Benjamin Péret, ‘A Word from Péret’
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Speech act
Contents are descriptions of:
One (1) act of deadly violence by the armed wing of the state.
One (1) explicit claim by Red Cross of no ‘security issues at all’.
Title: Haitian Violence Hampers Earthquake Relief Efforts
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Weaponised charity
Official: We Have Reason to be Proud of the American Response in Haiti.
Keeping out Caribbean Community emergency aid mission
Keeping out aid flights while US military take over
Keeping out a field hospital
Keeping starving from aid
Keeping in destitute desperate dying
Adjectives: compassionate; aid; humanitarian. The noun is telling.
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“She sees the city growing, she sees it growing urged on by its own lively...”
– Dulce-Maria Loynaz, Jardin (trans. Claudia Lightfoot)
Swings & Roundabouts
‘However, the price comparison sites’ battle to outdo one another with brash, eye-catching ads has a downside’.
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“Dress Him While He Walks”
– Alzheimers Association of Miami, Ohio, instructional video
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“Fish psychology awaits its Freud.”
– T.C. Kingsmill Moore, A Man May Fish
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“[A] singularly dismal picture, long, dim vistas ending in a bank, buildings...”
– Ambrose Bierce
& taxes
‘Hail, ye solitary Ruins, Ye sacred Tombs, and silent Walls! … When oppressed humanity bent in timid silence throughout the globe beneath the galling yoke of slavery, it was you that proclaimed aloud the birthright of those truths, which tyrants tremble at while they detest; and which, by sinking the loftiest head of the proudest potentate, with all his boasted pageantry, to the level...
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ha ha
Horace Walpole, Essay on Modern Gardening
‘A short walk from the outer homes of the village, not more than 200 meters, leads suddenly to the edge of a cliff. The view here is marvelous, the air fresh. Below one’s feet is the coastal plain, from Kfar Saba to the sea … At one point in the plain … the small and crowded farming plots of the Palestinian are replaced by the...
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A neologism is needed for an utterance in which two terms X & Y are: i) conjoined by a preposition; and ii) can exchange locations on either side of that preposition without any diminution of truth-value.
‘Thompson’s soldiers express the X of Y.’
Here the variables are ‘empire’ & ‘ecstasy’.
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Weak infinity
‘Like a bird or a shaft, or any other swift thing, she was gone from the room’
Charlotte Brontë, Villette
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Hide.
The convention (crossbred from one breathless post-Victorian enthusiasm for secret knowledge with another, no more rigorous, for cool toys) that photographs capture hiddens our eyes don’t see.
Not just the minutiae of murders, but more things than are dreamt of, &c.
Take a picture of the sun with a digital camera, especially a cheap one.
It’s not that much of a surprise.
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“The possibilities for alternative endings to any detective story are infinite.”
– Cameron McCabe, The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor
The courage of one's convictions
Free Speech™. It’s non-negotiable. ‘I disapprove of what you say, but I am prepared to risk a five-year-old child’s death for your – alright, my – right to say it.’
(A purveyor of racist provocations and knight of liberty cowering in an armour-clad toilet leaving a toddler to face an axe-wielding madman? The gods of metaphor are generous.)
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“White lights lead to red lights.”
– American Airlines safety video.
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