inspo/funny
Martin Amis,
Thomas Pynchon,
Charlie Kaufman,
Miranda July,
Helen DeWitt,
Elaine Dundy,
Lucia Berlin,
Iris Murdoch,
Shirley Hazzard
otherwise uncaptured moments of humor
Just a big hunk of desert, no more maids, no field-hands, no laborers for the construction or the mining—wait, wait a minute there, yes it's Karl Marx, that sly old racist skipping away with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it's nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets. . . . Oh, no. Colonies are much, much more. Colonies are the outhouses of the European soul, where a fellow can let his pants down and relax, enjoy the smell of his own shit. Where he can fall on his slender prey roaring as loud as he feels like, and guzzle her blood with open joy. Eh? Where he can just wallow and rut and let himself go in a softness, a receptive darkness of limbs, of hair as woolly as the hair on his own forbidden genitals. Where the poppy, and cannabis and coca grow full and green, and not to the colors and style of death, as do ergot and agaric, the blight and fungus native to Europe. Christian Europe was always death, Karl, death and repression. Out and down in the colonies, life can be indulged, life and sensuality in all its forms, with no harm done to the Metropolis, nothing to soil those cathedrals, white marble statues, noble thoughts. . . . No word ever gets back. The silences down here are vast enough to absorb all behavior, no matter how dirty, how animal it gets. . . .
oh my god
"Oneirine, and Methoneirine. Variations reported by Laszlo Jamf in the ACS Journal, year before last. Jamf was on loan again, this time as a chemist, to the Americans, whose National Research Council had begun a massive program to explore the morphine molecule and its possibilities—a Ten-Year Plan, coinciding, most oddly, with the classic study of large molecules being carried on by Carothers of du Pont, the Great Synthesist. Connection? Of course there's one. But we don't talk about it. NRC is synthesizing new molecules every day, most of them from pieces of the morphine molecule. Du Pont is stringing together groups such as amides into long chains. The two programs seem to be complementary, don't they? The American vice of modular repetition, combined with what is perhaps our basic search: to find something that can kill intense pain without causing addiction.
"Results have not been encouraging. We seem up against a dilemma built into Nature, much like the Heisenberg situation. There is nearly complete parallelism between analgesia and addiction. The more pain it takes away, the more we desire it. It appears we can't have one property without the other, any more than a particle physicist can specify position without suffering an uncertainty as to the particle's velocity—"
my god
Gustav is a composer. For months he has been carrying on a raging debate with Säure over who is better, Beethoven or Rossini. Säure is for Rossini. "I'm not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven," Gustav argues, "but as he represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where all notes get an equal hearing. Beethoven was one of the architects of musical freedom—he submitted to the demands of history, despite his deafness. While Rossini was retiring at the age of 36, womanizing and getting fat, Beethoven was living a life filled with tragedy and grandeur."
"So?" is Säure's customary answer to that one. "Which would you rather do? The point is," cutting off Gustav's usually indignant scream, "a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn't even have a sense of humor. I tell you," shaking his skinny old fist, "there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part to La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the whole point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled—listen!" It was a night in early May, and the final bombardment of Berlin was in progress. Säure had to shout his head off. "The Italian girl is in Algiers, the Barber's in the crockery, the magpie's stealing everything in sight! The World is rushing together. ..."
You will want cause and effect. All right. Thanatz was washed overboard in the same storm that took Slothrop from the Anubis. He was rescued by a Polish undertaker in a rowboat, out in the storm tonight to see if he can get struck by lightning. The undertaker is wearing, in hopes it will draw electricity, a complicated metal suit, something like a deep-sea diver's, and a Wehrmacht helmet through which he has drilled a couple of hundred holes and inserted nuts, bolts, springs and conductive wands of many shapes so that he jingles whenever he nods or shakes his head, which is often. He's a digital companion all right, everything gets either a yes or a no, and two-tone checkerboards of odd shape and texture indeed bloom in the rainy night around him and Thanatz. Ever since reading about Benjamin Franklin in an American propaganda leaflet, kite, thunder and key, the undertaker has been obsessed with this business of getting hit in the head by a lightning bolt. All over Europe, it came to him one night in a flash (though not the kind he wanted), at this very moment, are hundreds, who knows maybe thousands, of people walking around, who have been struck by lightning and survived. What stories they could tell!
i just love the fucking boldness ugh
Panthers walk on Sacramento; it’s national news on prime time, and overnight there’s forty-three Black Panther Party chapters nationwide. Telegrams come in daily; this one’s from this place called Reed College, wants to form a chapter.
Huey asks, “Akagi, you’re a college man. What’s this Reed College?”
Akagi thinks about it. “College for geniuses, but the crazy John Reed kind.”
“Check it out.”
Reed is honky territory out in Portland, Oregon. Shit. Could be a bunch of black brothers infiltrated behind the lines. How’d they get into Reed? They’re letting colored people into fancy places everywhere. Affirmative action my ass! Could be a hoax. A trap! Akagi gets three of his best men. Drive up to Oregon and do calisthenics and shoot up the desert on the way. Take a pilgrimage detour to Tule Lake and shoot at the leftover guard towers. Get to Reed in prime condition—trained and mean and looking sharp. Field jackets, black berets, shades, rifles. March into the designated coffee shop for the meeting. At attention.
Who walks in? It’s one black dude. Just one.
“Where’re the others?”
“It’s just me.”
“Just you?”
“Just me.”
It’s a chapter of one! A fucking chapter of one! Break my heart!
Akagi could lose it, but stop! He tugs nervously at his leather gloves, then faces Reed off and says, “Name the ten-point program!”
cute
‘Okay. Carlton had your dress hoicked up over your ribcage!’
With quiet matter-of-factness, taking rightful warmth from her cup with both palms, Phoebe said, ‘He wanted to see it. So I showed him.’
‘Yes, completely straightforward. And logical. Carlton wanted to see it, so you hoicked up your dress and showed Carlton your…?’
‘My mandala. Luckily these pants are see-through so I didn’t have to take them down. I’ll explain,’ she said. ‘Now Carlton’s a corporate raider, but you have to understand that he finds himself drawn, he finds himself increasingly drawn, Martin, to Buddha.’
this is amazing. the pacing of the last sentence
Jed Slot was in the hotel bar – being interviewed. Himself a teetotaller, Jed did all his interviews in the hotel bar, and I’d arranged to do all my interviews in there too; but whereas Slot’s sessions lasted all day long and well into the night, mine only accounted for teatime (so I often went in early and came out late, just to listen). The truth was that I had taken up Jed like a new hobby. I had even read him.
‘Eh bien. Now tell me, if you would,’ began the questioner (a shrivelled sage with a briar pipe), ‘what is the difference between the novel and the short story – I mean compositionally, in terms of praxis?’
‘Well, sir,’ said Jed, ‘the novel is more expansive. By contrast, the short story is more succinct.’
chuckled at this
In excellent fettle, in the pink or the blue of boyish good health during their absence, Marmaduke sickened dramatically within a few hours of their return. Evenhandedly he dabbled with every virus, every hatching, afforded by that early spring. Recovering from mumps, he reacted catastrophically to his final whooping-cough shot. Superflu followed superflu in efficient relay. Doctors now visited him, unasked and unpaid, out of sheer professional curiosity. At this point, and for no clear reason (Sir Oliver asked if he might write a paper about it), Marmaduke's health radically improved. Indeed, he seemed to shed his sickly self as if it were a dead skin or a useless appendage: from the feverish grub of the old Marmaduke sprang a musclebound wunder-kind, clear-eyed, pink-tongued, and (it transpired) infallibly vicious. The change was all very sudden. Guy and Hope went out one day, leaving the usual gastroenteritic nightmare slobbering on the kitchen floor; they returned after lunch to find Marmaduke strolling round the drawing-room with his hands in his pockets, watched by several speechless nannies. He had never crawled. Instead, he appeared to have worked it out that he could cause much more trouble, and have much more fun, in a state of peak fitness. His first move was to dispense with that midnight nap. The Clinches hired more help, or they tried. An ailing baby was one thing; a strappingly malevolent toddler was quite another. Up until now, Guy and Hope's relationship, to the child and to each other, had been largely paramedical. After Marmaduke's renaissance, it became, well — you wouldn't say paramilitary. You'd say military. The only people they could get who stayed longer than an hour or two were male nurses sacked from lunatic asylums, Around the house, these days there was a kind of swat team of burly orderlies, as well as a few scarred nannies and au pairs. Dazedly yet without bitterness, Guy calculated that Marmaduke, now in his ninth month, had already cost him a quarter of a million pounds. They went away again.
god he's so funny
Every time he pushed open the plywood door, every time Trish came to welcome him on her knees, Keith was that little bit angrier. For this he would give Trish payment. God save us, what was he doing to himself? Why was he here, with her, with that, when he had funloving little Debbee, and sinuous Analiese (and Peggy and Iqbala and Petronella and Fran) ? Well, it was true that Trish had something to be said for her. Trish had a certain quality. She was nearest.
oh my god lol
Our noses were still almost touching as Keith talked of such things as the address of the board and gracing the oché and the sincerity of the dart. Oh yes, and clinicism. He then went on to tell me everything he knew about the game. It took fifteen seconds.