To reimagine the fifties, whether in Gainesville or anywhere else in America, means setting aside some images and ideas about the era that have all but hardened into place. Too often the period is remembered as a time of ruthless
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“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
―
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”
―
“Personally I feel that real rock 'n' roll may be on the way out, just like adolescence as a relatively innocent transitional period is on the way out. What we have instead is a small island of new free music surrounded by some good reworkings of past idioms and a vast sargasso sea of absolute garbage.”
― Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
― Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung
“Boo, Forever
Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
top,
I'm haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.”
― The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster
Spinning like a ghost
on the bottom of a
top,
I'm haunted by all
the space that I
will live without
you.”
― The Pill vs. the Springhill Mine Disaster
“Of the blessings set before you make your choice, and be content. No man can taste the fruits of autumn while he is delighting his scent with the flowers of the spring: no man can, at the same time, fill his cup from the source and from the mouth of the Nile.”
― The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
― The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia
“Aestheticism and radicalism must lead us to jettison reason, and to replace it by a desperate hope for political miracles. This irrational attitude which springs from intoxication with dreams of a beautiful world is what I call Romanticism. It may seek its heavenly city in the past or in the future; it may preach ‘back to nature’ or ‘forward to a world of love and beauty’; but its appeal is always to our emotions rather than to reason. Even with the best intentions of making heaven on earth it only succeeds in making it a hell – that hell which man alone prepares for his fellow-men.”
― The Open Society and its Enemies
― The Open Society and its Enemies
Scott’s 2025 Year in Books
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