Lee > Recent Status Updates

Bob Dylan’s music has never appealed to me, I think because lyrical meaning is so much less important to me than sound and its texture in music and his sounds are all wrong for me. Inaccessible. But I love reading Sam’s/Evan’s passion for Dylan’s songs. I will I suspect be missing out on a layer of enjoyment of this novel that Dylan fans will have access to, but I’m not seeing it as a roadblock.

She appeared to be instructed in all the things of which a girl is better ignorant, and ignorant of all the things that a girl should know. That at least was the point of view of Mme. de Sautron.
“Tell me, madame,” quoth Aline, “are all men beasts?”

The more I aspire to align myself with the highest and holiest, the better a Zalman I can be, For who am I if not God’s willingness to play the role of Zalman for yet another day?

'The 'P' account, how you call it' he continued, 'is the first creation story. Then you have your 'J' account, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Creation story number two. You can be sure I didn't teach it like this in Meah Shearim.'

Ok, reading this is a BIT of work, but it also feels something like reading Cormac McCarthy. There must be some influence there.

You look at lykens on a stoan its all them tiny manyings of it and may be each part of it myt think its sepert only we can see its all 1 thing. Thats how it is with what we are its all 1 girt big thing and divvyt up amongst the many. Its all 1 girt thing bigger nor the worl and lorn and loan and oansome. Tremmering it is and feart. It puts us on like we put on cloes. Some times we dont fit. It cant find arm hoals.

Your department’s concerned with formal questions exclusively: Woolf’s method, Mann’s symbols, the patterns of Katherine Anne Porter. All appropriate enough for criticism, but it isn’t what the student reads for. A student reads an author for his ideas, to detach from him a portable philosophy, like the young Joyce - a laudable aim which you discourage by your insistence on the inseparability of form and content.

I seek peace, but I too have a war within. I desire freedom, yet fight the oppression of my own fears. I seek alignment in the present, shedding limiting narratives from my past. I aim to reconcile who I was on October 6 with who I am now in a post-October 7 world, where each day still feels like the 8th. - Alyssa Rosenheck.

‘I will do as I please,’ Isabel cut her off, a sharp tone, and then continued to do nothing of what she pleased: throat too tight to swallow, guilt-rotten heat in her belly, down her spine.

Seymour the angel once even tried to kill himself. He hanged himself with his braces. He had apparently forgotten for the moment that there was no dying in Paradise. After he spent an entire day and night dangling in the air, he took the braces off from around his neck and cursed Paradise, the angel Barney, and, he wanted to curse the Paradise shopkeeper’s daughter, the cause of all his suffering, but he could not.

“Apparently, an elderly client said that she couldn’t stand blacks and Jews equally, but at least she wasn’t scared of the Jews. My mother growled at her. She said that she wanted to show her that Jews could be scary too. Only then did my mother get fired for good.”

Nobody understood how this activated their dopamine systems like it did. The thing about dopamine, though, is that once it's activated, you don't really care about why. That's how dopamine works.

She had begun to see all the superstitions that were her heritage as the silly burden of a poor and desperate people who had no control and no explanation of why they were constantly being chased to their death. If all those superstitions were to protect against the dangers their poverty endowed them with, then money was the solution and it was time for them to relax. But now she saw that money had tricked her.

Sometimes Hannah wondered how strong Eric’s faith was. The unseen world was as real to her as the skin on her hands. Yosef had been the same way. Up in that attic she could see it all play out in the drift of his eyes, the wonder and terror of existence. Elsie too, she’d seen things. But Eric, for all his learning, was not a man with wonder in his eyes.

‘Follow your own argument, Kate. You believe in subconscious inherited racism. But you also believe that after 3,000 years of antisemitism, none of that slime has stuck to the anti-Zionists, whose sole political aim is to kick us out of yet another country. You think those rowdy kids alone out of all humanity are free of unconscious bias, perfectly rational in their convictions.’

Loving this so far.

“Thomas believes that any writer who thinks himself better than the products of his own imagination should seek out some more appropriate profession (such as dentistry, for example, or the construction of dry-stone walls).”

He was touching forty but looked ten years older again, with a face on him like a vandalized church

Daniel Ziskind had once learned that time is created through deeds of true kindness. Days and hours and years are not time, but merely vessels for it, and too often they are empty. The world stands still, timeless and empty, until an act of generosity changes it in an instant and sends it soaring through arcs of rich seasons, moment after spinning moment of racing beauty.

“But you are too indulgent," Peretz declared, waving his hand to brush away a smoke ring. "You are seduced by beauty, and you think that if you can write a pretty sentence about something, then it doesn't matter where the story goes or how it ends. Your greatest weakness is that you write as if you are painting a picture instead of telling a story. A painting doesn't have to mean anything, but a story does."

"More than ever I restrain my talent lest it run a course that virtue has not set."

Yeah, same, honestly.

“It is always better to hold one’s tongue than speak
a truth that seems a bold-faced lie when uttered,
since to tell this truth could be embarrassing;

but I shall not keep quiet…”
(Canto 16, 124-127)

As little flowers from the frosty night
are closed and limp, and when the sun shines down
on them, they rise to open on their stem,

my wilted strength began to bloom within me,
and such warm courage flowed into my heart
that I spoke like a man set free of fear.
(Canto II, 127-132)

This should be part of the high school math curriculum, unless administrators are afraid of the image of students, a little bit too relaxed, asking things like "What even IS mathematics, man?"

There is no time machine except the human being.

Our parents were all deluded about the fact that the world had changed and would not go back to being what it once was.

"Should science by some miracle forge on into the future it will uncover not only new laws of nature but new natures to have laws about."

So far so weird. What was that Vietnam War passage for? Hmm.