Andew Mcvey > Recent Status Updates

“Practice with these tools until you find them boring, then practice some more”

“We didn’t say these beats had to be uninflected. We said that the shots had to be uninflected”

“The boat had to look like a boat; the sail doesn’t have to look like a boat”

“While so hard-pressed, and while working to include the pretty picture, one will undoubtedly become wedded to its eventual inclusion, to the detriment of the piece as a whole”

To live is to be sentenced for living

Kafka knew hours, days perhaps, in which he identified personal life itself with ineradicable existential guilt. To be alive, to engender further life, was to sin… It was, at some enigmatic deeps, to sin against oneself to the precise degree that survival entails lies, the failures of love, suffering, and the anguish which whispers pitilessly out of The great winds from under the earth.
- intro by George Steiner

“- People worry about losing species diversity in the rain forest. But what about intellectual diversity - our most necessary resource? That's disappearing faster than trees.But we haven't figured that out, so now we're planning to put five billion people together in cyberspace. And it'll freeze the entire species.Everything will stop dead in its tracks. Everyone will think the same.”

“- That's the effect of mass media-it keeps anything from happening. Mass media swamps diversity. It makes every place the same. Bangkok or Tokyo or London: there's a McDonald's on one corner, a Benneton on another, a Gap across the street. Regional differences vanish. All differences vanish. In a mass-media world, there's less of everything except the top ten books, records, movies, ideas-“

“This idea that the whole world is wired together is mass death... Put three people on a committee and they may get something done. Ten people, and it gets harder. Thirty people, and nothing happens. Thirty million, it becomes impossible.”

Michael Crichton is clearly an intelligent writer, he has a technicality to his research that clearly indicates Ivy League education, but I unfortunately didn’t find his characters terribly engaging. Maybe it’s because I kept relating events in the novel to events in the film, but I found the characters in the film much more interesting with real development. That being said I enjoyed Tim’s character the most.

1/4 of the book is preamble, just got to the park around page 120 and I don’t even care, Crichton writes typically mundane technical and scientific explanations pretty engagingly. I used to lie to people and say I read this but I haven’t

“I dreamed of other accidents that might enlarge this repertory of orifices, relating them to more elements of the automobiles engineering, to the ever-more complex technologies of the future.”

“His face seemed drained of all aggressiveness, as if the semen he had voided into Catherine’s vulva had carried with it his sense of crisis”

“I could feel my wounds again, cutting through my chest and knees. I searched for my scars, those tender lesions that now gave off an exquisite and warming pain. My body glowed from these points, like a resurrected man basking in the healed injuries that had brought about his first death.”

“This pervasive sexuality filled the air, as if we were members of a congregation leaving after a sermon urging us to celebrate our sexualities with friends and strangers, and were driving into the night to imitate the bloody Eucharist we had observed with most unlikely partners”

“The world was beginning to flower into wounds”

“Let me take you for a ride”

“I suddenly wondered how I could hurt her”

“The deformed body of the crippled young woman, like the deformed bodies of the crashed automobiles, revealed the possibilities of an entirely new sexuality”

“Robert Vaughan, nightmare angel of the expressways”