Brian > Recent Status Updates

Does it make it easier to control other creatures, or even peoples, us deciding that because we don’t know what they’re saying, what they’re saying doesn’t get to mean anything, or that they don’t get to have a say?

"I know that if an architect of unrest were to design a world guaranteed to destroy the mental, spiritual, emotional, imaginative and creative life of human beings everywhere - that world would be this one."

It is so fun to read this while I'm in the middle of my (slow) multi-year reading of the complete Thousand and One Nights.

Scheherazade forever!

I can change the story because I am the story.

Chaos, if you followed your instincts and walked on a thin enough edge, could reveal the most unexpected and contradictory insights over time.

I guess we accept, or at least expect, horror in the darkness. Maybe the verbs should be reversed in that sentence, I’m not sure.

This is what the world does to you when you pay attention too closely, he thought. The shutter slams down before the final clues appear, before the chain is connected and the fine details are resolved. And there are never enough quarters.

and this gift given me twenty years ago
I now give back as a poem,
as a candle kept lit,
through all the tears and sadnesses,
sometimes unattended and barely giving any light
but always letting go its light
as I let go in giving and compassion for others,
sharing it with others in the night,
to those who dream for peace,
for those who cherish the light,
pass it on.

Love makes so little sense
gives us a dog’s mind and cat’s heart
reduces our lives to wrecked cars
rusting in fields of yellow flowers.

There is something about Christmas, not the private mystery of it but the coercive public celebration of it, that victimizes us all.

"Sonia read Nabokov and found rising in her - like mountains and ocean without end - the unbearable longing for a book that could only be cured by writing."

The woman said that of course a person must be thankful for being allowed to hold on to the breath of life; but one was also thankful for being able to get rid of it. "My great-grandmother had an enormously hard time dying," she said. "In the end they had to turn a pot over her head."

"The sickbed has been one of the most important social institutions in Iceland since the country was settled."

Very few writers can pen insightful, biting and funny social commentary like Laxness.

He was pleased to feel part of a humanity that included tens of thousands of brown working-class men who had left their families behind and were on their own. These denizens kept New York City up and running, the United States up and running, the countries left behind from Guatemala to Nepal up and running. They were heroic.

Always tell a big lie, darling, to swallow the truth—with the small ones, you’ll get found out and be thrown in prison.

Amazon, in 2018, filed a patent for “anticipatory shipping,” presuming that it will eventually be able to predict what customers are going to buy before they actually do so.

“Contrary to what we like to believe today, humans quite easily fall into obeying others, and any sufficiently advanced AI is indistinguishable from God. People won’t necessarily mind taking their marching orders from some vast oracular computer.”

Miss America from sea to shining sea
the huddled masses have a concern
there is one of you and all of us

In addition to our physical bodies, there exists—somewhere in the ether—a second self that is purely informational and immaterial, a data set of our clicks, purchases, and likes that lingers not in some transcendent nirvana but rather in the shadowy dossiers of third-party aggregators... (cont)

We kept our harvest alive by meteorlight.

By chance, our graves were spared
by the storm