walrus > Recent Status Updates

NO JANE DON'T DO IT PLEASE BY GOD JANE

I hope this isn't going where I think it is, Jane

Tennyson goes hard actually

gonna read this cover to cover rq

"If any one faculty of our nature may be called more wonderful than the rest, I do think it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the powers, the failures, the inequalities of memory, than in any other of our intelligences. The memory is sometimes so retentive, so serviceable, so obedient-- at others, so bewildered and so weak--and at others again, so tyrannic, so beyond controul!"

Emily Dickinson !

so close

Kind of crazy how Less Good the Death-Bed version is than the First Edition. The style is softened, the focus is lost, the power and consistency are considerably less. Sad!

who doesn't love Fanny Price?

Fanny, ... was equally forlorn, finding something to fear in every person and place...

... and she crept about in constant terror of something or other; often retreating towards her own chamber to cry; and the little girl who was spoken of in the drawing-room when she left it at night, as seeming so desirably sensible of her peculiar good fortune, ended every day's sorrows by sobbing herself to sleep.

Walter Whitman

I will not be stopped.

Austen's dialogue is continuing to be marvelous

'We are simulators, we are simulacra (not in the classical sense of "appearance"), we are concave mirrors radiated by the social, a radiation without a light source, power without origin, without distance, and it is in this tactical universe of the simulacrum that one will need to fight- without hope, hope is a weak value, but in defiance and fascination.'

'The original monstrosity of the beast ... has been exchanged for that of a spectacular monstrosity: ... King Kong wrenched from his jungle and transformed into a music hall star. ... Kong dies for having renewed, through seduction, this possibility of the metamorphosis of one reign into another, this incestuous promiscuity between beasts and men (... one that is never realized, except in a symbolic and ritual mode).

'It is useless to ask oneself if cancer is an illness of the capitalist age. It is in effect the illness that controls all contemporary pathology, because it is the very form of the virulence of the code: an exacerbated redundancy of the same signals, an exacerbated redundancy of the same cells.'

When one sees Las Vegas rise whole from the desert in the radiance of advertising at dusk, and return to the desert when dawn breaks, ... advertising is not what brightens or decorates the walls, ... and all the architecture, ... and that it is this liquidation, this reabsorption of every thing into the surface ... that plunges us into this stupefied hyperreal euphoria that we would not exchange for anything else ...

'Make Beaubourg bend!'

'Children are simultaneously required to constitute themselves as autonomous subjects, responsible, free and conscious, and to constitute themselves as submissive, inert, obedient, conforming objects.'

A1 Liz:

'Do not be afraid ... of my encroaching on your privilege of universal good will. You need not. There are few people whom I really love, and still fewer of whom I think well. The more I see of the world, the more am I dissatisfied with it; and every day confirms my belief of the inconsistency of all human characters, and of the little dependence that can be placed on the appearance of either merit or sense.'

'Anything serves to escape this void, this leukemia of history and of politics, this hemorrhage of values, ... -a controlling idea no longer selects, only nostalgia endlessly accumulates: war, fascism, the pageantry of the belle epoque, or the revolutionary struggles, everything is equivalent and mixed indiscriminately in the same morose and funeral exaltation, in the same retro fascination.'

'Not so long ago, sex and work were fiercely opposed terms; today both are dissolved in the same type of demand.'

Time to Austenmaxx