kevo

Emerson on Austen

kuoni — Sat, 16 Jul 2011 23:26:33 +0000

I am at a loss to understand why people hold Miss Austen’s novels at so high a rate, which seem to me vulgar in tone, sterile in invention, imprisoned in the wretched conventions of English society, without genius, wit, or knowledge of the world. Never was life so pinched & narrow. The one problem in the mind of the writer in both the stories I have read, “Persuasion”, and “Pride & Prejudice”, is marriageableness; all that interests any character introduced is still this one, has he or she money to marry with, & conditions conforming? ‘Tis “the nympholepsy of a fond despair”, say rather, of an English boarding-house. Suicide is more respectable.

That is from Emerson’s Notebooks, August-September 1861.

Chuck Klosterman on recorded sports

kuoni — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 06:11:43 +0000

If I record a sporting event, there’s no way I’m sitting through the commercials. That would be like volunteering for a DUI.

This, I suppose, is a nonstoned way to describe the (completely unscientific) concept of “levels of reality.”

There is a massive sector of the populace who think they are partially responsible for what happens in the games they’re watching on television; they believe their psychic energy plays a role in what happens to other people in other cities. These consumers tend to fall into one or more of the following categories:

a. People who get mad at total strangers for not standing up and cheering at live events.
b. People who swear at inanimate objects.
c. People who refer to teams composed of people they’ve never met as “We.”
d. People who think God has a vested interest in certain teams’ succeeding.1
e. People who applaud at the conclusion of movies, just in case the director happens to be sitting in the theater.
f. People who worry about Susan Miller.2
g. People who refuse to accept that even “live” TV events are on a seven-second delay.
h. People who set their watch five minutes ahead to fool themselves into being on time.
i. People who are eventually arrested for failed assassination attempts.

Living in a cave isn’t enough. We’ve beaten the caves. The caves have Wi-Fi.

http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6626431/space-time-dvr-mechanics

Lunch with David Mamet

kuoni — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 04:59:38 +0000

He has a knack of combining character assassination with dry wit, as if only half-serious.
-John Gapper

“They are very, very beautiful. It once occurred to me: being able to write is like being the pretty girl at the party. You can’t be diffident about it because that’s a lie but it’s nothing to be arrogant about.”
-Mamet

In Slate, June 11

http://goo.gl/6sXxF

John Howard Yoder

kuoni — Fri, 13 May 2011 18:15:11 +0000

When am I more a slave of my adversary than when I let him define our relationship as my being his enemy?

John Howard Yoder
Nonviolence: A Brief History

quoting niels bohr

kuoni — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 23:03:08 +0000

prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.
Niels Bohr said it, but not first

how to write a sentance

kuoni — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 03:24:47 +0000

If the history of the American sentence were a John Ford movie, its second act would conclude with the young Ernest walking into a saloon, finding an etiolated Henry James slumped at the bar in a haze of indecision, and shooting him dead. The terse, declarative sentence in all its masculine hardness routed the passive involutions of a higher, denser style.

How To Write a (Good) Sentence

Adam Haslett on Stanley Fish.

Slate Jan. 23, 2011

Howard Zinn

kuoni — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 04:11:30 +0000

SNCC represents the closest thing we have in the United States to that militant mood of change which one finds in emerging nations abroad. It constantly aims to create and recreate, out of the bodies of poor and powerless people, a new force: nonviolent but aggressive, honest but therefore unmanageable. It wants to demonstrate to the nation not what kind of system people should believe in, but how people should live their lives. So its radicalism is not an ideology but a mood. Moods are harder to define, they are also harder to imprison.

The New Abolitionist, 196

about Howard Zinn

kuoni — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 03:59:05 +0000

His capacity for moral outrage… was again a thing that has throughout fed my spirit, feeds my spirit now, I dont understand how there aren’t more people who are just profoundly upset…

Howard Zinn: You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train

Melinda Gates at TED

kuoni — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 03:50:21 +0000

We make a fundamental mistake: we think that if people need something, we do not have to make them want that.

Sarah Vowell and MLK Jr

kuoni — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 02:32:48 +0000

I happen to be with King in proclaiming the Sermon on the Mount’s call for love to be at the heart of Christian behavior, and one of us got a Ph.D. in systematic theology.

Sarah Vowell
The Wordy Shipmates