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Showing posts from November, 2023

Bluets quotes

“114. But now think of the Dutch expression: "Dat zin maar blauwe bloempjes" - “Those are nothing but blue flowers." In which case "blue flowers" means a pack of bald-faced lies.” - from Bluets by Maggie Nelson . It's an odd little book, which is part of it's charm. She's personal, confessional, literary, historical.  "You cannot step into the same river twice" heartening anthem, without a doubt. But really this is but one version of the fragment left behind by Heraclitus, who was justly nicknamed "The Riddler" or "The Obscure." Other versions: "On those stepping into rivers staying the same other and other waters flow"; "We step and do not step into the same river; we are and we are not"; "You cannot step twice into the same river, for other waters and yet others, go flowing on." It seems that something is staying the same here, but what?" (p. 80).

Gilmore Girls

One plot device is to not tell someone something and then the other person gets upset. That's a huge plot device. Nobody runs around and informs their friends of every little detail, but of course it does sign some hesitancy in romantic relationships. I think it's OK to have some hesitancy in intimate relationships. I can't help but think of Secrets and Lies by Mike Leigh (1996) Plot devices can irk people, that's not realism. But if Hamlet kills his uncle the play is over, or a quite different play. In fact there is a lot of what if fiction. I remember once someone was irked that Cheryl Strayed was a heroin addict for a time. She square community disapproved. There's a lot more on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophies.  The other plot device is being threatened by rivals, and triangles. If things get bogged down, introduce a romantic rival.  I love how passive aggressive Emily Gilmore is. There's a real problem of respecting other people'

Intercourse by Andrea Dworkin

Some quotes first: "I went to the peace office and instead of typing letters for the peace boys I wrote to newspapers saying I had been hurt and it was bad and not all right and because I didn't know sophisticated words I used the words I knew and they were very shocked to death; and the peace boys were in the office and I refused to type a letter for one of them because I was doing this and he read my letter out loud to everyone in the room over my shoulder and they all laughed at me, and I had spelled America with a 'k' because I knew I was in Kafka's world, not Jefferson's, and I knew Amerika was the real country I lived in." P.xvi “ "The worst immorality," she wrote, "is in living a trivial life because one is afraid to face any other kind of life-a despairing life or an anguished life or a twisted and difficult life."” p. xix. "man' and 'woman' are fictions, caricatures, cultural constructs ... reductive, totalitar

To amplify or not to amplify?

That is the question. NY Times op ed piece suggested that ignoring all the shenanigans actually promotes acceptance, ignoring. I'm done with Trump, DeSantis, Ramaswamy, Cruz, MTG, Bobo, Gertz, Santos and Christofascist Mike Johnson. These people are beneath America. It's crazy when a Cheney, Chisty and Romney are the sane ones. They're worse than carnival barkers. Dante has the deepest level of hell for them. The strategy is to overwhelm the parent with bad behavior so some slips through. Never mind it's being in the child position as a leader. The body rots from the top, we need a better system for finding politicians besides who is the most grandiose and venial. The far right wing Christofascist are trying to sneak in behind the grifter wingbats. It's a void, and that's where revolutions come. Not amplifying their grifts does make space for some of it to sneak by. But I don't have time to be the policeman of America, it's a crowd sourcing job. It's

Asteroid City

Asteroid City came out in 2023, it's Wes Anderson's 11th film, among many other projects of shorter length, more recently 4 shorts on Netflix based on Roald Dahl short stories. Wesley Wales Anderson was born in 1969 in Houston Texas. He majored in philosophy at University of Texas at Austin. The first thing is the frame for the movie. To start out saying it's a play on TV, the writer, the actors, the TV screen. The setting of the play is another layer. Then the title credits roll and you get color. A father with 5 children, his car breaks down. It dies in front of them. The movie core is grief. The inability to speak it. The weird sequelae. The visuals are southwest, 50's. Wes Anderson has a specific look to his movies, it's unique, it's his, among many other aspects of the film. Maybe the deadpan deliveries. The way the whole thing is intricately structured. There's a knowing metafiction approach that turns many people off, usually uneducated people and ri

We're all just grubby little mean assholes

74 million Americans voted for Donald Trump. There's so disaffected that the fuck you to America by such a horrible human being, and even more so a horrible president, has ushered in an age of assholism, where the assholes feel free to roam free.  As horrible quote after horrible action pile up, the campaign strategy of Biden is to just play footage of Trump saying horrible things. The people who wish to say fuck you to America will like that, and hopefully enough of a slim majority will say no to that. Their contempt is blind and unfocused, but exists. The quirks of American politics give Trump a chance, and it's possible Trump could be president from jail if he's elected. The fuck you people of America would think that was funny. Biden is old, but Trump is only 4 years younger, and seems in worse health. He's mixing things up a lot in his speechs, people are noticing, and not hiding his wannabe fascism. Biden was born 11/20/42, and Trump was born 6/14/46. That's l

bananas songs

My daughter is always talking about bananas, and I realized I have 3 songs in my memory. Sesame Street The Banana Slits  1969 Louis Prima