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"[...]a vessel cleaving the dungeon of the waves[...]"
You're Love in the Time of Cholera!
by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Like Odysseus in a work of Homer, you demonstrate undying loyalty by
sleeping with as many people as you possibly can. But in your heart you never give
consent! This creates a strange quandary of what love really means to you. On the
one hand, you've loved the same person your whole life, but on the other, your actions
barely speak to this fact. Whatever you do, stick to bottled water. The other stuff
could get you killed.
Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.
Never miss a word
You're Infinite Jest!
by David Foster Wallace
While you1 consider yourself2 to be clever,
there are those3 who think you're just full of yourself or, perhaps worse,
playing a joke4 on everyone around you, and yet you are pretty sure that
you really are that brilliant after all, since people would hardly take the time to
get to know you5 if they didn't care very deeply about what you had to
say to them, to wit, about their lives, their hopes, their dreams, their fears, their
drug habits, and of course what videos6 they prefer to watch, since,
after all, your impressive vocabulary and tendency to go on and on7 makes
you seem superior, able to educate them, and really drive a sense of something
ineffable into their measly little skulls while you are not above making a cheap
gag or really going after anyone or anything or telling them about incredible
futures involving tennis, geopolitics, and
1Meaning you personally, not someone like you or your own
personal daddy, for example.
2As well as you can see yourself, which, frankly, may not be that well.
3Though we wouldn't deign to be so peripatetic as to name them here, mind.
4Jokes, though not common in Victorian England, were known to originate
sometime in ancient history, perhaps as early as the time of Babylon, or even before.
It is thought that the history of the joke plays an integral role in the mindset of
the characters depicted here, though you may disagree at this point, in which case I
am facing quite the dilemma in relaying this narrative, no?
5It is rather time consuming, after all.
6Ha!
7and on and on and on...
Take the Book Quiz II
at the Blue Pyramid.
You're The Metamorphosis!
by Franz Kafka
Though you think you're in the midst of a dream, the fact of the
matter is that your life has become a nightmare. The nightmare at first seems
horrific to you, but you are slowly able to adjust to the facts of the matter
and settle down and make do with what you've been given. There are those that
would say you're pointless and absurd, but you're really just trying to
demonstrate that people can (and do) adapt to anything, no matter how absurd
it is. Not that this will really inspire them to change, because they probably
don't understand.
Take the Book Quiz II
at the Blue Pyramid.
About Me
- Σφιγξ
- possesses wholly unmerited academic pretensions; examines love as an entomologist; collects haunted dollshouses; notes the lunar phase as regularly as the temperature; peruses field guides; reads like a serial magazine subscriptionist; functions through coffee and "mood" music; draws to the very corners of the page; takes notes on unlined paper; reads poetry as prayer; observes textual authority with the incredulity of fiction; suppresses the smart-ass answer(s); adapts as well as anyone beseiged by her own bibelots; she is a sensation seeker in spite of all of this.
8 comments:
WHAT THEY SAID
: After I am dead, darling,
My seventeen senses gone,
I shall love you as you wish,
no sex, no mouth, but bone--
in the way you long for now,
with my soul alone.
: When we are neither woman nor man
but bleached to skeleton--
when you have changed, my darling,
and all your senses gone,
it is not me that you will love:
you will love everyone.
--Muriel Rukeyser from The Speed of Darkness
Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle:
Part 1, Chapter 3
"There were those who maintained that the discrepancies and
"false overlappings" between the two worlds were too numer-
ous, and too deeply woven into the skein of successive events,
not to taint with trite fancy the theory of essential sameness;
and there were those who retorted that the dissimilarities only
[ 18 ]
confirmed the live organic reality pertaining to the other world;
that a perfect likeness would rather suggest a specular, and
hence speculatory, phenomenon; and that two chess games with
identical openings and identical end moves might ramify in an
19.05 infinite number of variations, on one board and in two brains,
at any middle stage of their irrevocably converging development."
My seventeen senses pine to nest. I have not grilled in a while (potential carcinogens), but this was a pleasant surprise.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3DfyJRIT4jyREt4Y2t6NG5aVlE/view?usp=sharing
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B3DfyJRIT4jyRDZXRUg4c04xb28/view?usp=sharing
Crumbling under years of unmet expectations, in general. It is easier not to imagine anything anymore.
*I fucking hate you, Anthony. You never meant signified any of the above configurations. You awful troll.
*meant or signified in
"Mercaptans are a class of organic compounds known mostly for their foul smell. They're toxic in big doses but are typically found in harmless dilution. One particular arrangement called ethyl mercaptan was once named the 'smelliest substance' in existence by The Guinness Book of World Records; the human nose can detect it at concentrations of less than one part per billion—about a thousand times lower than the threshold for sulfur dioxide (the penetrating smell of pollution and volcanic gas). Mercaptans help give cooked cabbage, onions, flatulence, cheese, bad breath, and feces their fragrant bouquet. Also present in animal blood and brains, mercaptans are released as a carcass decays, helping to give corpses their smell.
It wasn't long before workers at the Union Oil Company noticed a peculiar side effect of the scented gas. Whenever one of their remote lines sprang a leak, a group of turkey vultures would soon collect overhead, evidently detecting the mercaptans percolating in the atmosphere. The workers began looking for circling vultures when tracing down a leak, a technique that is apparently used today.
[...] One investigation of 108 bird species found that, of the ten birds with the largest olfactory bulbs relative to their own brain size, nine were seabirds (also known for possessing a keen sense of smell). The other was the turkey vulture, which ranked eighth overall (60-61)."
Noah Stryker's The Thing with Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human (2014)
"'Yes, I can have two faces, but I can't have them at the same time. With you, I wear the scoffing face. When I am at the office, I wear the serious face. I get the résumés of people looking for work at our place. It's up to me to recommend them or reject them. Some of them, in their letters, express themselves in this perfectly up-to-date ling, with the clichés, with the jargon, with all the required optimism. I don't need to see them or talk to them to detest them. But I know that those are the ones who will do the work well, and zealously. An then there are the ones who, in other times, would certainly be going into philosophy, or art history, or teaching French literature, but these days, for want of anything better, almost out of despair, they're looking for work at our place. I know that in their hearts they feel contempt for the job they're seeking and that therefore they are my kinfolk. And I have to decide.'
'And how do you decide?'
'One time I recommend the person I like, the next time the person who'll do good work. I behave half as traitor to my company, half as traitor to myself. I'm a double traitor. And that state of double treason I consider not a defeat but a triumph. But who knows how long I'll still be able to hold on to my two faces? The day will come when I'll have only one face. The worse of the two, of course. The serious one. The acquiescent one. Will you love me then?'
'You'll never lose your two faces,' says Jean-Marc (27-28)."
Linda Asher's translation of Milan Kundera's Identity (1998)
Exercise 90.
Accounting.
Late entry. Exercise 90. Thank you, for reminding me.
https://1drv.ms/i/s!AsA4BY25Ql_1mx1h6W8Y91QaAAL7?e=OYw6Ab
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