“BLOOM: (In workman’s corduroy overalls, black gansy with red floating tie and apache cap) Mankind is incorrigible. Sir Walter Raleigh brought from the new world that potato and that weed, the one killer of pestilence by absorption, the other a poisoner of the ear, eye, heart, memory, will, understanding, all. That is to say, he […]
“Sirs, he said, our lust is brief. We are means to those small creatures within us and nature has other ends than we.” ––Ulysses, by James Joyce, pg. 387 “The fight for a national health care system today is not basically different than the struggle for universal public education that took place in this […]
“Every life is many days, day after day. We walk through ourselves, meeting robbers, ghosts, giants, old men, young men, wives, widows, brothers-in-love. But always meeting ourselves.” ––Ulysses, by James Joyce, pg. 213 “I cannot emphasize enough how important it was that we developed ‘coalition politics.’ The way to rekindle hope in America, we […]
“As we, or mother Dana, weave and unweave our bodies, Stephen said, from day to day, their molecules shuttled to and fro, so does the artist weave and unweave his image. And as the mole on my right breast is where it was when I was born, though all my body has been woven of […]
Neal Stephenson’s Some Remarks is a highly stimulating read from my favorite living author. This collection of essays and short fiction sheds light on Stephenson’s personal background, writing methods, and modes of information synthesis. As always, we are treated to a very special version of the world––one seen through the eyes of an author who […]
“We are the fat. You and I are the fat in the fire. We haven’t got the chance of a snowball in hell.” ––Ulysses, by James Joyce, pg. 132 “Today’s belief in ineluctable certainty is the true innovation-killer of our age. In this environment, the best an audacious manager can do is to develop […]
“Everything speaks in its own way.” ––Ulysses, by James Joyce, pg. 123 “A few years ago I began thinking that the bookish people of the world were becoming a little bit like medieval monks, living austere but intellectually complex lives in voluntary seclusion from a gaudy and action-packed secular world. I’ve written a novel, […]
“Why not endless till the farthest star? Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds. Me sits there with his augur’s rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars. Endless, would it […]
“‘Shakespeare said it best,’ Tamaru said quietly as he gazed at the lumpish, misshapen head. ‘Something along these lines: if we die today, we do not have to die tomorrow, so let us look to the best in each other.’” ––1Q84, by Haruki Murakami, pg. 873 “Choose any person in the world at random, […]
“The center of identity is constructed of those stories we tell ourselves––the poems and philosophies, memories and mythologies and scientific explanations––and the ten thousand things remain always beyond them. Seen at its most fundamental level as generative ontological tissue, that elsewhere beyond our stories is what Lao Tzu called ‘dark enigma.’ To see landscape, the […]