irrelevents

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The way to get ideas is to do something boring… They fly into one’s head like birds.

John Cage (via austinkleon)

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Word.

Ad Reinhardt, 1943

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This is life below the white line, the permafrost. People sitting in renovated kitchens, decent, sad, a little bitter in an undirected way. I felt I knew them. Bass fishermen. Presbyterians.When children race out of rooms the noise of their leaving remains behind. When old people die, she’d once been told, they leave a smell on things.

Don Delillo, The Names, (p. 31)

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[A] noted [Tory]…was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, "Well! Give me peace in my day." Not a man lives on the continent but fully believes that a separation must some time or other finally take place, and a generous parent should have said, "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace;" and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.

Thomas Paine, The Current Crisis (Dec. 23, 1776)

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The phrase 'Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam,'  (“Moreover I am of the opinion that Carthage be destroyed,”) was used by Cato to conclude every speech on any topic whatever, until he finally goaded the Romans into the third Punic War.

From a footnote in the Hacket edition of Nietzsche's On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life.

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A new exhibition at the New York Society Library, “Readers Make Their Mark,”collected annotated books from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries, thus continuing the culture’s growing fascination with marginalia.

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A noted [tory], who kept a tavern at Amboy, was standing at his door, with as pretty a child in his hand, about eight or nine years old, as I ever saw, and after speaking his mind as freely as he thought was prudent, finished with this unfatherly expression, "Well! give me peace in my day." Not a man lives on the [American] continent but fully believes that a separation must some time or other finally take place [with the British], and a generous parent should have said, "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace;" and this single reflection, well applied, is sufficient to awaken every man to duty.

Thomas Paine, The Current Crisis, December, 1776.

(BTW that essay is amazing, eminently quotable, vehement, and legitimately moving.)

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i cant get over “suffering sappho”

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“I would prefer not to spend Valentine’s day alone” —Herman Melville

Literary Valentines.

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“What if there was a place for movies where nothing was impossible? A place where veteran auteurs shared the spotlight with first-time directors? Where diversity of voices was of the highest importance, rather than the lowest? Where budget size didn’t matter, and every topic, big or small, was covered with the same attention to detail? Where films could actually change the world?

This place already exists, and it has for decades. It isn’t Tomorrowland. It’s the PBS documentary showcase made up of the nonfiction anthology series POV and Independent Lens. And it’s slowly dying.”

Andrew Lapin explains why saving POV and Independent Lens is crucial to saving the documentary form for the people who need it most. [Read more…]

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And I say, there is no man in Detroit that doesn’t know that these defendants, everyone of them, did right. There isn’t a man in Detroit who doesn’t know that the defendant did his duty, and that this case is an attempt to send him and his companions to prison because they defended their constitutional rights. It is a wicked attempt, and you are asked to be a party to it. You know it. I don’t need to talk to this jury about the facts in this case. There is no man who can read or can understand that does not know the facts. Is there prejudice in it?

Clarence Darrow’s summation in People v. Henry Sweet, 1926. (via irrelevents)

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“I still cannot conceive of any comfortable abode whose walls are not carpeted with the brightly colored spines and edges of books and built-in paintings” Javier María on the crammed nature of his book-filled childhood home. How large is your library?

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What possible link is there between the great delta of the Mississippi River and the poverty and violence of Ciudad Juárez? Answer: The delta of the Mississippi River is the richest land on earth and for two centuries it has produced the poorest people in the United States. Ciudad Juárez was to be the model for American free-trade theories and for decades it has produced corruption, poverty, and violence. If you ask what food and cooking has to do with all this, then you do not understand appetite and if you do not understand appetite you will be baffled by love, violence, and death.

Charles Bowden, "The Lives of the Saints," in Aperture Magazine. < http://www.aperture.org/blog/lives-saints-charles-bowden/>

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"White Collar," by Denis Johnson (From: The Incognito Lounge)

We work in this building and we are hideous

in the fluorescent light, you know our clothes

woke up this morning and swallowed us like jewels

and ride up and down the elevators, filled with us,

turning and returning like the spray of light that goes

around dance-halls among the dancing fools.

My office smells like a theory, but here one weeps

to see the goodness of the world laid bare

and rising with the government on its lips,

the alphabet congealing in the air

around our heads. But in my belly’s flames

someone is dancing, calling me by many names

that are secret and filled with light and rise

and break, and I see my previous lives.

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--from Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

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YES.

“Troll the ancient” would be a sweet tattoo.

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Lol.

Should the Democrats Give Up on the South?

John Cassidy considers the national future of a battered political party:

If the Democratic Party wants to be a national party of government, it needs to retain and expand its presence in the South, not neglect it.

Photograph by Sean Gardner/Getty Images