Wow. Just when you think you know a fellow. I’m really having to rethink my opinions on this Hitler guy.
jests japes jokes jollies
The Playground of Another’s Thoughts
When we read, another person thinks for us: we merely repeat his mental process. In learning to write, the pupil goes over with his pen what the teacher has outlined in pencil: so in reading; the greater part of the work of thought is already done for us. This is why it relieves us to take up a book after being occupied with our own thoughts. And in reading, the mind is, in fact, only the playground of another’s thoughts. So it comes about that if anyone spends almost the whole day in reading, and by way of relaxation devotes the intervals to some thoughtless pastime, he gradually loses the capacity for thinking; just as the man who always rides, at last forgets how to walk. This is the case with many learned persons: they have read themselves stupid.
— Schopenhauer, Essays and Aphorisms
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To become a thinker. — How can anyone become a thinker if he does not spend at least a third of the day without passions, people and books?
— Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
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Well, I typically do my reading in the couple of hours before bed, so I guess I’m keeping it within proper limits. I don’t know that I do any worthwhile thinking, or perhaps I should say woolgathering, during the rest of the day, but then again, I don’t have an inheritance (Schopenhauer) or a small pension (Nietzsche) to keep my time and thoughts free of more prosaic matters.
Nevertheless, it is true that we do well to not allow our thoughts to be captured by the inane ruckus made by peers and events. For my part, when I have a little spare time during the workday, rather than waste it on seeing what everyone on social media is shouting about, I like to browse a site like Redbubble and see what sorts of clever or amusing creations can be found under favorite topics. So, for example, what do you find if you do a search for G.K. Chesterton?
“The CHE you respect.” OK, I admit, I’d wear it.
My favorite Greek philosopher. So human, so relatable.
I may have already ordered a sticker of this one for my laptop.
I find myself captivated by this artwork. It speaks to me. What’s the story behind this? Is there a group I can join?
Baby Brock
The first time I saw current Borussia Dortmund striker Erling Haaland, back in his Salzburg days, I thought, “That kid looks like Brock Lesnar’s “before” picture, or maybe his teenage son.” I’ve called him “Baby Brock” ever since. Today, I tried to show somebody what I mean, only to find that there didn’t seem to be any photographic comparisons available. So, once again, it falls to me to make things happen:
Culture War Profiteering
Be right back; I’m just gonna go sell these on the dark web and use the money to pay off my mortgage.
Beyond the Wires
The widest prairies have electric fences,
For though old cattle know they must not stray
Young steers are always scenting purer water
Not here but anywhere. Beyond the wiresLeads them to blunder up against the wires
Whose muscle-shredding violence gives no quarter.
Young steers become old cattle from that day,
Electric limits to their widest senses.— Philip Larkin, “Wires”
And yet, even bovines can find themselves possessed of the Promethean spirit:
cow has learned how to open an electric fence pic.twitter.com/tlzHNyoz7S
— Susan Metcalfe (@susanamet) February 20, 2021
Just Giving Ideas Away for Free Here
For a film about criminal profiling, SILENCE OF THE LAMBS does very little to understand what made its murderer. Here we look at the history of cruelty and indifference towards trans people paralleled by a culture that would create “Buffalo Bill”.https://t.co/ZciVAeAnch
— Harmony M. Colangelo (@Veloci_trap_tor) February 15, 2021
This reminded me of something, and no, I don’t mean a time when the A.V. Club used to be a fun and interesting site to read rather than another woke embarrassment. Actually, I remembered something from last summer, when I read Lis Wiehl’s Hunting the Unabomber.
[I]n the summer of 1966, Ted experienced what he described as a gender-identity crisis that prompted him to consider a sex-change operation. He claimed that beginning that summer, he was plagued by “intense and persistent sexual excitement involving fantasies of being a female” and became convinced he should undergo a sex-change operation.
He made an appointment to see a psychiatrist in order to gain authorization, but lost his nerve and chose not to reveal the original motive for the meeting.
“As I walked away from the building afterwards I felt disgusted about what my uncontrolled sexual cravings had almost led me to do and I felt—humiliated, and I violently hated the psychiatrist,” he wrote in one of his journals. “Just then came a major turning point in my life. Like a Phoenix, I burst from the ashes of my despair to a glorious new hope. I thought I wanted to kill that psychiatrist because the future looked utterly empty to me. I felt I wouldn’t care if I died. And so, I said to myself, why not really kill the psychiatrist and anyone else whom I hate? What is important is not the words that ran through my mind but the way I felt about them. What was entirely new was the fact that I really felt I could kill someone. My very hopelessness had liberated me because I no longer cared about death. I no longer cared about consequences and I said to myself that I really could break out of my rut in life and do things that were daring irresponsible, criminal.”
I’m genuinely surprised that in this age of diminishing clickbait returns, when tons of hack writers are looking for a formula to produce viral articles, no one has seized on this yet to argue that we should see Kaczynski as a victim of internalized anti-trans bigotry. If any of you want to pitch the idea to Vice, Salon, Slate, or whichever other garbage outlet you prefer, take it with my blessings.
Deep Thoughts With Pulitzer Prize-Winning Critics
A good critic always puts more into writing about art work than the artist put into making it. The artist only creates. The critic must plumb that creation & also write creatively enough to deliver the full volume of the art while also creating a thing of beauty & clarity itself.
— Jerry Saltz (@jerrysaltz) January 25, 2021
“Without me, this whale would be nothing,” said the remora.
(I like that when numerous, uh, critics pop up to, uh, plumb this creation, he tries to credit/blame Oscar Wilde for it.)
I Learned It By Watching You!
If Twitter were a city it would be the sort of city where the authorities allow people to defecate in public or shoot up outside a school, and then express surprise when middle-class families wish to leave because of “the better quality of life” found in a four-hour commute away exurb.
So…like San Francisco, then? I mean, considering the father, is it any wonder the kid turned out the way it did?
Where the Sun Is Cold Like a Yellow Balloon
Remove your hats, gentlemen. We’re in the presence of greatness.
I Must Confess
During a conversation over yonder at Idlings, Dave Lull shared a link to one of the most interesting interviews I’ve read in a long time. Really, the whole thing is worth reading, but this part made me literally laugh out loud:
Plus, the first time around, my book was excerpted for a magazine, only the magazine altered many of my sentences to make them more sensational, and kept my name on the byline. When I objected, I was told, by the publishing company, “Well, Sam, we can pull it, but, remember, we’ve made an investment in you and we need to see an economic return on our investment. etc.”
As in, the subtitle of my book.
Muscle, as a title, I love.
But the subtitle, “Confessions of an Unlikely Bodybuilder”? Are you kidding me?
When the editor called me up to tell me that subtitle, she cooed into the phone, “But Sam, it will make readers think of Rousseau!”
25 years later, and not one human being on this planet has ever said to me, ‘Sam, I love the subtitle. It’s so very Rousseau!”
Rummaging briefly through my memory and Amazon, I find a few other sterling examples of the “Confessions of a…” genre of book titles. A curious bookseller. A Buddhist atheist. An economic hit man. A hockey parent. A sociopath. A gay priest. A funeral director, a public speaker, and a yakuza. An investigative reporter, an advertising man, and a video vixen. I can certainly believe that an English major-turned-editor thought it was just oh-so-clever to reference Rousseau (not Augustine?), that all her friends would approve of her learned wit, but the truth is, well, first of all, Rousseau should be forgotten altogether, but secondly, when it comes to clichés, “Confessions of a…” might as well be “It was a dark and stormy night.” It is a desiccated mummy of a cliché lying exposed in the Sahara of imagination. There is not one ounce of juice left in it. For the love of God, stop it.