John Hawkes, The Cannibal, A Microcosm of war-torn Germany

"All Germany Revolved around Balamir. His feet were in the boots of an Emperor's son, he felt the silver sword of time and tide and strength against his hip. Growing weak and cold, he was the result of commands coming down out of the years. From the farm where he was born to the institution to the munition works, he felt that people bowed as they passed. How he sought to be that image, how the Kaiser's ghost needed him, how he would be honor in the land he had become. But how well he knew it was a reign of terror and felt like pulling his beard like his father would have done. Potentate of the north, he scowled on his subjects, the trees, the chips of broken glass, brass casings and beaten fuse ends, but alone he smiled on his castle walls. He was the true and unknown prince of Spitzen-on-the-Dein, followed by the castrated and the disillusioned, guided by an unknown hand around the signs of the skull and cross-bones planted above the mines. He had crept about the door of the Duke's apartment, watched the tall man come and go. He used to walk in the institutions garden, and now, in the last days of the decline of his kingdom, he was befriended in the home of twittering birds.
     The vapors of the canal grew stronger, the Duke gained a hundred feet and eased his pace, cracks and holes in the earth filled with night dew.
     I unstrapped my pistol and put it on the floor."

                                                                                -John Hawkes, The Cannibal


Another author hard to place and compare. His writing and his books could often be more easily compared to impressionistic paintings than the novels of more conventional and less experimental writers. He once said "I began to write fiction on the assumption that the true enemies of the novel were plot, character, setting and theme, and having once abandoned these familiar ways of thinking about fiction, totality of vision or structure was really all that remained." This is not to say that his novels are completely bereft of these things, but they kind of pop up second hand to what he is focusing on. The story is told in meticulously described scenes, a kind of verbal mise-en-scene that can show to us things transcendentally beautiful or nightmarish and bleak and everywhere in between. He can be tough to follow at first, but once your brain stops trying to fit his books within more traditional conventions, he'll eventually absorb and entrance you.

Cormac McCarthy, Master Of The Sublime; Blood Meridian, The Neo Western to End All Westerns

"In two days they began to come upon bones and cast off apparel. They saw half buried skeletons of mules with the bones so white and polished they seemed incandescent even in the blazing heat and they saw panniers and pack saddles and the bones of men and they saw a mule entire, the dried and blackened carcass hard as iron. They rode on. The white noon saw them through the waste like a ghost army, so pale they were with dust, like shades of figures erased upon a board. The wolves loped paler yet and grouped and skittered and lifted their lean snouts on the air. At night the horses were fed by hand from sacks of meal and watered from buckets. There was no more sickness. The survivors lay quietly in that cratered void and watched the white-hot stars go rifling down the dark. Or slept with their alien hearts beating in the sand like pilgrims exhausted upon the face of the planet Anareta, clutched to a nameless wheeling in the night. They moved on and the iron of the wagontires grew polished bright as chrome in the pumice. To the south the blue cordilleras stood footed in their paler image on the sand like reflections in a lake and there were no wolves now."


                                                                 -Excerpt from Blood Meridian By Cormac McCarthy




Cormac McCarthy is one of those writers unlike any other, singular and separate from anything else within the literary tradition. Hemingway, Kafka, and David Foster Wallace also come to mind in this category, and surely there are others. In other words this man is a genius, and like the other writers I've mentioned, his style may be imitated but it would only come off as parody, as no one else could possibly possess such a voice as his. His is the voice of a prophet. I'd say it is biblical if those who wrote the bible had any taste for style or prose. Page after page of Blood Meridian sustains this twisted, near perverse enlightenment of perception that tears down any notion of the grandeur and glory of the old west so that we see it for what it really was: quite the opposite, and yet we are left even more in awe of it. Not a chapter passes without multiple passages that give me the chills. It is one of those books that not only changes the way you think about literature but the way you see the entire world. A must read indeed, and hopefully you're not squeamish lest you miss out on one of the greatest novels of all time. More passages to come from this masterpiece.

Rimbaud, A Season in Hell

Back again from hiatus, and though it was not a season in hell that kept me away, it would be all the more effective if i said so. The experiment returns to life, however briefly...


     "Once, if I remember well, my life was a feast
where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.
     One evening I seated beauty on my knees. And I
found her bitter. And I cursed her.
     I armed myself against justice.
     I fled. O Witches, O Misery, O Hate, to you has
my treasure been entrusted.
     I contrived to purge my mind of all human hope.
On all joy, to strangle it, i pounced with the stealth
of a wild beast.
     I called to the executioners that i might gnaw
their rifle-butts while dying. I called to the plagues
to smother me in blood, in sand. Misfortune was
my God. I laid myself down in the mud. I dried my-
self in the air of crime. I played sly tricks on mad-
ness.
     And spring brought me the idiot's frightful laugh-
ter.
     Now, only recently, being on the point of giving
my last squawk, I thought of looking for the key to
the ancient feasts where i might find my appetite again.
     Charity is that key.--This inspiration proves that
I have dreamed!
     'You will always be a hyena...' etc., protests
the devil who crowned me with such pleasant poppies.
'Attain death with all your appetites, your selfishness
and all the capital sins!'
     Ah! I'm fed up:--But, dear Satan, a less fiery eye
I beg you! And while awaiting a few small infamies
in arrears, you who love the absence of the instructive
or descriptive faculty in a writer, for you let me tear
out these few, hideous pages from my notebook of
one of the damned."

                                           -A Season In Hell, Rimbaud

Batman, The Dark Knight Returns; James Olsen, Fictional Reporter

There’s this little saloon you’ll find up and running and packed with patrons before most of us are ready for our morning coffee.

The joint’s two subway levels beneath the streets of Metropolis.

Step out at the Schuster stop on the south-bound side, take two lefts, walk maybe fifteen feet and you’re right on top of it.

But you could just as easily walk right past it and never know it was there.

There’s no sign up. Not even a door. Just a dark hallway that looks like a good place for a murder.

Take a breath. Follow the cigarette stink and the bluesy jukebox sounds inside.

It’s a tolerable little gin mill. Get there before the morning rush, and you’re likely to find a stool.

Your first clue that there’s something wrong about the place is the bartender. You’ll never forget his face. He’s a hulk of a guy who’s seen way too much. A broken man with laser-red eyes. His forehead’s a fractured cantilever, an avalanche waiting to happen. His skin’s gone a little gray from its natural chartreuse.

He’s got a voice like Coke bottles getting ground up under a door.

His name is Jones.

He says he’s from Mars.

And nobody tells him he’s nuts, not one of these sad old barflies. It’s not that they’re scared of him, either.

They’ve seen and done things that are supposed to be impossible.

They’re not the kind to out-and-out brag about being able to bench-press cars or run faster than a speeding bullet or jump up into the air and stay there. Nah. Not these guys. These guys, they’ve got nothing to prove. Been there. Done that.

Except for old “Snapper” always at the same stool at the end, living up to his nickname, snapping his fingers in time to the music and rattling on and on and on about mighty powers, globe-spanning adventures, nefarious world conquerors, you name it.

He never stops snapping his damn fingers. And he never stops sucking back the sauce and jabbering about the old days. The glory days.

The “Golden Age” he calls it.

The age of heroes.

And all the other old farts, they grunt and nod and grumble at each other, swapping old jokes they’ve swapped a thousand times. Even fat, beet-red old “Penguin” chirps out a curse or two before bursting into tears.

Then they get talking. And if you’ve got half a brain, you listen.

They talk about amazing adventures, sounding like a bunch of retired car mechanics the whole time.

They talk about a Man of Steel. An Amazon Princess.

But they never talk about the mean one. The cruel one. The one who couldn’t fly or bend steel in his bare hands. The one who scared the crap out of everybody and laughed at all the rest of us for being the envious cowards we were.

No, they never talk about him. Say his name and watch Dibny’s face sag so bad his jaw hits the bar.

Not a man among them wants to hear about Batman.

Was he quietly assassinated? Or did he just decide we weren’t worth the grief?

The question hangs in the air for a moment or two, then Jones springs for a round for everybody and himself.

They get talking again. About the old days. The glory days.

They remember.

They were right there. In the thick of it.

Back then.

It wasn’t so long ago.

We had heroes.

                               - From The Dark Knight Returns; James Olsen, "Truth To Power"

W.H. Auden, Old Tales Retold

She looked over his shoulder
       For vines and olive trees,
     Marble well-governed cities
       And ships upon untamed seas,
     But there on the shining metal
       His hands had put instead
     An artificial wilderness
       And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
   No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down, 
   Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
   An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line, 
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
   Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
   No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
   Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

     She looked over his shoulder
       For ritual pieties,
     White flower-garlanded heifers,
       Libation and sacrifice,
     But there on the shining metal
       Where the altar should have been,
     She saw by his flickering forge-light
       Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
   Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
   A crowd of ordinary decent folk
   Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
   That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
   And could not hope for help and no help came:
   What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

     She looked over his shoulder
       For athletes at their games,
     Men and women in a dance
       Moving their sweet limbs
     Quick, quick, to music,
       But there on the shining shield
     His hands had set no dancing-floor
       But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone, 
   Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
   That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
   Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

     The thin-lipped armorer,
       Hephaestos, hobbled away,
     Thetis of the shining breasts
       Cried out in dismay
     At what the god had wrought
       To please her son, the strong
     Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
       Who would not live long.

                                       - W.H. Auden, The Shield of Achilles

H.P. Lovecraft, The World of Dreams

"When age fell upon the world, and wonder went out of the minds of men; when grey cities reared to smoky skies tall towers grim and ugly, in whose shadow none might dream of the sun or of spring’s flowering meads; when learning stripped earth of her mantle of beauty, and poets sang no more save of twisted phantoms seen with bleared and inward-looking eyes; when these things had come to pass, and childish hopes had gone away forever, there was a man who travelled out of life on a quest into the spaces whither the world’s dreams had fled.

     "Of the name and abode of this man but little is written, for they were of the waking world only; yet it is said that both were obscure. It is enough to know that he dwelt in a city of high walls where sterile twilight reigned, and that he toiled all day among shadow and turmoil, coming home at evening to a room whose one window opened not on the fields and groves but on a dim court where other windows stared in dull despair. From that casement one might see only walls and windows, except sometimes when one leaned far out and peered aloft at the small stars that passed. And because mere walls and windows must soon drive to madness a man who dreams and reads much, the dweller in that room used night after night to lean out and peer aloft to glimpse some fragment of things beyond the waking world and the greyness of tall cities. After years he began to call the slow-sailing stars by name, and to follow them in fancy when they glided regretfully out of sight; till at length his vision opened to many secret vistas whose existence no common eye suspects. And one night a mighty gulf was bridged, and the dream-haunted skies swelled down to the lonely watcher’s window to merge with the close air of his room and make him a part of their fabulous wonder.

     "There came to that room wild streams of violet midnight glittering with dust of gold; vortices of dust and fire, swirling out of the ultimate spaces and heavy with perfumes from beyond the worlds. Opiate oceans poured there, litten by suns that the eye may never behold and having in their whirlpools strange dolphins and sea-nymphs of unrememberable deeps. Noiseless infinity eddied around the dreamer and wafted him away without even touching the body that leaned stiffly from the lonely window; and for days not counted in men’s calendars the tides of far spheres bare him gently to join the dreams for which he longed; the dreams that men have lost. And in the course of many cycles they tenderly left him sleeping on a green sunrise shore; a green shore fragrant with lotus-blossoms and starred by red camalotes..."

                                                                                - Azathoth, by H.P. Lovecraft

Perhaps you steer clear of Lovecraft because those goths in high school made him seem so pretentious. Perhaps the fact that he was only published in pulp genre magazines and journals, or that his writing often approaches the realm of fantasy - a genre forbidden by those super serious literary aficionados - has caused you to preemptively scoff at this author and his stories and prose. Whatever may be the reason that you, a student of the arts and literature, have avoided him, it is most certainly a stupid reason. Because few writers captivate and entrance me to the extent that he does. If I pick up one of his story collections, it will be hours before I put it down. His style is somewhat of an amalgam of other, earlier writers of weird fiction: Lord Dunsany and his tales of the ancient gods of Pagana influencing Lovecraft's Cthulhu mythos; Robert W. Chamber's use of dreams, hallucinations, and ancient texts; Poe's psychology. He creates a sense of mystery, foreboding, terror, a gravity, an atmosphere far greater than simply the sum of his words and their meaning. He is like many of the characters in his pieces, mysteriously connected to a realm within and beyond every day realities, deeper in portent and meaning than that which the average person experiences. He possesses that magic of storytelling few other writers can be said to have, casting an irresistible spell on those who read him.

Steven Soderbergh, Schizopolis, Eventualism

One of Steven Soderbergh's lesser known and smaller budget films, Schizopolis is a hilarious indictment of American ideals and expectations. Soderbergh himself stars in his own film in his first acting role as Fletcher Munson, speech writer for an L. Ron Hubbard style religious cult, navigating the banalities of life and marriage in a town filled with white picket fences, general discontent, and everything else you'd expect in a stereotypical American suburb. The film itself is anything but stereotypical, and any description or summation I might attempt to write would inevitably fall short of the film itself. It will suffice to say that Soderbergh was coming out the tail end of a rather difficult divorce, and if this film might be admitted as evidence, he was in the midst of quite the existential crisis. So he bucked up, wrote a script, paid for the production out of his own pocket, and made one of the most unexpected pieces of art I have ever watched. You should watch it too.

Sailing To Byzantium, W.B. Yeats Feeling Old, Body and Spirit

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

Isaac Asimov, Foundation Series, Between Psycho History and Psycho Fiction

The buzz now became a dull roar. The Advocate, unheeded, was yelling, "You are openly declaring that–" and stopped because the cries of "Treason" from the audience showed that the point had been made without any hammering.
     Slowly, the Chief Commissioner raised his gavel once and let it drop. The sound was that of a mellow gong. When the reverberations ceased, the gabble of the audience also did. The Advocate took a deep breath.

Q. (theatrically) Do you realize, Dr. Seldon, that you are speaking of an Empire that has stood for twelve thousand years, through all the vicissitudes of the generations, and which has behind it the good wishes and love of a quadrillion human beings?
A. I am aware both of the present status and the past history of the Empire. Without disrespect, I must claim a far better knowledge of it than any in this room.
Q. And you predict its ruin?
A. It is a prediction which is made by mathematics. I pass no moral judgements. Personally, I regret the prospect. Even if the Empire were admitted to be a bad thing (an admission I do not make), the state of anarchy which would follow its fall would be worse. It is that state of anarchy which my project is pledged to fight. The fall of Empire, gentlemen, is a massive thing, however, and not easily fought. It is dictated by a rising bureaucracy, a receding initiative, a freezing of caste, a damming of curiosity – a hundred other factors. It has been going on, as I have said, for centuries, and it is too majestic and massive a movement to stop.
Q. Is it not obvious to anyone that the Empire is as strong as it ever was?
A. The appearance of strength is all about you. It would seem to last forever. However, Mr. Advocate, the rotten tree-trunk, until the very moment when the storm-blast breaks it in two, has all the appearance of might it ever had. The storm-blast whistles through the branches of the Empire even now. Listen with the ears of psychohistory, and you will hear the creaking.
Q. (uncertainly) We are not here, Dr. Seldon, to lis–
A. (firmly) The Empire will vanish and all its good with it. Its accumulated knowledge will decay and the order it has imposed will vanish. Interstellar wars will be endless; interstellar trade will decay; population will decline; worlds will lose touch with the main body of the Galaxy. –And so matters will remain.
Q. (a small voice in the middle of a vast silence) Forever?
A. Psychohistory, which can predict the fall, can make statements concerning the succeeding dark ages. The Empire, gentlemen, as has just been said, has stood twelve thousand years. The dark ages to come will endure not twelve, but thirty thousand years. A Second Empire will rise, but between it and our civilization will be one thousand generations of suffering humanity. We must fight that.

                                       -Foundation, By Isaac Asimov

      The Foundation Series won the Hugo Award for best all-time science fiction series, as it damn well should have. Isaac Asimov is an author with little to no delusions as to his writing ability. His novels and short stories read like the classic paperback  sci-fi adventures that they certainly are, but what makes them great are the concepts behind them. This man was primarily a scientist who also happened write. The Foundation series is filled with hardcore scientific, historical, religious, and psychological theory that, like all great science fiction, reaches far into the future and has turned out to be not very far off the mark. It's incredible how up to date his core ideas remain over fifty years later. His prose, to me, seems entirely aimed at fun and entertainment, but at the same time his stories satisfy some of my deepest intellectual hungers. What more could you ask for in a book? For sci-fi "nerds" and intellectual snobs alike; read these books.

p.s. If you're not yet sure about committing to a three novel series (or five, including another two Asimov wrote a decade or two later because of popular demand; or seven, if you include the two prequels he wrote after those; or ten, taking into account the three Galactic Empire novels that flesh out some pertinent back story), read his short story Nightfall and you'll probably be convinced.

"Bitter" Ambrose Bierce, Satirest, Total Bad Ass

I. How Trees Are Felled in China

A half-mile north from Jo. Dunfer's, on the road from Hutton's to Mexican Hill, the highway dips into a sunless ravine which opens out on either hand in a half-confidential manner, as if it had a secret to impart at some more convenient season. I never used to ride through it without looking first to the one side and then to the other, to see if the time had arrived for the revelation. If I saw nothing -- and I never did see anything -- there was no feeling of disappointment, for I knew the disclosure was merely withheld temporarily for some good reason which I had no right to question. That I should one day be taken into full confidence I no more doubted than I doubted the existence of Jo. Dunfer himself, through whose premises the ravine ran. 

     It was said that Jo. had once undertaken to erect a cabin in some remote part of it, but for some reason had abandoned the enterprise and constructed his present hermaphrodite habitation, half residence and half groggery, at the roadside, upon an extreme corner of his estate; as far away as possible, as if on purpose to show how radically he had changed his mind. 

     This Jo. Dunfer -- or, as he was familiarly known in the neighbourhood, Whisky Jo. -- was a very important personage in those parts. He was apparently about forty years of age, a long, shock-headed fellow, with a corded face, a gnarled arm and a knotty hand like a bunch of prison-keys. He was a hairy man, with a stoop in his walk, like that of one who is about to spring upon something and rend it. 

     Next to the peculiarity to which he owed his local appellation, Mr. Dunfer's most obvious characteristic was a deep-seated antipathy to the Chinese. I saw him once in a towering rage because one of his herdsmen had permitted a travel-heated Asian to slake his thirst at the horse-trough in front of the saloon end of Jo.'s establishment. I ventured faintly to remonstrate with Jo. for his unchristian spirit, but he merely explained that there was nothing about Chinamen in the New Testament, and strode away to wreak his displeasure upon his dog, which also, I suppose, the inspired scribes had overlooked.

        -Excerpt from "The Haunted Valley" by Ambrose Bierce

Thomas Hardy, Victorian novelist turned Modernist Poet

If but some vengeful god would call to me 

From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing, 

Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy, 

That thy love's loss is my hate's profiting!” 

Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die, 

Steeled by the sense of ire unmerited; 

Half-eased in that a Powerfuller than I 

Had willed and meted me the tears I shed. 

But not so.   How arrives it joy lies slain, 

And why unblooms the best hope ever sown? 

—Crass Casualty obstructs the sun and rain, 

And dicing Time for gladness casts a moan. . . . 

These purblind Doomsters had as readily strown 

Blisses about my pilgrimage as pain.

                                                     -Hap, by Thomas Hardy

Carcosa, and The King in Yellow

"I crept to the door: the organ broke out overhead with a blare. A dazzling light filled the church, blotting the altar from my eyes. The people faded away, the arches, the vaulted roof vanished. I raised my seared eyes to the fathomless glare, and I saw the black stars hanging in the heavens: and the wet winds from the lake of Hali chilled my face.

"And now, far away, over leagues of tossing cloud-waves, I saw the moon dripping with spray; and beyond, the towers of Carcosa rose behind the moon.

"Death and the awful abode of lost souls, whither my weakness long ago had sent him, had changed him for every other eye but mine. And now I heard his voice, rising, swelling, thundering through the flaring light, and as I fell, the radiance increasing, increasing, poured over me in waves of flame. Then I sank into the depths, and I heard the King in Yellow whispering to my soul: 'It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God!'"

                                                                       -Robert W. Chambers, The King in Yellow

Videodrome, Cronenburg, The New Flesh

"The television screen is the retina of the mind's eye. Therefore, the television screen is part of the physical structure of the brain. Therefore, whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore, television is reality, and reality is less than television."

     -Brian O'Blivion

Cronenburg is a genius, and my new favorite director. This film is yet another brilliant depiction of human-kind's relationship to technology; the fantastic possibilities of transcending our physical and psychic boundaries, and the terrible ways it can be misused. Who says horror/sci-fi can't be a medium for serious philosophical exploration? Not I, and for anyone who does, nearly the entirety of Cronenburg's filmography (except for works such as A History of Violence and Eastern Promises that simply aren't of this genre) would beg to differ.

Infinite Jest, Infinite Possibility, Infinite Beauty, David Foster Wallace, Transcendence

“Were he now still among the living, Dr. Incandenza would now describe tennis in the paradoxical terms of what's now called 'Extra-Linear Dynamics.' And Schtitt, whose knowledge of formal math is probably about equivalent to that of a Taiwanese kindergartner, nevertheless seemed to know what Hopman and van der Meer and Bollettieri seemed not to know: that locating beauty and art and magic and improvement and keys to excellence and victory in the prolix flux of match play is not a fractal matter of reducing chaos to pattern. Seemed intuitively to sense that it was a matter not of reduction at all, but — perversely — of expansion, the aleatory flutter of uncontrolled, metastatic growth — each well-shot ball admitting of n possible responses, n2 possible responses to those responses, and on into what Incandenza would articulate to anyone who shared both his backgrounds as a Cantorian3535 continuum of infinities of possible move and response, Cantorian and beautiful because infoliating, contained, this diagnate infinity of infinities of choice and execution, mathematically uncontrolled but humanly contained, bounded by the talent and imagination of self and opponent, bent in on itself by the containing boundaries of skill and imagination that brought one player finally down, that kept both from winning, that made it, finally, a game, these boundaries of self…

"…Schtitt's thrust, and his one great irresistible attraction in the eyes of Mario's late father: The true opponent, the enfolding boundary, is the player himself. Always and only the self out there, on court, to be met, fought, brought to the table to hammer out terms. The competing boy on the net's other side: he is not the foe: he is more the partner in the dance. He is the what is the word excuse or occasion for meeting the self. As you are his occasion. Tennis's beauty's infinite roots are self-competitive. You compete with your own limits to transcend the self in imagination and execution. Disappear inside the game: break through limits: transcend: improve: win. Which is why tennis is an essentially tragic enterprise, to improve and grow as a serious junior, with ambitions. You seek to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible in the first place. It is tragic and sad and chaotic and lovely. All life is the same, as citizens of the human State: the animating limits are within, to be killed and mourned, over and over again.”

                                                                       - Infinite Jest, page 82-84, David Foster Wallace

Melville The Master, The Mask, Mankind's Search for Truth and Understanding

“Hark ye yet again- the little lower layer. All visible objects, man, are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event- in the living act, the undoubted deed- there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike though the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s naught beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. That inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate; and be the white whale agent, or be the white whale principal, I will wreak that hate upon him. Talk not to me of blasphemy, man; I’d strike the sun if it insulted me. For could the sun do that, then could I do the other; since there is ever a sort of fair play herein, jealousy presiding over all creations. But not my master, man, is even that fair play. Who’s over me? Truth hath no confines. Take off thine eye! more intolerable than fiends’ glarings is a doltish stare! So, so; thou reddenest and palest; my heat has melted thee to anger-glow. But look ye, Starbuck, what is said in heat, that thing unsays itself. There are men from whom warm words are small indignity. I meant not to incense thee. Let it go. Look! see yonder Turkish cheeks of spotted tawn- living, breathing pictures painted by the sun. The Pagan leopards- the unrecking and unworshipping things, that live; and seek, and give no reasons for the torrid life they feel! The crew, man, the crew! Are they not one and all with Ahab, in this matter of the whale? See Stubb! he laughs! See yonder Chilian! he snorts to think of it. Stand up amid the general hurricane, thy one tost sapling cannot, Starbuck! And what is it? Reckon it. ‘Tis but to help strike a fin; no wondrous feat for Starbuck. What is it more? From this one poor hunt, then, the best lance out of all Nantucket, surely he will not hang back, when every foremast-hand has clutched a whetstone. Ah! constrainings seize thee; I see! the billow lifts thee! Speak, but speak!- Aye, aye! thy silence, then, that voices thee. (Aside) Something shot from my dilated nostrils, he has inhaled it in his lungs. Starbuck now is mine; cannot oppose me now, without rebellion.”

                            -Captain Ahab, Herman Melville, Moby Dick, Chapter 36

The Thief and The Cobbler, Golden Age of Animation, Richard Williams, Hand Illustrated

Created over the course of 28+ years, this amazing, although unfinished film, is not only a masterpiece of art and hand illustration, it's also revolutionary in its innovative narrative and story-telling made possible by the art form. In this piece the story is very much told by the animation, brought to life by a team of the most talented illustrators of the time. It has 3d animated sequences that would rival those brought to us by Dreamworks and Pixar today, and this film was started in 1964. Pencil sketches and rough prints were subbed in to make the end product as close to the dream of Richard Williams as possible, but those moments when fluid, finished animation devolves into pictures of story board or sketches in colored pencil are artistically fascinating, and somehow even heighten the effect of the choices in perspective and cinematography, and all the little details. Though this film has a long and troubled history, I must commend Richard Williams, its mastermind, on a job well done.

Melville the Master, The Whiteness of the Whale, Words to Explain the Unexplainable

"What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.

Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man's soul some alarm, there was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught."

                                                   - Moby Dick, Chapter 42, by Herman Melville

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed, Shelley's imperfect poetry

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.' 

                                                       -Ozymandias, Percy Shelley

Ode To Kafka

                                                                                            - From the television series, Home movies

David Lynch, Rabbits, and movies in movies

If you like these you should watch inland empire. It's a movie about the making of a remake of a movie informed by a myth about the making of the original movie which was based on an old russian myth, with episodes of these rabbit fellas spliced in throughout it. And if you weren't confused yet, Inland Empire is kind of a remake, or rather a re do (not acknowledged by lynch) of lynch's idea for another movie he made, mulholand drive, except when he made that he was held back a bit by studio and corporate constraints. But it's still awesome and is more conventional in form and structure, and it kind of acts as a key (at least it did for me) to understanding Inland, or at least part of it... So the relation between the movie they're remaking in inland and its original is kind of mirrored by the relationship of Inland Empire itself and Lynch's other movie Mulholland Drive... In summation, Lynch is crazy, and awesome, and you should watch all his movies if you haven't already...