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And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas

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Not good. The parameters breed like mosquitoes in the bayou, faster than he can knock them off. Hunger, compromise, money, paranoia, memory, comfort, guilt. Guilt gets a minus sign around Achtfaden though, even if it is becoming quite a commodity in the Zone. Remittance men from all over the world will come to Heidelberg before long, to major in guilt. There will be bars and nightclubs catering especially to guilt enthusiasts. Extermination camps will be turned into tourist attractions, foreigners with cameras will come piling through in droves, tickled and shivering with guilt.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

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"I'm not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven," Gustav argues, "but as he represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where all notes get an equal hearing. Beethoven was one of the architects of musical freedom--he submitted to the demands of history, despite his deafness. While Rossini was retiring at the age of 36, womanizing and getting fat, Beethoven was living a life filled with tragedy and grandeur."

"So?" is Säure's customary answer to that one. "Which would you rather do? The point is," cutting off Gustav's usually indignant scream, "a person feels good listening to Rossini. All you feel like listening to Beethoven is going out and invading Poland."

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

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One night he set fire to twenty pages of calculations. Integral signs waved like charmed cobras, comical curly ds marched along like hunchbacks through the fire-edge into billows of lace ash. But that was his only relapse.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

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Slothrop goes hunching paranoically along the street, here's "God Bless America," a-and "This Is the Army, Mister Jones," and they are his country's versions of the Horst Wessel Song, although it is Gustav back at the Jacobistrasse who raves (nobody gonna pull an Anton Webern on him) to a blinking American lieutenant-colonel, "A parabola! A trap! You were never immune over there from the simple-minded German symphonic arc, tonic to dominant, back again to tonic. Grandeur! Gesellschaft!"

"Teutonic?" sez the colonel. "Dominant? The war's over, fella. What kind of talk is that?"

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

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When it was sufficiently raised for me to peer inside, I saw to my dismay that the queen was not there - the sarcophagus was empty! Turning to Reisner, I said in a voice louder than I had intended, 'George, she's a dud!'

Whereupon the Minister of Public Works asked, 'What is a dud?'

Reisner rose from his box and said, 'Gentlemen, I regret Queen Hetepheres is not receiving.'

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Ah, well ! for us all some sweet hope lies
Deeply buried from human eyes

Whittier

Deportolitics

SERBIAN COWORKER: I'm sorry, I'm having trouble concentrating. Serbia's playing France in an hour.

SCOTT: Very exciting.

SERBIAN COWORKER: And do you know what happens if we win?

SCOTT: They give you Kosovo back?

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What the leaflet neglected to mention was that Benjamin Franklin was also a Mason, and given to cosmic forms of practical jokesterism, of which the United States of America may well have been one.

Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

Pater Ṇsere

Pater Ṇsere, jos kemeloisi essi,
Nōmṇ Twom sqenetoru.
Regnom Twom cemietōd.
Woliā Twā dhidhētoru,
ita kemelei jota pḷteuijāi.
Qāqodjūtenom bharsiom ṇserom edjēw dasdhi-nos
joqe dhaleglāms ṇserāms parke,
swāi skeletbhos pārkomos.
Enim mē noms peritloi enke prōd,
mō upelēd nosēie-nos.
Estōd.

Dear DC Metro

Let us henceforth call the escalators "staircases" and end the farce.

Yours,
Scott Scheule

Draughts

SCOTT: I had a great line in Russian class. In the book, there was a blurb about how all Russians like to play chess, so I asked the professor if she played. She said, yes, and checkers, too, though in Russia checkers has different rules. And I said, 'Like what? Red team always wins?'

JAY: That's pretty good.

SCOTT: Right, but the first time I said it, no one responded. So I had to say it again louder, and then it killed.

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Ojo a la cita: "Que nadie me malinterprete, pero yo nunca fui uno de esos niños 'tories' con acné que tuvieron sueños semieróticos con Margaret Thatcher. Ella nunca me visitó por las noches enfundada en su vestido de azul imperial y con ese peinado magnífico de color de piña. Nunca me la imaginé inclinándose sobre mí, abriendo sus labios rojos y susurrándome al oído cosas sobre el monetarismo y el final del poder de los sindicatos".

Eduardo Suárez, "Fantasías sexuales con la 'Dama de Hierro'"

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40.

Fe, alegría, optimismo. --Pero no la sandez de cerrar los ojos a la realidad.


46.

¿No crees que la igualdad, tal como la entienden, es sinónimo de injusticia?


54.

¿Contemporizar? --Es palabra que sólo se encuentra --¡hay que contemporizar!-- en el léxico de los que no tienen gana de lucha --comodones, cucos o cobardes--, porque de antemano se saben vencidos.

Josemaría Escrivá de Balaguer, Camino

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In 1919, [Joseph Schumpeter] agreed to join a commission on the nationalization of industry established by the new socialist German government. A young economist asked him how someone who had so extolled enterprise could take part in a commission whose aim was to nationalize it. "If someone wants to commit suicide," Schumpeter replied, "it is a good thing if a doctor is present."

Robert L. Heilbroner, The Worldly Philosophers

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Lockstock
Of course, it wasn't long before the water turned silty, brackish and then disappeared altogether. As cruel as Caldwell B. Cladwell was, his measures effectively regulated water consumption, sparing the town the same fate as the phantom Urinetown. Hope chose to ignore the warning signs, however, preferring to bask in the people's love for as long as it lasted.

Little Sally
What kind of musical is this?! The good guys finally take over and then everything starts falling apart.

Lockstock
Like I said, Little Sally. This isn't a happy musical.

Little Sally
But the music's so happy!

Lockstock
Yes, Little Sally. Yes it is.

Josephine
Such a fever. If only I had a cool, tall glass of water, maybe I'd have a fighting chance.

Hope
But don't you see, Mrs. Strong? The glass of water's inside you, it always has been.

Josephine
It has?

Hope
Of course it has.

Mark Hollmann, Greg Kotis, Urinetown

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Dawkins speaks scoffingly of a personal God, as though it were entirely obvious exactly what this might mean. He seems to imagine God, if not exactly with a white beard, then at least as some kind of chap, however supersized. He asks how this chap can speak to billions of people simultaneously, which is rather like wondering why, if Tony Blair is an octopus, he has only two arms. For Judeo-Christianity, God is not a person in the sense that Al Gore arguably is.

Terry Eagleton, Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching

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Zeno, the disciple of Parmenides, having attempted to kill the tyrant Demylus, and failing in his design, maintained the doctrine of Parmenides, like pure and fine gold tried in the fire, that there is nothing which a magnanimous man ought to dread but dishonor, and that there are none but children and women, or effeminate and women-hearted men, who fear pain. For, having with his own teeth bitten off his tongue, he spit it in the tyrant’s face.

Plutarch, The Moralia

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“Prisoner at the bar, you have been accused of the great crime of labouring under pulmonary consumption, and after an impartial trial before a jury of your countrymen, you have been found guilty. Against the justice of the verdict I can say nothing: the evidence against you was conclusive, and it only remains for me to pass such a sentence upon you, as shall satisfy the ends of the law. That sentence must be a very severe one. It pains me much to see one who is yet so young, and whose prospects in life were otherwise so excellent, brought to this distressing condition by a constitution which I can only regard as radically vicious; but yours is no case for compassion: this is not your first offence: you have led a career of crime, and have only profited by the leniency shown you upon past occasions, to offend yet more seriously against the laws and institutions of your country. You were convicted of aggravated bronchitis last year: and I find that though you are now only twenty-three years old, you have been imprisoned on no less than fourteen occasions for illnesses of a more or less hateful character; in fact, it is not too much to say that you have spent the greater part of your life in a jail.

“It is all very well for you to say that you came of unhealthy parents, and had a severe accident in your childhood which permanently undermined your constitution; excuses such as these are the ordinary refuge of the criminal; but they cannot for one moment be listened to by the ear of justice. I am not here to enter upon curious metaphysical questions as to the origin of this or that— questions to which there would be no end were their introduction once tolerated, and which would result in throwing the only guilt on the tissues of the primordial cell, or on the elementary gases. There is no question of how you came to be wicked, but only this— namely, are you wicked or not? This has been decided in the affirmative, neither can I hesitate for a single moment to say that it has been decided justly.["]

Samuel Butler, Erewhon

The Windlover

I caught your cadence, cooed in another’s voice—her choice of clauses
Cleaved with air, there! the twin of your tattoo, which clip-clops
Down the cobbled pitch of a cathedral tone—that yours alone: how it drops
In caverns of caramel and buckles stone. Tempo, pulses and pauses
Beating fresh between the terms, the rhythm draped on the stranger’s verbs, flung
As high as a bird unbound, each sound unwound and set to soar
On the winged wish of the word—I almost heard the thrumming reeds that moor
The silken syllables you swirl in the world behind your tongue.

Not you, I knew, but each trace chased, each collage cut collected by hand
One more mote of the wild winter that whirls
From the bursting pane of glass. And my love has lit each shard with a band

Of light so rare it colors the numbing night—and the coming white pearls
Of snow. So my heart hears the hum, the substance and the sand
Of you, not you, you, Osiris in the dew of a thousand scattered girls.