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Barbelith Commonplace Thread

  
  

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Kit-Cat Club
09:49 / 16.05.03
Me first!

Sir Ector makes a lament for Lancelot, in Malory's Morte D'Arthur (Caxton, book 21 chap. 13).

'Ah Launcelot,' he said, 'thou were head of all Christian knights, and now I dare say,' said Sir Ector, 'thou Sir Launcelot, there thou liest, that thou were never matched of earthly knight's hand. And thou were the courteoust knight that ever bare shield. And thou were the truest friend to thy lover that ever bestrad horse. And thou were the truest lover of a sinful man that ever loved woman. And thou were the kindest man that ever struck with sword. And thou were the goodliest peson that ever came among press of knights. And thou were the meekest man and the gentlest that ever ate in hall among ladies. And thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.'

Then there was weeping and dolour out of measure.


I think this is so moving, and I think the reason for this is the way Ector, in his grief, expresses all the contradictions of the chivalric code and the idealisation of its paradoxes - it makes Lancelot more human and more tragic than practically anything else in the whole book. And Malory's style here is so plain and dignified.
 
 
Sax
10:10 / 16.05.03
This is the last paragraph from Jack Kerouac's On The Road (yeah, I know, as predictable as ever...):

So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulge over to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars'll be out, and don't you know that God is Pooh Bear? the evening star must be drooping and shedding her sparkler dims on the prairie, which is just before the coming of complete night that blesses the earth, darkens all rivers, cups the peaks and folds the final shore in, and nobody, nobody knows what's going to happen to anybody else besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.

And it never fails to prickle my scalp and send a shiver down my spine. It just sums up Kerouac's much-derided prose-poetry for me, a lilting, lyrical piece of writing that is immensely moving and evocative of a dreamscape America.
 
 
Not Here Still
11:01 / 16.05.03
Another predictable book choice, perhaps - the good doctor Hunter S Thompson, in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas:

And that, I think, was the handle---that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that.
Our energy would simply prevail. There was no point in fighting ---on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.
So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark---the place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

The feeling that this passage conjures up is what does it for me, I think. To me, it speaks volumes about belief in what you are doing - that incontrovertible feeling of 'we are right, we will prevail' which, you learn, is rarely the case.
A nostalgic hymn to times past, it is a recognition that any wave will, ultimately, crash to earth.
 
 
Shrug
12:30 / 16.05.03
Yossarian ran right into the hospital, determined to remain there forever rather than fly one mission more than the thirty-two missions he had. Ten days after he changed his mind and came out, the colonel raised the misssons to forty-five and Yossarin ran right back in, determined to remain in the hospital forever rather than fly one mission more than the six missions more he had just flown.

Yossarian could run into the hospital whenever he wanted to becuse of his liver and because of his eyes; the doctors couldn't fix his liver condition and couldn't meet his eyes each time he told them he had a liver condition. He could enjoy himself in hospital, just as long as there was no one really very sick in the same ward. His system was sturdy enought to survive a case of someone else's malaria or influenza with scarcely any discomfort at all. He could come through other peoople's tonsilectomies without suffering any postoperative distress, and even endure their hernias and hemorrrhoids with only mild nausea and revulsion. But that was just about as much as he could go through without getting sick. After that he was ready to bolt. He could relax in hospital, since no one there expected him to do anything. All he was expected to do in the hospital was die or get better, and since he was perfectly all right to begin with, getting better was easy.


Catch 22 -Joseph Heller
 
 
Cavatina
13:47 / 16.05.03
There are so many striking passages in Jeanette Winterson's The Passion , it's difficult to choose. But here's a little of the delightful mixture of fantasy and matter-of-fact humour in Villanelle's narration of her family background and birth:

It was an easy birth and the midwife held me upside down by the ankles until I bawled. But it was when they spread me out to dry that my mother fainted and the midwife felt forced to open another bottle of wine.
My feet were webbed.
There never was a girl whose feet were webbed in the entire history of the boatmen. My mother in her swoon had visions of rosemary and blamed herself for her carelessness. Or perhaps it was her carefree pleasure with the baker she should blame herself for? She hadn't thought of my father since the boat had sunk. She hadn't thought of him much while it was afloat. The midwife took out her knife with the thick blade and proposed to cut off the offending parts straight way. ... She tried again and again in between all the toes on each foot. She bent the point of the knife, but that was all.
'It's the Virgin's will,' she said at last, finishing the bottle. 'There's no knife can get through that.'
My mother started to weep and wail and continued in this until my stepfather came home. He was a man of the world and not easily put off by a pair of webbed feet.
'No one will see so long as she wears shoes amd when it comes to a husband, why it won't be the feet he'll be interested in.'
This comforted my mother somewhat and we passed the next eighteen years in the normal family way.

Oh dear. Sorry. That's much longer than 300 words. I'd like to have quoted also one of Villanelle's wonderful evocations of Venice (and of passion). Perhaps later.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
14:12 / 16.05.03
[Actually it's 255 words... I'm not that draconian!]
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
19:05 / 16.05.03
Do you know how many translations of the Iliad I should have in my study? About four. Do you know how many of the bloody things I can find? Not one. Not a single bloody one. So, I'm afraid you'll have to put up with my rather rusty translation, applied to Book 12, lines 310-328:

Glaucus, why is it that in the land of Lydia we are honoured greatly, with the best seats, the best cuts of meat and the finest winecups, why all men look upon us as gods, and why we dwell there in broad estates by the banks of the river Xanthus?

For the same reason that we must now make a stand, go into the front lines of our Lycian troops and meet the burning battle head-on, so that any one of the heavy-armoured Lydians would speak thus: "They do not rule over Lycia as inglorious men, our kings who eat our plump mutton and drink our honey-sweetened wine. No, their strength demands respect, for they fight on the front lines of the Lycian army."

Beloved friend, if by fleeing this one battle we could become ageless and deathless for eternity, then I would not fight at the front, nor would I urge you into the war where glory is won. But even now, the thousand shades of death approach, and no mortal can run away or avoid them.

Which may sound a bit goth, but I've always found it rather inspiring. Because what Sarpedon is saying is that you are going to die whatever you pass the time doing in the interim, so you may as well act in a way that is worthy. For him, that meant doing what was expected of him as a king; for you it could mean something else.
 
 
Persephone
23:52 / 16.05.03
Well, I was going to post a bit from The Once And Future King but I forgot that it always makes me cry...

So Watership Down instead.

Suddenly Woundwort spoke.

"Thlayli," he said, "why do you want to throw your life away? I can send one fresh rabbit after another into this run if I choose. You're too good to be killed. Come back to Efrafa. I promise I'll give you the command of any Mark you like. I give you my word."

"Silflay hraka, u embleer rah," replied Bigwig.

And then a bit later:

"Thlayli," he said, "we've unblocked a run out here. I can bring in enough rabbits to pull down this wall in four places. Why don't you come out?"

Thlayli's reply, when it came, was low and gasping, but perfectly clear.

"My Chief Rabbit has told me to defend this run and until he says otherwise I shall stay here."

"His Chief Rabbit?" said Vervain, staring.

It had never occurred to Woundwort or any of his officers that Thlayli was not the Chief Rabbit of his warren. Yet what he said carried immediate conviction. And if he was not the Chief Rabbit, then somewhere close by there must be another, stronger rabbit who was. A stronger rabbit than Thlayli.

By this time you have forgotten they are rabbits, or completely accepted that they are rabbits.
 
 
Persephone
00:24 / 17.05.03
One from Howard's End, by Forster, voce Margaret Schlegel:

When your Socialism comes, it may be difficult, and we may think in terms of commodities instead of cash. Till it comes, give people cash, for it is the warp of civilization, whatever the woof may be. The imagination ought to play upon money and realize it vividly, for it's the --the second most important thing in the world. It is so slurred over and hushed up, there is so little clear thinking --oh, political economy, of course, but so few of us think clearly about our own private incomes, and admit that independent thoughts are in nine cases out of ten the result of independent means. Money: give Mr. Bast money, and don't bother about his ideals. He'll pick up those for himself.

And oh, there's a part from Murder Must Advertise that goes with this... will find...
 
 
The Return Of Rothkoid
03:01 / 17.05.03
Waxing pulpish for a moment, I give you an excerpt from a letter from Kirsten Bakis' Lives Of The Monster Dogs:

It is so clear to me. Cleo, please try to understand.
We move forward through time in only one direction. It is as if we were one-dimensional creatures moving along a straight line. We cannot see anything to the left or right, above or below; we cannot even comprehend the meaning of the words "left" or "down." The whole breadth and height of the world are veiled to us.
If we were to stop moving foward, the cover would be pulled away and the entire static universe would be revealed to us.
Hope is motion. Curiosity, desire and hope alone can keep the surface from being drawn back to reveal the terrifying mechanism of the world. I would give my life, Cleo, to keep you from having to hear the noise it makes.
It is a dead hum.
My desire for you is the last thing. You are my spark.
Where there is no communication, there is insanity, and if I can convey this one last thought to you, perhaps I can live, but that doesn't matter; what matters is that you should live.

I'll dig around for something suitable from Zorba The Greek shortly.
 
 
HCE
20:13 / 22.05.03
Because most "serious" fiction, still, involves the fullest possible expression of a single person's subjectivity, it's considered crass and amateurish not to "fictionalize" the supporting cast of characters, changing names and insignificant features of their identities. The "serious" contemperary hetero-male novel is a thinly veiled Story of Me, as voraciously consumptive as all of patriarchy. While the hero/anti-hero explicitly is the author, everyone else is reduced to "characters." Example: the artist Sophie Calle appears in Paul Auster's book Leviathan in the role of the writer's girlfriend. "Maria was far from beautiful but there was an intensity in her gray eyes that attracted me." Maria's work is identical to Calle's most famous pieces - the addressbook, hotel photos, etc. - but in Leviathan she's a waif-like creature relieved of complications like ambition or career.

When women try to pierce this false conceit by naming names because our "I's" are changing as we meet other "I's" we're called bitches, libellers, pornographers and amateurs. "Why are you so angry?" he said to me.

-- Chris Kraus, I Love Dick
 
 
—| x |—
21:30 / 22.05.03
I hope it is OK to include passages from non-fiction or am I misinterpreting the function of the thread? Without waiting for an answer, for your reading pleasure:

“We said that attention is necessary—don’t say, “Define what you mean by attention”, you might just as well look it up in the dictionary. We are not going to define it, what we are trying to do is, by denying what it is not, to come upon it by yourself. We are saying, this attention is necessary for sensitivity, which is intelligence at the deeper level. Again, these words are difficult because there is no measurement—when you say, “deeper”, “more”, you are comparing, and comparison is a waste of energy. So if that is understood, we can use words to convey meaning which is not comparative but actual.

“This sensitivity implies intelligence and we need great intelligence to live, to live our daily life, because it is only intelligence that can possibly bring about a total revolution in our psyche, in the very core of our being. And such a mutation is necessary, because [hu]man[s] [have] lived for millions of years in agony, in despair, always battling with [ourselves] and with the world. [We] have invented peace which is not peace at all; such peace is between two wars, between two conflicts. And as society is getting more and more complex, disorderly, competitive, there must be radical change, not in society, but in the human being who has created society. The human being, as he [or she] is, is a very disorderly person, he [or she] is very confused; [s/]he believes, [s/]he doesn’t believe, [s/]he has theories and so on and so on; [s/]he lives in a state of constant contradiction. And [s/]he has built a society which is contradictory, with its rich and its poor…The older generation has made a mess of the world, you have made a mess of this world with your pujas, your gurus, with your gods, with your nationalities, because you are only concerned with earning a livelihood and cultivating part of the brain, the rest you neglect, you discard. Each human being is responsible for this disorder within him[or her]self and in the society in which [s/]he lives;…forms of tyranny are not going to bring order, on the contrary they are going to bring about more disorder, because [hu]man[s] need to be free.”

J. Krishnamurti from The Awakening of Intelligence; Avalon Books, 1973.
 
 
Foust is SO authentic
16:06 / 23.05.03
As usual, somebody mentions Watership Down and off I go.

"Do you want to talk to me?"

"Yes, that's what I've come for," replied the other. "You know me, don't you?"

"Yes, of course," said Hazel, hoping he would be able to remember his name in a moment. Then he saw that in the darkness of the burrow the stranger's ears were shining with a faint silver light. "Yes, my Lord," he said. "Yes, I know you."

"You've been feeling tired," said the stranger, "but I can do something about that. I've come to ask whether you'd care to join my Owsla. We shall be very glad to have you and you'll enjoy it. If you're ready, we might go along now."

They went out past the young sentry, who paid the visitor no attention. The sun was shining and in spite of the cold there were a few bucks and does at silflay, keeping out of the wind as they nibbled the shoots of spring grass. It seemed to Hazel that he would not be needing his body any more, so he left it lying on the edge of the ditch, but stopped for a moment to watch his rabbits and to try and get used to the extraordinary feeling that strength and speed were flowing inexhaustibly out of him into their sleek young bodies and healthy senses.
 
 
Foust is SO authentic
16:12 / 23.05.03
Ok, gotta get this one down before I go to work. Huzzah for this thread.

From Carl Sagan's Contact.

But if something as big as the Earth turned once a day, it had to be moving ridiculously fast. Everyone she knew must be whirling at an unbelievable speed. She thought she could now actually feel the Earth turn - not just imagine in her head, but really feel it in the pit of her stomach. It was like descending in a fast elevator. She craned her neck back further, so her feild of view was uncontaminated by anything on Earth, until she could see nothing but black sky and bright stars, Gratifyingly, she was overtaken by the giddy sense that she had better clutch the clumps of grass on either side of her and hold on for dear life, or else fall up into the sky, her tiny tumbling body dwarfed by the huge darkened sphere below.

And that, my friends, is the romance of science.
 
 
alas
15:13 / 24.05.03
"If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity." --George Eliot, MIDDLEMARCH.

Ah George Eliot! Ah Humanity!
 
 
lolita nation
19:03 / 25.05.03
Pynchon's Säure Bummer, defending Rossini from a charge of corniness:

"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. Ode to Joy indeed. The man didn't even have a sense of humor. I tell you," shaking his skinny old fist, "there is more of the Sublime in the snare-drum part to La Gazza Ladra than in the whole Ninth Symphony. With Rossini, the point is that lovers always get together, isolation is overcome, and like it or not that is the one great centripetal movement of the World. Through the machineries of greed, pettiness, and the abuse of power, love occurs. All the shit is transmuted to gold. The walls are breached, the balconies are scaled -- listen!" It was a night in early May, and the final bombardment of Berlin was in progress. Säure had to shout his head off. "The Italian girl is in Algiers, the Barber's in the crockery, the magpie's stealing everything in sight! The World is rushing together...."

Because I find it inspiring even if it is a delusion.
 
 
Cat Chant
10:17 / 26.05.03
'And this house still has to be turned into a Citadel! Gods! The things I still have to do!' Derk groaned. He let go of the table and tottered to the dining room.

The six lordly elves there sprang up from behind after-dinner cups of coffee and bowed gracefully. 'My liege lord,' said the one with the golden circlet. 'Greetings.'

They were all nearly seven feet tall. Derk found them a bit much.

Diana Wynne Jones, Dark Lord of Derkholm. Probably makes no sense outside a lifelong devotion to DWJ, and it's not the most moving or striking piece of writing she has ever committed, but as a soundbite, even (or perhaps especially) out of context, it seems to sum up so much of what she's irreplaceably good at and what she has meant to me over the last twenty years of my life. Devastatingly understated emotional precision about the sorts of feelings and moments that are usually, in fantasy or out of it, either effaced or romanticized into dangerous cliche. And a stunning grasp of detail and ability to set everything in an instantly recognizable emotional landscape and socio-economic/cultural context, without, again, lazily short-cutting through cliche. The book of essays on her work is called 'A Kind of Exacting Wisdom', and for me, the line "They were all nearly seven feet tall. Derk found them a bit much" begins to demonstrate why. I don't care about having role models that look like me in books - female role models, gay role models, whatever - but it is literally life-saving to have understated, non-melodramatic models for strong and quasi-unrepresentable emotions/experiences.
 
 
unheimlich manoeuvre
11:46 / 31.05.03
In some remote corner of the universe, poured out and glittering in innumerable solar systems, there once was a star on which clever animals invented knowledge. That was the highest and most mendacious minute of "world history"—yet only a minute. After nature had drawn a few breaths the star grew cold, and the clever animals had to die.

from Nietzsche. On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense
 
 
Our Lady of The Two Towers
12:42 / 31.05.03
Yes, I know it's The Lord of the Rings but screw the lot of you (and Moorcock too), it's one of my favourite books.

"Where are you going, Master?" cried Sam, though at last he understood what was happening.
"To the Havens, Sam," said Frodo.
"And I can't come."
"No, Sam. Not yet anyway, not further than the Havens. Though you too were a Ring-bearer, if only for a little while. Your time may come. Do not be too sad Sam. You cannot be always torn in two. You will have to be one and whole, for many years. You have so much to enjoy and to be, and to do."
"But," said Sam, and tears started in his eyes, "I thought you were going to enjoy the Shire, too, for years and years, after all you have done."
"So I thought too, once. But I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: someone has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them. But you are my heir: all that I had and might have had I leave to you... Your hands and your wits will be needed everywhere. You will be the Mayor, of course, as long as you want to be, and the most famous gardener in history: and you will read things out of the Red Book, and keep alive the memory of the age that is gone, so that people will remember the Great Danger and so love their beloved land all the more. And that will keep you as busy and as happy as anyone can be, as long as your part of the Story goes on.
"Come now, ride with me!"

When I first read The Lord of the Rings I was probably about twelve, and it was the first book I encountered where life went on after the big bad was vanquished. Everyone lived happily ever after in the Narnia books, except Susan who was an evil slut whore and deserved everything she got. Characters might die in the middle of the story but that was all right, because at the end their widow, or their orphaned children would find true love and normality is restored.

Lord of the Rings was different. We are told that Sauron's power must be destroyed if the world is to survive, but that to do so will also destroy much, if in a subtler way. LotR is a meditation on loss and death, informed by the death of Tolkien's parents at a young age and the death of many of his friends and comrades in the First War. He was aware there was no happy ever after, why else does he take great care in telling the fates of the various members of the fellowship: Aragorn and Arwen grow old and die (he even writes a fragment of that future story just telling of Aragorn's death), Legolas and Gimli sail west, Merry and Pippin ride south to Gondor where they die of old age and Sam eventually follows Frodo, Bilbo and Gandalf to the West. And even though in the West they might be immortal, we never really envision it as a Narnia-like Heaven.

For me, the idea that you go through such struggle and pain and don't really get a reward at the end of it is a moving one, if Frodo had settled down in Hobbiton and lived 'happily ever after' then I don't think I would have liked this book half as much as I do. It's also a rare idea in English literature, King Arthur doesn't count as he falls through his own failings and bad luck. Martin Chuzzlewit is the only other story I can think of, OtTomH, though I'm sure there are others.
 
 
alas
01:02 / 09.06.03
my daughter's fave:

"Alice, pudding; pudding, Alice." --Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

top that! i defy you!
 
 
The Strobe
09:20 / 09.06.03
I would quote the whole chapter, but there's not room, so I'll just have the first three paragraphs and explain why.

"Christie lived with his mother at this point, near Hammersmith Bridge, in the stump of Mall Road left after the flyover and assosciated highway improvements.
When he arrived home on this day (time now being more or less continuous) his mother rose and welcomed him. Them she delivered herself of a statement, thus:
'My son: I have for the purposes of this novel been your mother for the past eighteen years and five months to the day if I assume your conception to have taken place after midnight. Now that you have had your Great Idea and are set upon your life's work there is nothing furhter for me to do.'
B.S. Johnson, Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry

The whole chapter is simply an exposition by Christie's mother of her brief role in the world, having been created on the first page of the chapter, and three pages later she dies, her role in the novel being complete. It's quite funny.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
10:19 / 09.06.03
This is taken from Jade Darcy and the Zen Pirates by Stephen Goldin and Mary Mason.

The Greest appeared in forms, never looking the same twice. He (or she, or it, or they- no one could be certain of the Greest's gender or singularity) was a four- dimensional being, and all anyone could ever see of him was whatever three- dimensional cross section happened to be intersecting this particular space at this particular time. But it was his ability to move three- dimensional objects through the curvature of fourth- dimensional space that made interstellar civilization possible- so people had to humor his mad eccentricities.

This time, seen through the bright white glare within the Pale House, the Greest appeared as a disjointed, scrambled artichoke.
 
 
HCE
21:37 / 09.06.03
An old favorite, recently unearthed, with apologies for the length of the excerpt, from Brian O'Nolan's At -swim-two-birds:

That same afternoon I was sitting on a stool in an intoxicated condition in Grogan's licensed premises. Adjacent stools bore the forms of Brinsley and Kelly, my two true friends. The three of us were occupied in putting glasses of stout into the interior of our bodies and expressing by fine disputation the resulting sense of physical and mental well-being. In my thigh pocket I had eleven and eightpence in a weighty pendulum of mixed coins. Each of the arrayed bottles on the shelves before me, narrow or squat-bellied, bore a dull picture of the gas bracket. Who can tell the stock of a public-house? Many are no doubt dummies, those especially within an arm-reach of the snug. The stout was of superior quality, soft against the tongue but sharp upon the orifice of the throat, softly efficient in its magical circulation throught the conduits of the body. Half to myself, I said:
Do not let us forget that I have to buy Die Harzreise.
Do not let us forget that.
Harzreise, said Brinsley. There is a house in Dalkey called Heartrise.
Brinsley then put his dark chin on the cup of a palm and leaned in thought on the counter, overlooking his drink, gazing beyond the frontier of the world.
What about another jar? said Kelly.
Ah, Lesbia, said Brinsley. The finest thing I ever wrote. How many kisses, Lesbia, you ask, would serve to sate this hungry love of mine? -- As many as the Libyan sands that bask along Cyrene's shore where pine-trees wave, where burning Jupiter's untended shrine lies near to old King Battus' sacred grave:
Three stouts, called Kelly.
Let them be endless stars at night, that stare upon lovers in a ditch -- so often would love-crazed Catullus bite your burning lips, that prying eyes should not have power to count, nor evil tongues bewitch, the frenzied kisses that you gave and got.
Before we die of thirst, called Kelly, will you bring us three more stouts. God, he said to me, it's in the desert you'd think we were.
That's good stuff, you know, I said to Brinsley. A picture came before my mind of the lovers at their hedge-pleasure in the pale starlight, no sound from them, his fierce mouth burying into hers.
Kelly, invisible to my left, made a slapping noise.
Bloody good stuff, I said.
The best I ever drank, he said.
 
 
unheimlich manoeuvre
17:44 / 10.06.03
"Having escaped restraint, (the sheep) were, like some people we know of, afraid of their freedom, did not know what to do with it, and seemed glad to get back into the old familiar bondage."
My First Summer in the Sierra, pg.57. by John Muir
 
 
grant
15:09 / 13.06.03
New favorite book, likely to stick around in my head for at least a while, is Ma Jian's Red Dust: A Path Through China. I have a thing for travelogues. This one is by a dissident painter - in 1983, he lost his job doing propaganda and, fearing what might come next, left Beijing to see his country. His travels take three years, and he nearly dies a few times along the way. Sometimes he's a pilgrim, sometimes he's a fugitive, and sometimes he's an esteemed guest from the big city.

The book was written after he left China for Hong Kong, and then London. It's not terribly favorable towards the government.

Here's one pretty good passage (over 300 words, sorry), about one of the most famous sites in China:

The Terracotta Army vault is just a corner of the vast necropolis of the first emperor of unified China, Qin Shihuang. Like all Chinese emperors, he divided his time between constructing his lavish mausoleum and collecting beautiful women for his harem. Historical records claim that in 246 BC, Qin Shihuang conscripted seven hundred thousand workmen to build his funerary compound which was only completed thirty-seven years later, a year after his death. His son was afraid the workmen might divulge the location of the buried treasures, so he ordered the men to be buried alive, together with the emperor and his concubines. This fifty square-kilometres of land is packed with corpses.

In the cavity of the museum's main hall, five thousand life-size clay soldiers stand poised for battle, their faces identical to the tourists peering down at them. The vault next door is still under excavation and the soldiers are not yet restored. Some are still half-buried, others have crumbled onto mud walls or lie shattered on the floor. I am reminded of the photographs of the mass graves unearthed just west of Qin Shihuangs's main tomb.

I study the ancient warriors. A layer of skin has been peeled from the earth, and China's cruel, ugly soul is exposed to the light of day. The emperors who followed in Qin Shihuang's wake restrained themselves slightly by stipulating that only a third of the national income should be spent on their mausoleums. But they continued to take their most precious possessions with them into the nether world, including jewels, gold and live concubines.

According to local legend the workmen who were buried with Qin Shihuang lived on beneath the soil. They engraved the story of their plight onto a large stone tablet which grew through the earth like a root. But when the tablet reached the surface no one could decipher the script. The tablet grew taller and taller, until one day it blotted out the sun.

'No photographs!' A policeman with a thick Shaanxi accent pounces on a foreign tourist, snatches the camera from her hand, flicks the back open and pulls out the film. The shiny grey strip coils down like a loose gut. The lady starts screaming at him, but no one understands what she is saying. A crowd of Chinese tourists gather to stare. 'We let you in to see our glorious past, but that's not enough for you! You want to take photos on the sly and sell them to magazines when you get home!' The policeman's self-righteous voice booms through the hangar.
 
 
HCE
22:51 / 23.06.03
If you want people to think that you're normal, there's nothing like having an all-fired nerve. If you've got plenty of nerve, you're all set because you're enitled to do anything at all, you've got the majority on your side, and it's the majority who decide what's crazy and what isn't.

Celine, Death on the Installment Plan
 
 
HCE
16:36 / 26.06.03
From Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten. Walser, who said of himself, "I was not born to write, but to be mad."

A week or more ago I still had ten marks. Well, now these ten marks are gone. One day I walked into a restaurant, one with hostesses. I was quite irresistably drawn into the place. A girl leaped toward me and forced me to sit down on the sofa. I half knew how it would end. I resisted, but without the slightest emphasis. I just didn't care, and yet I did. It was pleasure beyond compare to play to the girl the role of the refined and condescending gentleman. We were quite alone, and did the nicest of silly things. We drank. She kept running to the bar, to fetch new drinks. She showed me her charming garter and I carressed it with my lips. Ah, how silly one is. She kept standing up and fetching new things to drink. And so quickly. It was just that she wanted to earn a nice little sum of money from the silly boy. I know this perfectly well, but but it was precisely this that I liked--her thinking me silly. Such a peculiar vice: to be secretly pleased to be allowed to observe that one is being slightly robbed.
 
 
Sax
10:27 / 27.06.03
Brian O'Nolan's At -swim-two-birds

Flann O'Brien, shurely?
 
 
HCE
17:26 / 27.06.03
Oh yes, sorry. That's the way I have it listed in my notebook, otherwise I keep wanting to write Flannery O'Connor. Once I get the Flann part out the rest just happens automatically.
 
 
lolita nation
17:28 / 27.06.03
Off topic, sorry, but Dylan Thomas's statement about At Swim is maybe my favorite book review ever:

"Just the book to give your sister, if she's a loud, dirty, boozy sort of girl."
 
 
Jub
07:09 / 07.07.03
When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night -
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN!

I love that book.
 
 
illmatic
07:14 / 14.07.03
The natural instincts are biological facts. They cannot be done away with and they cannot be fundamentally changed. Like all living beings, man needs first and foremost the gratification of hunger and the fulfilment of sexual needs. Today’s society makes the first difficult and frustrates the latter. There is a glaring contradiction between natural demands and certain social institutions. Man is immersed in this contradiction, leans more towards one side or the other, makes compromises that always backfire, escapes into sickness and death, or rebels senselessly and fruitlessly against the existing system. The human structure is moulded in these struggles.

Wilhelm Reich. The Function of the Orgasm. Probably worte that back in the 'forties, I'm really enjoying re-reading his stuff. There's a real lucidity in his work, which I'm just beginning to appreciate.
 
 
HCE
20:58 / 06.08.03
More please. Surely there are some good bits in whatever you're reading.
 
 
Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless
22:06 / 06.08.03
William Blake (from memory, so it may not be perfect) Blake, like many mystics, constantly weirds me out by saying things with which I agree completely in language with which I disagree completely. Like this:

Truly my Satan, thou art but a dunce
And dost not know the garment from the man
Every harlot was a virgin once,
nor canst thou turn Kate into Nan
Though thou art worshipped by the names divine
Of Jesus and Jehovah, thou art still
The son of morn in weary night’s decline
The lost traveller’s dream under the hill
 
 
HCE
20:31 / 27.08.03
From Lydia Davis' Break It Down which is the first thing I've read in some time that made me want to actively proselytize:

All over the city there are old black women who have been employed to call people up at seven in the morning and ask in a muffled voice to speak to Lisa. This provides work for them that they can do at home. These women are part of a larger corps of city employees engaged to call wrong numbers. The highest earner of all is an Indian from India who is able to insist that he does not have the wrong number.
 
  

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