Good evening hubsquad, I'll be hosting your Occasional 'Give Me A Quote From Something You've Been Reading Lately' thread. Kicking things off, I have a quote from one of my favorite medical anthropologists, Carol Laderman, from her book Taming the Wind of Desire: Psychology, Medicine and Aesthetics in Malay Shamanistic Performance
- Shamans, by the very nature of their profession, must have the means of strengthening their bodily defenses, particularly when going into trance. They mobilize their inner resources, personified as the Four Sultans, the Four Heroes, the Four Guardians, and the Four Nobles. To 'Guard from above and become a shelter, guard from below and become a foundation, Guard from before and become a crown, guard from behind and become a palisade.' They call upon their familiar spirits to 'guard the inner gates closely, and strengthen the outer gates.' Shamans who omit these basic protections may put their lives in jeopardy, and indeed several deaths, even in contemporary settings are attributed to a lazy Shaman.
No tags this week, everybody just post whatever you got.
Descending, the elderly taxi driver spoke of his boyhood in a distant conurb called Mumbai, now deadlanded, when the moon was always naked. Hae-Joo said an AdVless moon would freak him out. David Mitchell, Cloud AtlasSeedCorp was the lunar sponsor that nite. The immense lunar projector on far-off Fuji beamed AdV after AdV onto the moon's face: tomatoes big as babies, creamy cauliflower cubes, holeless lotus roots. Speech bubbles ballooned from SeedCorp's logoman's juicy mouth, guaranteeing that his products were 100 percent genomically modified.
Anton Chekhov, The Lady with the DogHe had two lives: one, open, seen n known by all who cared to know, full of relative truth and of relative falsehood, exactly like the lives of his friends and acquaintances; and another life running its course in secret. And through some strange, perhaps accidental, conjunction of circumstances, everything that was essential, of interest and of value to him, everything that made the kernel of his life, was hidden from other people; and all that was false in him, the sheath in which he hid himself to conceal the truth … all that was open. And he judged of others by himself, not believing in what he saw, and always believing that every man had his real, most interesting life under the cover of secrecy and under the cover of night. All personal life rested on secrecy, and possibly it was partly on that account that civilized man was so nervously anxious that personal privacy should be respected.
WE! Where everyone is a number, right?! I have been mentioning this book in dystopian contexts for ten years and no one has ever heard of it I was beginning to wonder if I was making it the fuck up, or maybe I was the victim of a twisted dystopian novel myself, I read it when I was like 12 (why?!) and it was crazy and good and also crazy good! Damn sweet vindication!
So nice to wake up to you and flagamuffin this morning. I'm happy to vindicate you flags. But what does that quote say about love? about power? about control? Is it applicable beyond Russian dystopias? This morning I'm listening to Billy Bragg's CD@The Internationale@ which also has Blake's @Jerusalem@ on it. -- all kinds of dystopian and utopian themes. 8bit - tell me, have you heard of Billy Bragg?
David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day"After a few months in my parents' basement, I took an apartment near the state university, where I discovered both crystal methamphetamine and conceptual art. Either one of these things are dangerous, but in combination they have the potential to destroy entire civilizations"
Victor Hugo, Les Misérables"Let us say in passing, to be blind and to be loved, is in fact, on this earth where nothing is complete, one of the most strangely exquisite forms of happiness. To have continually at your side a woman, a girl, a sister, a charming being, who is there because you need her, and because she cannot do without you, to know you are indispensable to someone necessary to you, to be able at all times to measure her affection by the degree of the presence that she gives you, and to say to yourself: She dedicates all her time to me, because I possess her whole love; to see the thought if not the face; to be sure of the fidelity of one being in a total eclipse of the world; to imagine the rustling of her dress as the rustling of wings; to hear her moving to and fro, going out, coming in, talking, singing, to think that you are the cause of those steps, those words, that song; to show your personal attraction at every moment; to feel even more powerful as your infirmity increases; to become in darkness, and by reason of darkness, the star around which this angel gravitates; few joys can equal that. The supreme happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, say rather, loved in spite of ourselves; the conviction the blind have. In their calamity, to be served is to be caressed. Are they deprived of anything? No. Light is not lost where love enters. And what a love! A love wholly founded in purity. There is no blindness where there is certainty.”
Meh. I think it was wasted on me as well and I read it last year. It has a lot of very beautiful language and I used a page to make a black-out poem quite satisfactorily. However, besides language, pacing. And Hugo and I don't see eye to eye on pace.
"The face is the soul of the body." - Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
When two men meet they often - I'm tempted to say, nearly always - make an instant assessment. Even if they don't expect the question to arise in a million years, they can't help quietly wondering: if it came to it, could I take him? (Interesting that the same word, "take," means to beat a man or fuck a woman or steal property ...) Their two opinions as to the answer will subtly affect all their future dealings. - Spider Robinson, "Time Pressure"
'Mansaku, his wife and their children showed the baby love and affection like she was a member of their family. But she aged much more slowly than the other children. After ten years, she was still a baby. And she would only drink sap from the tree. Thirty years passed and both Mansaku and his wife passed away. Saho was only a toddler at the time.' Vol 7 of the gorgeous, meditative, surreal and grotesque manga Mushishi by Yuki Urushibara'My great grandfather, Mansaku, brought the child home with him. But the child wouldn't suckle at his wife's breast. It wouldn't even drink rice broth. But when they offered it sap from the tree, it drank that.'
~my 1st 'give me a quote'
As some background, I am taking a class on the history of the Holocaust. We are in the interwar years right now, and working on a project where we look at the life of average Jewish families before 1933. I found this picture and was curious to know more, as the caption implies they are emigrating into Berlin. I looked up the school and found this.At this place was from 1933 to 1939 the Jewish Theodor-Herzl-School, which was closed in 1939 by the National Socialists. In 1942 the school principal, Paula Fürst, was deported to Auschwitz and murdered.
Shirley Jackson - The Haunting of Hill House 'Tis the season for the creepy and crawlies, the squishy and squirmies , and all things that go bump in the night.No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone
The Brothers KaramazovThe old doctor who used to cure all sorts of disease has completely disappeared, I assure you, now there are only specialists and they all advertise in the newspapers. If anything is wrong with your nose, they send you to Paris: there, they say, is a European specialist who cures noses. If you go to Paris, he'll look at your nose; I can only cure your right nostril, he'll tell you, for I don't cure the left nostril, that's not my speciality, but go to Vienna, there there's a specialist who will cure your left nostril.