mk's question about recent reading was a hit, and it's been a while since we had some good quotes. Here's an excerpt from Blue Highways.
- A fellow with a face he’d gotten a lot of mileage out of sat down and drank off a beer like ice water and started complaining the electric company had billed him forty-eight dollars for an unoccupied house he owned. “Hell,” he said, “place has been boarded up ten years. May have to clean your ceiling.”
Dollar bills, folded to the size of postage stamps, clung like spiders to the ten-foot Celotex ceilings. “Why is money up there?” I asked.
“Road salesman in here years ago,” Mrs. Been said, “started betting he could throw a dollar bill against the ceiling and make it stay. Got some takers – like everybody. So he pulls out a couple of quarters, heavy silver ones, and a thumbtack. Folds the bill around the coins and tack so the tack stuck through the paper. He tosses it up and it sticks like a dart. He made some money that night. So’d the ceiling. Don’t ever bet a man against his own tricks. Every now and then, a dollar comes down. One stuck in a fella’s boot couple years ago. Money from heaven.”
A small man, tightly and neatly put together, his muscles wound around his bones like copper wire on an armature, his eyes faded turquoise, sauntered in. “Highway department’s stringin’ fence down eight-one,” he said.
“What’s the need for a fence?” I asked.
“People are runnin’ over cattle,” he said. “Miners drive it like a racetrack. Folks used to slow down for stock on the road, and we didn’t need no fences, but copper people don’t respect nothin’ smaller than a steamshovel. Always in a hurry. Afraid somethin’s gonna get them out here.”
“Those city boys don’t believe what can happen if they hit a steer, but school’s out when a half-ton of hamburger comes over the hood. That fence is for people, not cattle.”
“Government’s got things bassackwards again,” the little man said.
Mrs. Been turned to me, “He’s a real cowboy. Horse, lasso, branding iron.”
“Not many of us left except you count ones that tells you they’s cowboys. A lot of them ones now. I been ridin’ since the war.”
“Weren’t you up around Alamogordo when they tested the bomb?” the high-mileage man said. “Think I heard you were.”
“Over west to Elephant Butte, up off the Rio Grande. Just a greenhorn, sleepin’ out where we was movin’ cattle. July of ‘forty-five. They was a high wind that night and rain, and I didn’t get much sleep. Curled up against a big rock out of the wind. I was still in my bedroll at daybreak when come a god-terrible flash. I jumped up figurin’ one of the boys took a flashbulb pitcher of me sleepin’ on the job. Course nobody had a Kodak. Couple minutes later the ground started rumblin’. We heard plenty of TNT goin’ off to Almagordy before, but we never heard nothin’ like that noise. Sound just kept roarin’. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ I says, ‘what’d they go and do now?’ Next month we saw wheres they bombed Heerosaykee, Japan. We never knowed what an A-tomic bomb was, but we knowed that one flash wasn’t no TNT blockbuster.”
“The day the sun rose in the wrong direction,” the other man said. “They’ve been testing soldiers stationed at Alamogordo in ‘forty-five for radiation poisoning. You know, Herefords up there turned white.”
“Feelin’ fine. Doctor told me once it was a good thing I was behind that rock. He says the wind saved me, but the wife says the bomb musta been why we never had no kids. Says it burned out my genetics.”
“You never know.”
“Truth is, bad genetics runs in the family. Dad never had no kids.”
“Your dad didn’t have children?” I said.
“Not a one. That’s why he adopted me.” He drained his beer. “You know what Spaniards called the valley where the bomb got blowed off?”
High mileage looked up. “Don’t think I ever heard.”
“Journey of Death,” the little cowboy said. “That’s the English for it.”
Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory. -Benjamin Disraeli; from an opening chapter quote in Lords of Finance, by Liaquat Ahamed I largely agree with this. Life makes more sense to me when viewed through a historical (in terms of account), rather than philosophical, lens. At least in biography, it is usually pretty clear what someone has done, and the significance is always individual.
On a related note: -John Lewis Gaddis (qtd. in When the Facts Change by Tony Judt)It would be the height of arrogance for historians to condemn those who made history for not having availed themselves of histories yet to be written, Nightmares always seem real at the time--even if, in the light of day, a little bit ridiculous.
― Isaac Asimov, The Bicentennial ManThere is no right to deny freedom to any object with a mind advanced enough to grasp the concept and desire the state.
From here, but I read it in this. It just sums up the toxic "us vs them" mentality so well. That article should be required reading for everyone in high school. Politics is an extension of war by other means. Arguments are soldiers. Once you know which side you're on, you must support all arguments of that side, and attack all arguments that appear to favor the enemy side; otherwise it's like stabbing your soldiers in the back—providing aid and comfort to the enemy.
Haven't been reading much at all lately. The new season of Veep just started which means I get to watch the first 3 seasons again so the boyfriend can see it's amazingness. Favorite lines so far: You know what? You can't find these guys on fucking iTunes. You know why? - 'Cause they don't have a name? 'Cause they're not for fucking sale. Fucking listen to this. This is fucking like being operated on by a chimp with a hard-on and a hacksaw. Radical stuff.That's like trying to use a croissant as a fucking dildo....It doesn't do the job and it makes a fucking mess.
Ah! This is fucking primordial.
lil flagamuffin Richard Preston, The Hot Zone
I looked over the most disturbing descriptions of the middle and end stages of infection by a Marburg or Ebola virus. Seriously considered posting one of them, including 'It is said to be extraordinarily painful to lose the surface of one’s tongue.' But the quote I chose is far scarier. Preston gives historical examples of how filoviruses can surface, spread and hit the global air travel network in a matter of days.The rain forest has its own defenses. The earth’s immune system, so to speak, has recognized the presence of the human species and is starting to kick in. The earth is attempting to rid itself of an infection by the human parasite. Perhaps AIDS is the first step in a natural process of clearance.
That's not how evolution works. In fact, HIV is evolving to be less lethal, because killing one's host is not conducive to survival. Evolution resembles intelligence, but not consciousness. Romantic, but wrong.
The quote wasn't so much about the evolution of HIV as it was about the earth responding to human super-expansion by producing a response that looks like macro scale immune response. Also The Hot Zone was published in 1994, when HIV was a lot more unknown and scarier.
Thanks for the link, I didn't realize that about HIV, I only knew we were better at fighting it. It's nice to know that it's evolving to be less lethal too.
Sounds like the Gaia Hypothesis, a fun little idea. I'm kind of agnostic on the subject, unless widespread adoption leads to increased space industry funding, in which case I will lie through my teeth about my strong Gaia convictions.
This is the book with the Monkey House, right? That was a terrifying scene. I tried to visit, but the Internet was young and not the font of all knowledge that it is today. I think I saw the daycare center on the site. Now there's a Google Maps waypoint. I recall the book said you could see the Washington Monument from the top of high-rise office buildings in Reston, can you confirm? I snuck into the construction site of a condo building and climbed a tower crane to try and see for myself but couldn't make anything out.
Terry Pratchett, Wyrd Sistershe was also one of those rare individuals who are totally focused in time. Most people aren't. They live their lives as a sort of temporal blur around the point where their body actually is—anticipating the future, or holding onto the past.
Another interesting quote from Lords of Finance: A capitalism which cannot feed the workers of the world has no right to exist. The guilt of the capitalist system lies in its alliance with the violent policies of imperialism and militarism... The ruling classes of the world today have completely failed in political leadership as in socioeconomic. Hjalmar Schacht, Summer of 1931 -former head of Germany's Reichsbank
It looks like wasoxygen is farther along than I am in Blue Highways... "I don't work there, I'm employed there," he said to her. Then to me, "I'm supposed to spend my time 'imagineering,' but the job isn't so much a matter of getting something made. You know what my work is? You know what I pay attention to? Covering my tracks. Pretending, covering my tracks, and getting through another day. That's my work. Imagineering's my job." "It isn't that bad, darling." "It isn't that bad on a stick. What I do doesn't matter. There's no damn future whatsoever in what I do, and I don't mean built-in obsolescence. What I do begins and stops each day. There's no convergence between what I know and what I do. And even less with what I want to know." Now he was hosting his wife's salad plate, rolling her cherry tomato around "You've learned lots," she said. "Just lots." "I've learned this, Twinkie: when America outgrows engineering, we'll begin to have something.""The woman said, "Cal works at General Electric in Louisville. He's a metallurgical engineer."
My paperback copy is starting to look like it went on a cross-country voyage.It looks like wasoxygen is farther along
Just reached Depoe Bay:In the distance, the blue Pacific shot silver all the way to the horizon. I had come to the other end of the continent.
