The story of a single cookie presaging the most important building in China is, quite simply, bizarre.
I didn’t see a single building in Dallas with a sun breaker, just every possible mirror and tint applied to glittering glass.
Their strategy for staying alive is to be barely alive at all.
“You don’t pay to see him play,” came the reply, “you pay to see him think.”
Even in the early days of the movies, they didn’t know how to make movies. They had an image and it moved and the audience loved it. You saw a train coming into the station, and just to see motion was beautiful.
From a conversation between Francis Ford Coppola and film students at the Marrakech International Film Festival.
All of the columns Ernest Hemingway wrote for the Toronto Star will be available online:
Hemingway wrote 191 columns for the Star. Many more will be added in the coming weeks and months, along with historical annotations by William McGeary, the former editor who spent years researching the writer’s work for the paper’s archives, so check back often as our collection grows.
This is from Tancredo is Dead, his remembrance of a man who could stop the fierce charge of a bull simply with his gaze:
But imitators sprang up in bullrings all over Spain. Tancredo no longer had a monopoly. He could no longer command his high prices, for the imitators had an added advantage. They were not one hundred percent effective.
Sometimes the bull would halt and back away. Sometimes the eye of the amateur Tancredo would waver or he would give an involuntary shiver, and the bull would carry through his charge and the human statue would shoot up into the air in a tangle of gory sheeting.
The thrill of what might happen gave the Spanish crowd the same thrill that sends people of other nations out to automobile road races and the Grand National Steeplechase.
You also find these oddly anachronistic turns of phrase:
They never knew but what the bull might not stop.
(via the browser)
Blake Butler, editor of HTMLGIANT, asks, why do anything:
I tend to often want to beat myself up for whatever gives me pleasure, especially when it is a solitary pursuit. I think that comes from always wanting more from myself, to feel that I am up against a puzzle that keeps shifting underneath me, and only in certain moments fits into a set up that seems clear, like coming out of a forest into a clearing all of a sudden, but then to go anywhere else you have to go back into the forest, and often it feels like you’ll never find another clearing, and so a lot of people tend to go back to the previous clearing to feel that again. Great metaphor, dickface. Anyway, to answer your question: I guess because there’s nothing else to do? And for me going in search of the clearing and finding those modes where the search makes time no longer exist because I am so caught up in the mechanics of negotiating the dark makes the moments of emergence more emergent, personally, and the moments of utter darkness that much more volatile. It’s the only world I have.
Blake is the author, most recently, of Nothing: A Portrait of Insomnia and There Is No Year: A Novel and wrote one of the kindest things about me anyone could think to write.
(via @5cense)
In themselves, beards may not be signs of progress, although mine has subtly improved my thinking.
Kundera should have gone further: what could be more vulgar than an invented character?
Immediately, I realized I had the shot.
So, people can recognize that something is wrong, and still feel honor bound to do it.
Can we use honor against honor killing?
All the documentaries in this series are great.
Pee Wee Herman literally built rooms on his house just to put wallpaper on.
When the break comes, it is his black cat that stares you down — just like the outsider you are.
Yet, for me, this piece speaks just as much to recuperation as it does to bewilderment, as one person after another finds his or her bearings and walks out of the frame.
This is a faded picture of a dilapidated building. It seems to be run down and in the need of repairs.
Update:
Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.
Startled mother weasel abandoned her baby in the face of danger. Retrieved him when the coast was clear.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) May 15, 2012
“It’s a hard world for little things.” (Lillian Gish in “Night of the Hunter”)
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) May 15, 2012
The American Heartland is lousy with grottoes.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) May 15, 2012
If people are allowed to set up those tacky shrines near the sites of traffic accidents, who’s to stop me creating grottoes where I please?
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) May 15, 2012
For that matter, why can’t I place my own Burma Shave-style signs along the back roads?
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) May 15, 2012
Park my Honda Element on side roads just off US highways and sell peanut brittle and snow globes out the back?
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) May 15, 2012
I want to be a roadside attraction.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) May 15, 2012
Someone in the drainage tunnel at the park yelling I’m alive.
— Deron Bauman (@deronbauman) May 14, 2012
A fat raccoon has now twice used the deck out back as a short-cut from a nest of rabbits to wherever he is stashing them for his feast.
— Sheila Ryan (@Cirinda) May 14, 2012
If you find something original check to see where it was stolen from.
— Matt Thomas (@mattthomas) May 14, 2012
That story is simple: it was a complete accident.
It was only in theory, and for humble people, that marriage was for life.
I want things and their opposites. Many people do.
