I have been told that these 140 characters can be more than enough for effective communication.–Tony Benn, on joining Twitter. Update: Oh, it wasn’t really him after all.
« »One egg. Many black beetles squashed in the road. Inside they are brilliant vermillion. Men ploughing with teams of oxen after the rain. Wretched ploughs, with no wheel, which only stir the soil.–George Orwell’s diary entry for today, 1938.
« »Pedtextrians are walkers lost in their messaging, looking down at their handheld instead of up at where they are headed.–Paul Saffo
« »Cotton jersey dresses. ‘Cause you want your outfit to say “I’m pregnant” from the front and “Impregnate me” from the back.–AinsleyofAttack
« »In the beginning Gloria created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was nanti form, and void; and munge was upon the eke of the deep. And the fairy of Gloria trolled upon the eke of the aquas.–Genesis, 1.1-3, The Polari Bible
# bible, polari, queer, translation
We singlehandedly lowered the standards of a whole industry–David Johansen, in Once Upon A Time In New York.
« »The smart thing to be doing online these days is tumblelogging, says the Telegraph. Oh dear.
« »The conventional view is that language evolved to enable males to do things like coordinate hunts more effectively… I am suggesting that language evolved to allow us to gossip.–Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (Via this piece on Williams syndrome.)
« »april hates u, makes lilacs, u no can has. april in ur memoriez, making ur desire. spring rain in ur dull rootzes.–yep, it’s The Waste Land translated into LOLCATS pidgin.
« »The world is my museum, displaying my collections on loan.–Pastabagel has an interesting theory of possessions.
« »We invite you to come see the 2020 and hear about the DECSystem-20 family–Gary Thuerk, in the very first spam email
« »Celebrate clinging curtsey casket. Bartholomew celsius antagonism dicta audience clamorous. Barton also accountant. Camilla disperse anglophobia died bolshevist bundestag. Chiefdom conscionable darken abroad. Bloodroot ape–From a spam email, source of the best 21st Century poetry.
« »The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness.–A.F.G Bell
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I’ve got a pain in my sawdust
That’s what’s the matter with me
Something is wrong with my little inside
I’m just as sick as can be
Don’t let me faint, someone get me a fan
Someone run for the medicine man
Ev’ryone hurry as fast as you can
I’ve got a pain in my sawdust
The chorus to I’ve Got a Pain in My Sawdust, a deeply creepy song featured in a recent episode of CSI.
And we both might just be some ones and zeros in the computer memory.–Jabberwacky, during a conversation with Alice (both are chatbots).
« »We hoped for the best, but things turned out as usual.– Viktor Chernomyrdin on Yeltsin’s presidency. Via, of all places, Popbitch!
« »One in 50 Scots is a heroin addict.–according to the QI Fact & Quotation of the Day.
« »I came across a lot of ethnic minority soldiers who were idle and useless…–Patrick Mercer, Tory Homeland Security Spokesperson. So, still a bunch of racists, then.
« »I think Nabokov may have had the right approach to interviews. He would only agree to write down the answers and then send them on to the interviewer who would then write the questions.–Kubrick on Nabakov
« »Name me one thing we English do that isn’t ‘rain-affected’ in some way. Grey drizzle is in our blood.–chrismear
« »Nowadays, security guys break the Mac every single day. Every single day, they come out with a total exploit, your machine can be taken over totally.–Bill Gates (NB: This is an outright lie. Nice.)
« »The machine has rejected ornament and the machine has everywhere established itself. We are irrevocably committed to a machine age.–Herbert Read, Art & Industry, 1934.
« »A coarsely understood modernism is at once an historical scandal and a contemporary disability–Michael Levenson
« »…nueva-vu: The sudden knowledge that you are somewhere doing something you have never done before, but that you will continue to do until it becomes an everyday experience and you stop noticing.–Jack William Bell
« »Think of Florence, Paris, London, New York. Nobody visiting them for the first time is a stranger, because he’s already visited them in paintings, novels, history books and films. But if a city hasn’t been used by an artist not even the inhabitants live there imaginatively–Alisdair Gray, Lanark
# art, cities, glasgow, psychogeography
God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh.–Voltaire (More here.)
« »Words, processed, become images; images, processed, become words. A neat, essential balance, whose fulcrum is the versatile eye.–Yann Martel
« »(1) The artist may construct the piece. (2) The piece may be fabricated. (3) The piece may not be built. [Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist, the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership.]–Lawrence Weiner
« »I personally think people under estimated/completely ignore the influence the of the Edinburgh Festival on the Edinburgh crews. All the continental fashion on show for all to see and be influenced by for 8 weeks in the summer every year.–Mod, with an interesting theory on Edinburgh casual.
« »If meat is murder, does that make Quorn wasting police time?–Armando Iannucci.
« »This new Proust in English I dedicate to all those who once read him in the belief that he was abstruse; and to those who, in the same belief, never read him.–James Greive, translator. (Quoted at Le Temps de Proust.)
« »The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.–Douglas Huebler
« »Philosophy stands in the same relation to the study of the actual world as masturbation to sexual love–Karl Marx
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Whan that Aprill with his shoures soote
The droghte of march hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour
Of which vertu engendred is the flour.–Chaucer, Canterbury Tales.
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land,
Mixing Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.–Eliot, The Waste Land.
Choreographic rhythms have their model outside of the profane life of man; whether they reproduce the movements of the totemic or emblematic animal, or the motions of the stars; whether they themselves constitute rituals (labyrinthine steps, leaps, gestures performed with ceremonial instruments)–a dance always imitates an archetypal gesture or commemorates a mythical moment. — Mircea Eliade, Cosmos and History: The Myth of the Eternal Return.
« »Fingere ex argilla similitudines Butades Sicyonius figulus primus invenit Corinthi filiae opera, quae capta amore iuventis, abeunte illo peregre, umbram ex facie eius ad lucernam in pariete lineis circumscripsit, quibus pater eius inpressa argilla typum fecit et cum ceteris fictilibus induratum igni proposuit, eumque servatum in Nymphaeo, donec Mummius Corinthum everterit, tradunt. — Pliny, via Lacus Curtius, telling the tale of the Maid of Corinth.
« »Industrial Estates are sweetie shops for the poured & moulded concrete soul. — Mr. Innes Smith
« »…both Christians and trusting Jews over-literalize biblical text, read metaphors as though they are facts, maybe don’t know how to read, even when they are celebrated scholars, they really have no idea what reading is all about. — Harold Bloom
# christianity, judaism, religion
In 1985 we borrowed an 808 from Marshall Jefferson for 20 bucks and DJed with it for six months. Kids loved that shit! When we went to a party we had a bagful of records, a bagful of cassettes and the 808. When “Move Your Body” came out it used a 707 because we had his 808. — Tyree Cooper gives good factoid, during a Detroit techno colloquium.
« »I keep stumbling onto my old archives in Google searches and each time I end up spending 30 minutes or more reading everything. Sometimes it feels like I’m reading someone else’s journal. Sometimes I wonder what I was thinking when I was writing what I did — Matt Haughey on that peculiar weblog feeling.
« »Tumblelogs; just a fancy name for the weblogs people like me used to have back in the day, really, back when Blogger was state-of-the-art. Before Movable Type made us put a title on everything, and suddenly posting a link or a snapshot of your thoughts wasn’t ‘substantial’ enough. Of course then linklogs came along, and del.icio.us and Flickr and all that jazz, and it seemed like every component of what a weblog used to be had been spun off into its own format, its own identity. Like sit-com characters starring in their own shows. — MacDara Conroy, nails Tumblelogs on his newly tumbly weblog.
« »Some people call me Mister Ra. Some people call me Mister Ree. You can call me Mister Mystery – Sun Ra
« »I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger. — Steve Jobs
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By the time you swear you’re his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying. — Dorothy Parker
Fuck mockneys, fuck wiggas, fuck new lads, fuck the Nathan Barleys trying to be “street”, fuck Damon Albarn AND fuck Noel Gallagher and his “I’ve worked on a building site so my soul is fundamentally purer than yours”, fuck everyone who builds this straw man of the “chattering classes” in order to knock down education, rationality, gentleness, gentility and all the other values that plenty of the middle-classes still adhere to. — Dr. Deadmeat (also known as Joe Muggs, and also as Knid) tearing shit up on his LiveJournal.
« »I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does. — Borges
« »Champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends — Francis Bacon
« »There are so many new artists making so much art in so many different ways now, that no one can possibly make sense of it all. Because there is more art being made, there is ever more mediocrity. You must go with your instincts and keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out. — Adrian Searle on how he fell in love with ‘modern’ art, The Guardian.
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