cycads and ferns > Recent Status Updates

Thus, on January 26, 1944…Himmler told 260 high-ranking army and navy officers of the "all but" completion of the Final Solution…we shall understand Himmer's project as another application of the Roman-solution-to-the-Carthage-question. Since the Nazis intended to occupy Jewish property, they didn't salt the soil.
I understand my students are opposed to the napalming of babies. What délicatesse!

-I wonder..if we haven't got it wrong, Jurgen said...I wonder if maybe these guys' natural condition isn't to be lit up-if their ground state isn't actually when they're glowing...Or maybe... they really are glowing constantly...but, through some malign unknown mechanism, their everlasting light is periodically swallowed up by un-understood atmospheric forces... Rudely occluded...

LATER, AS HE sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building…
‘It's almost as if these aren't the people who really live here.’
…The surgeon held his elbow in a surprisingly powerful grip. He smiled reassuringly, flashing a mouth like a miniature cathedral of polished ivory.
‘Believe me, Laing. I see their teeth.’

…the Central Asian steppes, out where the enemy lives in long coats and fur caps, speaking that old weighted language of theirs…What secret history are they writing? There is the secret of the bomb and there are the secrets that the bomb inspires…For every atmospheric blast…that weird peeled eyeball exploding over the desert—for every one of these he reckons a hundred plots go underground….

…the part of Edie that always found smaller and smaller corners to wedge herself into was so alive. Marie had recognized this look in Edie's face…a woman with that much faith in the fire she was happily setting…We're going to beat this thing…Edie had said, though Marie could tell…that she was repeating something the new guy had told her,so she didn't ask why…love…needed to be conquered.

…she saw someone she knew,going up,a maintenance man…Keith thought he'd also seen the man….
No reason ever to remember this if she hadn't mentioned it.Means nothing…But then it did. Whatever had happened to the man was situated outside the fact that they'd both seen him,at different points…in some indeterminate way…he'd been carried in these crossing memories,brought…out of the tower and into this room.

How was it, Ko demanded, that these nations had fought against Japan just a few years ago and were now pitted against each other, taking Korea apart in the process?
Parker would shrug and say, "Beats me, champ."
"Shrimp between whales, eh?" Ko cackled, flicking a Zippo.
"Korea she is shrimp."
He also said, "Same bed, different dreams. Korea-she is bed."

Senator George Frisbie Hoar,Republican of Massachusetts,homegrown anti-imperialist…accuses his own party's president in the aftermath of the Samar trials: "You have devastated provinces…slain uncounted thousands…You have established reconcentration camps…You make the American flag…the emblem of sacrilege in Christian churches,and of the burning of human dwellings,and of the horror of the water torture."

I am adding to the tangency of the judge,who orders the execution,that of the dreamer who merely wishes…for the demise of an enemy…prays for it,possibly aloud…in the presence of murderous minions,men who know how to measure their eventual reward…who therefore move its reality.What I refuse to do is accept…that the dreamer is thereby more of a damnable fellow than the guy who dumped the corpse in the river.

"Good God," he said. "Sweet Lord in heaven."
Tanner favored such expressions, though he was nominally some sort of free-range Taoist.
"Slow-Mo," I said.
"The sleeper awakes!"
"I messed up the time."
"Not to worry, my friend. Don't get up."
"What do you mean, don't get up? You don't get up."

I come down. I feel the earth beneath my feet…I miss the sky filled with stars whose names I can't remember. I miss my nephew sitting to my left. I cover my eyes. I fail to summon the darkness…It's the blood surging through my fingers. Our cities are too bright. We've lost our ability to see the stars, to make our way in the dark. We have turned away from God, and He is punishing us.

My wife had grown frustrated with me when I tried, long before all this, to explain my complete and utter loss of faith in words and language-it was a change to my way of thinking that, I thought, explained why I was then not apologizing for something l'd done...

It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and space of falling ash and near night….This was the world now….figures in windows a thousand feet up, dropping into free space….In time he heard the sound of the second fall.

There is always an alternative story…
the massacre of civilians in Balangiga, Samar…
The Balangiga incident of 1901 is…a blip in the Philippine-American War…
The infamous General Jacob Smith ordered the Filipino deaths… “I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn…The interior of Samar must be made a howling wilderness."

Domination is the instinctive need of every individual who tries to make his way in life, and when people no longer feel its sting they are no longer living flesh.

Benito Mussolini, speech at the Third National Congress of the Fasci, November 8, 1921

What I mean to say is, and I want to be clear on this point, what I mean is that I knew then—at that exact moment-that all, all of my efforts in that area, that is to say, in the area of attempting to heal the rift between my wife and myself (and why not be blunt? all of my efforts in every area, every single one), had been and would continue to be futile.

Give the splendor of violence to these citizens of an inscrutable modern metropolis…these men bowed down by an existence they do not understand, give their sanguine desire for light a luminous tracer, give them a destiny and they will follow you.

My father wasn't home much. He worked. After work, he visited bars. My father found dresses hard to resist. He removed as many as possible. Mother was lonely.

French mathematician René Thom defined catastrophe theory as the value of the parameter in which the set of equilibria abruptly change…When I was young my belly was hard and smooth as a dinner plate. It now beckons the knife.

…I'd blow up the world if given it: that wondrous opportunity to even every score…don't take your anger and resentment out on me only because I took the villain's part for once and tried to understand him…oh, sure, we love to think victim, weep victim, mourn the murdered, pity the robbed, comfort the bereft…what of the beater's calluses, the beater's weary arms?

… you have uttered so many blasphemies against something so widely accepted in the world as true…as your grace has done…that there was no Hector, no Achilles, no Trojan War…no King Arthur of England…the search for the Holy Grail, and that the loves of Don Tristan and Queen Iseult, and those of Guinevere and Lancelot, are apocryphal…

You know, Whiff, sometimes, in a marriage, only one side hears the other cough.
Yeah? Well. What of it? Are we married to them, then? Is that the situation?
One side is cold, sometimes, in a marriage, she said. One eye does all the weeping….
We'd remain married. I would see to that. One life would not be long enough for my revenge.

During those same days, another writer, Franz Kafka of Prague, hospitalized not far from there in an Alpine sanatorium, notes in his diary: "In the struggle that pits the individual against the world, always bet on the world."

I have before me only the trenches…the arena of madmen…rioters, misfits, felons, erratic eccentrics, idlers, petit bourgeois bon vivants, schizophrenics, the neglected, the defeated, the irregulars, fly-by-nighters…anarchist incendiary union leaders…fanatics unable to clearly define their ideas, survivors who, thinking they are heroes committed to death, mistake mistreated syphilis as a sign of destiny.

For Christ's sake, he gasped. Jesus Christ, just turn me loose.
Sylder put his face to the man's and in a low voice said, You better call on somebody closer than that.

I watched my wife reach into a cabinet for a frying pan. I watched my daughter open the refrigerator door. I duly unloosened myself from my chair. I started off in the direction of the silverware drawer.
I went on with their life.

The one in the back was making small sobbing noises. No one spoke for a few minutes and then the little one said, Where's this go?
Goes to the gettin pla ...
Town, June broke in. Goes to town. Shorter this way.

THEY CAME across the field…before them passed solitary over no visible road a horse and a wagon surmounted by a harriedlooking man…They altered their course…the first of them reaching the horse and seizing the reins…the next one came up behind him sideways in a sort of dance and swung the brush-hook…and took him in the small of the back severing his spine…he fell unhinged sideways and without a cry.

Film is more than the twentieth-century art.It's another part of the twentieth-century mind.It's the world seen from inside…You have to ask yourself if there's anything about us more important than the fact that we're constantly on film, constantly watching ourselves.The whole world is on film, all the time.Spy satellites, microscopic scanners, pictures of the uterus, embryos, sex, war, assassinations, everything.