Jim > Recent Status Updates

Except for the Gadarene swine, famous through the ages for their prowess at the short sprint, no group is quicker off the mark than a jury at long last released from bondage....

This perpetual toggling between nothing being new, under the sun, and everything having very recently changed, absolutely, is perhaps the central driving tension of my work.

[Gervase Fen] was a tall, lanky man, a little over forty years of age. His face was cheerful, ruddy and clean-shaven, with shrewd and humorous ice-blue eyes, and he had on a grey suit, a green tie embellished with mermaids, and an extraordinary hat.

Power dies, power goes under and gutters out, ungraspable. It is momentary, quick of flight and liable to deceive. As soon as you rely on the possession it is gone. Forget that it ever existed, and it returns.

I know this. Land is the only thing that lasts life to life. Money burns like tinder, flows off like water. And as for government promises, the wind is steadier.

"Only the dead know the meaning of existence, and they don't answer letters."
"They don't even open them," said Roy.

[Osama Bin Laden puts in an appearance:] Toward the rear was a new arrival on horseback, this one tall and lanky, almost abnormally high in the saddle. He wore a green camouflage jacket around a white kameez. Salt-and-pepper scraggle of a beard, and the long face everyone knew so well, topped by the white pillbox that he wore in every poster in every bazaar.

A rusting signpost on the edge of town said 'Drug Free Happy Life' in English, the remnant of some long-gone aid organization. On the wall of a small store a faded mural depicted a variety of land mines above a red warning in Pashto. Someone had recently sprayed it with gunfire.

What on earth would Carol once she heard he had reached Afghanistan? He should have called Janine instead, but he was too tired now to do anything but crawl beneath the raspy sheets. Shut everything off and dream of redcoats and tribesmen, of brittle old empires shattering upon the stony floor of deep ravines. Of anything except home and family.

In conquering their empire, not only had the Mongols revolutionized warfare, they also created the nucleus of a universal culture and world system. This new global culture continued to grow long after the demise of the Mongol Empire, and through continued development over the coming centuries, it became the foundation for the modern world system....

Genghis Khan to the City of Nishapur: Know that God has given me the empire of the earth from the east to the west, whoever submits shall be spared, but those who resist, they shall be destroyed with their wives, children, and dependents.

In addition to sex, property, and food, Genghis Khan recognized the disruptive potential of competing religions. In one form or another, virtually every religion from Buddhism to Christianity and Manichaeanism to Islam had found converts among the steppe people, and almost all of them claimed not only the true religion but the only one.

At every twist and turn, the victim destined for sacrifice, ever since she was a child, is Lucrezia [Borgia]. It is she who is tossed into the gaping maw of financial and political interests by both her father and her brother, without a qualm.

All, or nearly all, Soviet people know that in the Soviet Union it's not the laws on the books, but the unwritten rules of behavior, that matter.

[Tarantino's mother] said 'Well, Quentin, it's very violent. Not that I necessarily have a problem with hat. But you wouldn't understand what the context in which the violence was taking place, you would just be watching violence for violence's sake. And that I don't want you to do.' Considering this would be a conversation I would be having for the rest of my life ....

[The Frank Lovetts of this world] are reserved, wary, only professionally affable. Their responses seem pragmatic but are often peculiarly abstract, based on systems they alone understand. They view other people as wild cards, useful in the hand but dangerous in the deck, and they gravitate to occupations in which they can deal their own hand, play their own system, their own information.

For love
Is unique: the more we have of it, the more it's not enough,
And the more calamitous desire sets the heart aflame.

Indeed, to harness mortal and immortal with one yoke
And think they can agree, and interact, is but a joke.
For what can be more out of tune, off-kilter and contrasting
Than a mortal thing hitched to something deathless, everlasting....

Sometimes it is better not to know anything about a country when you visit it. Especially it is important not to know its language. Thus every sound, striking the ear like a small bell or animal cry, without any associative meaning, takes on the immediate quality of poetry, the quality of pure color in painting, with the percussive effect of pure sound in a void.

Florida a thousand miles long, a hundred miles wide, and a foot high....Straight highway down thru it. Young new pine forests, clay side roads -- American flag waving on a post -- Colonial gas signs -- Swanee River crossing, overhung with live oaks heavy with Spanish moss....

Came upon Los Angeles by bus at night... Ah the crazy hotels, crazy streets, sad signs of America—Jesus Saves!—Tom's Tattoo—"The Electric Rembrandt—Snooker Parlor—"Acres of Autos"—Hotel Small—Ice Rink—Greyhound—Los Angeles Street—TV in Rooms—EAT—Barber & Beauty Supply—PAWNSHOP—"Shave Yourself"

The waves roared.
I stood alone in the darkness.
Light does not illuminate.
And I had never been found by the light.
I would always be in darkness—

His parents had probably made love out of just such an itch. For this momentary satisfaction, they had conceived him, and because he was inconvenient, dumped him in the orphanage; because he was not part of the fun of it all; he was just a harmful side effect of the scratching of the itch; he was the snot in the handkerchief after the nose had been blown.

He had bucked logs, worked in a cannery and a furniture factory, robbed gas stations, rolled drunks, and lived in half a hundred arid rooms. He had been wakened almost daily to the fear that time was a dry wind brushing away his youth and his strength, and slept through as many nightmares as there were nights to dream.

Love does not brook resolution. Love cannot be fulfilled; man in love can only truly be in love if he has not gained his object—and vice versa: unattainability precludes the possibility of relief. Reciprocal love does not exist: two people cannot be in love with each other at the same time; mutual attraction is not love but affection.

Art is "dangerous," at least in the modern age, when one of its main tasks is to smuggle solitude and the ultimate silence summoned by Hamlet's last words into the world of others. Great works disconcert one almost as much as does love: they abduct from one's everyday life only to confuse everything for one. They are promising and yet offer nothing.

Words say less than we would wish to convey—they mislead us, divert our thoughts away from their original goal to such an extent that even as we speak we ourselves are amazed: we wanted to say something else, not what the words, tones, and linguistic structures imply.

In Emerence's world there were two kinds of people, those who swept and those who didn't, and everything flowed from that. It made no difference under which slogans or flags they staged national holidays.

When we first met, I very much wanted to see her face, and it troubled me that she gave me no opportunity to do so. She stood before me like a statue, very still, not stiffly to attention but rather a little defeated-looking.