Jim > Recent Status Updates

On being asked about a lawn: "True. Very little grass. Part of my plan.... I have a theory that it is exhausting for anyone to look at a large expanse of lawn. The viewer becomes tired reflecting on the effort that foes into cutting all that grass. A lawn is not restful to look at. A lawn represents great labor and noise, hours of rackety lawn mowers. A lawn is exhausting.

"I can't sleep in that bed," he said. "It's tainted. Why did he do it? The foolish, ignorant man!"
"What happened?" I asked.
"One of the workmen in Vidia's bedroom was explaining something," Pat began.
His face twisted in nausea, Vidia said, "And he sat on my bed.... He put his bottom on my bed."

He seemed eager for me to know him. He said he slept badly, he was abstemious about alcohol, he got headaches, he had asthma. He claimed to have an explosive temper. He licked playing cricket and wanted me to help him find a pitch where he could practice bowling.

A white man—a white doctor!—visiting in the Negro slums! Treating a Negro woman! It was unheard of, unprecedented—a soul-shaking, pride-trampling experience. White doctors did not treat Negroes. Generally speaking, no one did.

The history of wetlands reclamation for intensive agricultural production by the Tiahuanaco state is emblematic of the larger social history of the people of Tiahuanaco. The emergence, florescence, and ultimate collapse of ijntensive raised field agriculture in the region recapitulates the trajectory of state expansion and decline.

Forced labor in the nightmarish silver mines of Potosi exacted an awful toll on tribute-paying natives. Death by starvation, physical exhaustion, mine-shaft collapses, and the insidious effects of mercury poisoning devastated families and entire ethnic groups who were transplanted to Potosi as cheap labor.

Pasha didn't know that Katia was from Chernobyl, of course, because he had picked her up near Kiev, but he had told her to say she was from Russia if any customer asked her, because no one was going to want to shove his dick into death.

Those who poke around in the past will get a stick in the eye.

These things are details. Details give women wrinkles.

She was constantly giving things away: the bracelets on her arms opened up, the necklace slipped from her martyr's throat. She was as if deciduous. It was as if her languorous body rejected anything that would give it a third dimension.

The two other young married men in the office considered Harry Rowe lucky, very. Harry had two pretty girls in love with him.

"And upstairs," she said gasping. "fire department? Not too late, is it?"
"Let the goddamn thing burn!"

Ah mothers, mothers! It's the holiest of words, but time goes by and you'll find you have nothing to say to your child, and your child has nothing to say to you. Love them and they'll tear you to pieces, don't love them and they'll leave you all the same.

Nothing, not the pursuit of perfection through the sand, nor fame, nor money, has meaning for me. I shall have riches; I shall have fame. But I shall never have what I want, for I lack bodily grace and the courage that comes with it.

Nothing, not the pursuit of perfection through the sand, nor fame, nor money, has meaning for me. I shall have riches; I shall have fame. But I shall never have what I want, for I lack bodily grace and the courage that comes with it.

I gibe and mock at this sad religion, at these tremulous, grief-stricken figures advancing, cadaverous and wounded, down a white road shadowed by fig trees where boys sprawl in the dust--naked boys; and goatskins distended with wine hang at the tavern door.

No tears, dear Margot! Tears will not help Eli—and tears will not help you. Life is cruel once you are in its grasp, and life begins to squeeze like that hideous Greek sea serpent, who squeezed the father and his sons to death—'Layo-koon.' That has not happened to you—yet—but it has begun with me, and with poor Eli too.

"'There is no journey, and there is no path. There is no wisdom, there is emptiness. There is no emptiness.'" Pauses to add, "There is the wisdom of the Buddha. But there is no wisdom, and there is no Buddha." Laughing with inexplicable good humor.

To a parent, your child wasn't just a person: your child was a place, a kind of Narnia, a vast eternal place where the present you were living and the past you remembered and the future you longed for all existed at once.

He will not be able to use history for its end, which is the establishment of Truth. All that he establishes by his action, and all that he confirms and makes stronger, is Untruth.

Our Europe cannot perish. Her religion—which is also mine—has in it those victorious energies of defence which neither merchants nor philosophers can understand, and which are yet the prime condition of establishment.

Conventional, Cecil, you’re that, for you may understand beautiful things, but you don’t know how to use them; and you wrap yourself up in art and books and music, and would try to wrap up me. I won’t be stifled, not by the most glorious music, for people are more glorious, and you hide them from me. That’s why I break off my engagement. You were all right as long as you kept to things, but when you came to people—

Not so these English. They gain knowledge slowly, and perhaps too late.

Temple and his brother breakfasted with me. I went to Love's to try to recover some of the money he owes me. But alas a single guinea was all I could get. He was just going to dinner, so I stayed and eat a bit, though I was angry at myself afterwards. I drank tea at Davies's in Russell Street, and about seven came in the great Mr Samuel Johnson, whom I have so long wished to see.