Jim > Recent Status Updates

[T]hey prefer telling children about the Holy Trinity and how the Father is His own Son and the Son His Father and They use a messenger pigeon to communicate, it's enough to make your head spin....

There were thousands like him my ten-thousand-square-mile beat: boys who had lost their futures, their parents and themselves in the shallow jerry-built streets of the coastal cities; boys with hot-rod bowels, comic-book imaginations, daring that grew up too late for one war, too early for another.

"I think I envy those people a hundred years ago."
"Don't envy what you can't even guess. There was a lot of quiet madness under their serene no-talk."

The heart of the new system used at Mayapan and other Postclassic capitals was a collective sharing of power among a number of elite ruling lords. One of these lords was often identified as paramount among a collective body or ruling council. But decision making and responsibility for successful action was shared among a ruling oligarchy, rather than concentrated in a single individual as it had been in the past.

The elite rulers of Cozumel were far less concerned with harnessing corvée labor to construct great temples and palaces like those associated with the Maya past. Instead, labor was invested in large platforms to support warehouses, port facilities, and the roads that serviced these facilities.

"A Dialogue with Hermann Goering in Hell," in which the poet arrives at an abandoned airfield, in a place known as Hell, near Maracaibo on the Venezuelan coast, and meets [Goering] with whom he discusses various subjects: aviation, vertigo, destiny, uninhabited houses, courage, justice and death.

Consider the need for adventure in the world today. Danger is necessary, to offset a certain weakening of human fiber which easy times has brought to the race. These fantasy adventures present danger in its safest and most palatable form. But they would lose all value if the person undergoing them did not take them seriously.

The day came when Danton found himself thinking favorably of Martian women, something no Terran had succeeded in doing before. Then he knew something drastic had to be done.

Maarten considered that for a moment. "Yes, you're right. Our voices shatter their land, our expressions disgust them, our gestures hypnotize them, our breath asphyxiates them, our perspiration burns them. Oh, Lord!"

One teacher suggested to m that the least I could do was to have the automobile stop two or three blocks away, so that my schoolmates might be spared the sight of a liveried chauffeur doffing his cap. It was as if the school were allowing me to carry about a dead rat by the tail with the understanding that I would not dangle it under people's noses.

The act of recalling a patch of the past is something that I seem to have been performing with the utmost zest all my life, and I have reason to believe that this almost pathological keenness of the retrospective faculty is a hereditary trait.

Defective, the man thinks. Syndromes of the city's tragic womb. The signal of life distorted by chemicals, by starvation, by blows of fortune. Yet he, like everyone else, like the man himself, is exactly where, exactly what, exactly when he is meant to be. It is the Tao: darkness within darkness.

The huge machine with the swift bevel is set up on the square in Florac. Forty-seven times the iron blade of Mother Death severs a head from a trunk, forty-seven times a head severed from a trunk violently confirms the law of falling bodies.

In the fifth chapter of PNIN, [Nabokov] speaks at length and in different voices of the price you must pay on going into exile: not least, besides the material goods of life, the certainty of your own reality.

We need no longer fear the once overwhelming numbers of the dead. On the contrary: the dead must now be cleared out of the way as quickly and comprehensibly as possible.

Cato, once it was clear that Caesar was the inevitable victor, killed himself at the town of Utica in the most gory way imaginable. He stabbed himself with his sword but survived the gash. Despite attempts by friends and family to save him, he pushed away the doctor they had summoned and pulled out his own bowels through the still open wound.

The subway had rows of enormous aviaries on each side. This was where the Civic Controllers stored their spare pigeons for Public Squares and Monuments. There were also resting places for weary sparrows, nesting places for rearing sparrows, testing spaces for cheering sparrows.

What is more, there is hardly any mention of the world outside Rome—beyond a coupl of references to how particular rules applied to a hostis (a 'foreigner' or an 'enemy'; the same Latin word, significantly, can mean both) and one possible reference to sale into slavery 'in foreign country across the Tiber,' as a punishment of last resort for debt.

Wait a second—what's going on? He stepped back with one foot, careful of the drinks he was holding, turning to see what touched him. He caught a glimpse. He saw the revolver in his face and two figures, two masks, but not like Mickey's, there were eyes looking at him, one pair of eyes close, coming at him—

Sydney thought that it was very strange to be friends with an accuser who could not prove a crime, and someone who could prove but would not accuse. It was like being punished and exonerated at the same time.

One evening when they were here alone. He'd strike her in anger once, and instead of stopping, he'd just keep on until she was dead.

What would have disturbed others filled him with an inexplicable delight: he was anticipating pleasures that he had not yet even dreamed of, and with each step he took toward the wild and mysterious west, he felt thathe was entering the sacred realm of impunity, that is, of human freedom....

Hollywood started as a meaningless dream, invented for money. But its colors ran, out through the holes in people's heads, spread across the landscape and solidified. North and south along the coast, east across the desert, across the continent. Now we were stuck with the dream without a meaning. It had become the nightmare that we lived in.

What was before [Olive] now was the reality, with the beautiful, indifferent sky pouring down its complacent rays upon it. The reality was simply that Verena had been more to her than she ever was to Verena, and that, with her exquisite natural art, the girl had cared for their cause only because, for the time, no interest, no fascination, was greater.

He had discovered Olive Chancellor by this time; she was in the front row of chairs, at the end, on the left; her back was turned to him, but he could see half her sharp profile, bent down a little and absolutely motionless. Even across the wide interval her attitude expressed to him a kind of rapturous stillness, the concentration of triumph.

Mrs. Luna declared that if she must be trampled upon—and very likely it was her fate!—she would rather be trampled upon by men than by women, and that if Olive and her friends should get possession of the government they would be worse despots than those who were celebrated in history.

She had come to consider [Verena Tarrant] as a wonder of wonders, to hold that no human origin, however congruous it might superficially appear, would sufficiently account for her; that her springing up between Selah and his wife was an exquisite whim of the creative force; and that in such a case a few shades more or less of the inexplicable didn't matter.

To be quiet about the Southern land, not to touch her with vulgar hands, to leave her alone with her wounds and her memories, not prating in the market-place neither of her troubles or her hopes, but waiting as a man should wait, for the slow process, the sensible beneficence, of time....

All Mark's thoughts splintered into shards and disconnected fragments, like those waves out there breaking on the black rocks. He was the junked remains of himself, a disposable artifact used up and thrown away, a shell, drained and purposeless.

I thought about the barbecue I'd been invited to. The trouble with barbecues is that they always say 'Don't eat, don't eat, there's going to be tons of food'—so you don't eat and then you arrive and by the time you get anything to eat, its overcarcinogenated, overcooked, or undercooked, and it's too greasy, too fattening, and too much, too late.