Jim > Recent Status Updates

... the one-and-only girl who exists for all of us at that age, and for some of us not only then, the one-and-only girl both imaginary and at the same time real with fine blue veins in her temples beneath the delicate, tender skin and a heart rhythmically contracting to pump fresh, hot blood (is it really hot?) around the fragile, tensile arteries ...

As in any period when the old order is breaking down, there was no lack of ideas. These decades were tumultuous and chaotic, swirling with conflicting visions. The Ottoman Empire in the 19th centuy was in profound flux. The only constant was that the old was evaporating. Uncertain but hopeful, Arabs, Turks, Christians, Muslims, and Jews looked to a future of working with the West to construct a new order.

The [Crusades] began in a burst of religious fury, but in the end it probably did more harm to the Christian Byzantine Empire than it did to the Muslim states of the Near East.

It has always taken some effort to get men to kill one another, and shouting holy war was one way to motivate soldiers; .... The goal in either case was pre-battle frenzy. Holy war was more often a tactic rather than a strategy, and it would be a mistake to apply to the Muslims and Christians of 11th century Spain the ideological passions we associate with the early 21st century.

Like any prejudice, the mutual animosity between Islam and the West is fueled by ignorance and selective memory. If we emphasize hate, scorn, war, and conquest, we are unlikely to perceive that any other path is viable. If we assume that religion is the primary source of conflict, we are unlikely to address factors that have nothing to do with religion.

There was no correct text. There was no standard version. Of anything. There was not one ARBOR but many, many ARBORs. The jungle was endless, and it was not one jungle but endless jungles, all burning with bright tigers of meaning, endless tigers....

But the actual touch of her lingered, inside his heart. That remained. In all the years of his life ahead, the long years without her, with never seeing her or hearing from her or knowing anything about her, if she was alive or happy or dead or what, that touch stayed locked within him, sealed in himself, and never went away. That one touch of her hand.

In Southern California it didn't make any difference anyhow where you went there was always the same McDonaldburger place over and over like a circular strip that turned past you as you pretended to go somewhere. And finally when you got hungry and went to the McDonaldburger place and bought a McDonald's hamburger, it was the one they sold you last time and the time before that and so forth....

The point is that humanity, without even suspecting it, has attracted the attention of this intelligence and stopped being a self-contained system. Apparently, without ever suspecting it, we've trod on the corns of some supercivilization, and that supercivilization, apparently, has decided to regulate our progress as it sees fit.

"Sin is the only note of vivid color that persists in the modern world." I made this attitude my own with far more conviction, I think, than if I had immediately put it into practice. I believed I could base my life on it, I forgot the bad times, the ups and downs, day-to-day happiness. I visualized a life of degradation and moral turpitude as my ideal.

"I'll just at some time cut out and get me another girl, white, white thighs, etc., and it'll have been a great affair and I hope I don't hurt her tho." -- Ha!

'Well,' said Inspector Fowler with heavy superiority, 'these petty crimes of yours are matters for the local police. No doubt as these tendencies of yours develop you will fall into their hands and go to such places as Maidstone, Wandsworth and other prisons for periods of ten, fifteen and twenty years, where they will feed you on bread and bad fish.'

Bond ordered a double gin and tonic and one whole green lime. When the drink came he cut the lime in half, dropped the two squeezed halves into the long glass, almost filled the glass with ice cubes and then poured in the tonic.

We know nothing of the human heart if we imagine that the Algerian French can now forget the massacres at Philippeville and elsewhere. And it is another form of madness to imagine that repression can make the Arab masses feel confidence and esteem for France. Hence we are pitted against each other, condemned to inflicting the greatest possible pain on each other, inexpiably.

As I came out into the dawn, I saw, far away across a great sheet of water, the silhouette of a distant land, black against the sunrise.... I realized that I was looking at great reedbeds. A slim, black, high-prowed craft lay beached at my feet—the sheikh's war canoe, waiting to take me into the Marshes.

An Algeria made up of federated settlements and linked to France seems to me preferable to an Algeria linked to an empire of Islam which would bring the Arab peoples only increased poverty and suffering and would tear the Algerian-born French from their natural home.

Glass cases labeled to show that they contained the bodies of [Coptic] Christian martyrs who died under Diocletian, contained partly mummified corpses. These, with teeth flashing through black flesh twisted in pain, were reverently dresses in silver tinsel and wedding costumes as a symbol of the eternal happiness their sacrifice had won them.

The Samaritans reject Jewish religious texts such as the books of Daniel and Isaiah: for the, the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament, sometimes also called he Torah) stands alone.

Instead of despising dogs, as the Muslims did, the Zoroastrians put food out for them every night, before they themselves ate.

They believe in heaven, but it is called the Light-World; in an evil spirit, but one that, unlike Satan, is female, and called Ruha; and in baptism as a necessary condition for entering the Light-World, though for them it must be in running water, while babies who die unbaptized are comforted for eternity by trees bearing fruits shaped like their mothers' breasts.

For he was aware that he was going round and round like a circus horse. There was no point waiting fo a brainwave; in police matters, brainwaves were of no use. Nor was it a matter of discovering a phenomenal lead, or a clue that had eluded everyone else.

Ulysses is one of the dullest books ever written, and one of the least significant. This is due to the total absence from the book of any sort of conflict and to the absolutely static nature of the characters. Bloom is consistently and statically unpleasant.

Unlimbering [the camera] has been more trouble than I have cared to take, perhaps because I dislike carrying a camera: it seems that one misses a great deal of seeing and feeling through thinking of one's experience in terms of light and angle.

The first impression [of the Amazon jungle] is of the dark, soft atmosphere, an atmosphere which might be described as "hanging," for the great tangle of leaves and fronds and boles it is difficult to perceive any one plant as a unit....

It was easy to see that it was an avoided house—a house that was shunned by the village, to which my eye was guided by a church spire some half a mile off—a house that nobody would take. And the natural inference was, that it had the reputation of being a haunted house.

Will you not join me in Atlantis where we will go through streets of blue and yellow marble to the wharves of orichalch and choose us a galley with a golden Eros for a figurehead and sails of Tyrian sendal?

The Renaissance ... manifested itself in different countries by different symptoms. In Italy, [it] was more than anything an outburst of painting, architecture, and sculpture. Scholarship and religious reformation were in Germany the typical manifestation... But when this gorgeous measles crossed the English Channel, its symptoms were almost exclusively literary.

Later that night, when the puzzled boy recounted his story in the pub at Cappoquin, one old man, enjoying the peaty smoke of a black cobeen pipe, nodded his head. "Sure, now, and that'd be the two Miss O'Haggertys. A great pair they were entirely, the like of little childer grown old and tall. Arrah, they haunt the place now, just as they did in life."

The high and mighty Grantleys
Live in terror of their lives.
Terror, Terror, Terror, Terror,
Comes in fours and never fives.