Chris > Recent Status Updates

"The barrenness of sand..." "ceaseless movement that made it inhospitable to all living things. What a difference compared to the dreary way human beings clung together year in year out. Certainly sand was not suitable for life. Yet, was a stable condition absolutely indispensable for existence? Didn't unpleasant competition arise precisely because one tried to cling to a fixed position?"

"She came down the steps slowly, madonna bereaved, so grief-stunned and wooden pieta of perpetual dawn, the birds were hushed in the presence of this gravity and the derelict that she had taken for the son of light himself was consumed in shame like a torch. She touched him as a blind person might. Deep in the floor of her welling eyes dead leaves scudding. Please go away, she said."

"In his tower by the sea Paul Berlin considered the possibilities. A miracle, he thought. An act of high imagination--daring and lurid and impossible. Yes, a cartoon of the mind."

"I have learned thhat what I have not drawn, i have never really seen, and when I start drawing an ordinary thing, I realize how extraordinary it is, sheer miracle." - Frederick Franck, The Zen of Seeing

Every character, action, setting, comparison or thought has some (not too subtle) allegorical implications. Don't know if I'll make it to the end

"The truths contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised," writes Sigmund Freud, "that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that new-born babies are brought by the stork. Here, too, we are telling the truth in symbolic clothing, for we know what the large bird signifies. But the child does not..."

The Shawl - Cynthia Ozick. This dhit trumps Night and every other holocaust story I've read

Afraid of public speaking? Read Ralph Ellison's "Battle Royal" - apparently the first chapter of "Invisible Man". Good God.

Afraid of public speaking? Read Ralph Ellison's Battle Royal (Apparently the first chapter of Invisible Man). Good God.

Ai Wei Wei: Never Sorry. pretty good complementary documentary

"One of our most common reading experiences is, in fact, the discovery on reflection that we have allowed ourselves to become a 'mock reader' whom we cannot respect, that the beliefs which we were temporarily manipulated into accepting cannot be defended in the light of day"