The short version

[edit] Crime and Punishment (1866)


Taking a new step, uttering a new word, is what people fear most.

Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it — that is what you must do.

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel.

Talking nonsense is man's only privilege that distinguishes him from all other organisms.

"You're a gentleman," they used to say to him. "You shouldn't have gone murdering people with a hatchet; that's no occupation for a gentleman."

Do a man dirt, yourself you hurt.

Nothing in this world is harder than speaking the truth, nothing easier than flattery.

Accept suffering and achieve atonement through it — that is what you must do.

If not reason, then the devil.


from Wikiquote: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dostoevsky

In Jeff In Venice, Death in Varanasi, Geoff Dyer speculates that what Dostoevsky had in mind when he defined man as a creature that gets used to everything, was the price of fine glass in Venice.

Selections from "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi"

When he came to a half-decent canal, he sat beside it and didn't weep.


{ to a goat who has asked the narrator the difference between human and goat consciousness:}

"Well, you see, that is probably the difference. The ability to articulate things. Language. Self-examination. . . . " I didn't know what else to say. It seemed I was lacking in exactly the qualities I claimed distinguished me from my interlocutor. The more I tried to articulate the difference between myself and the goat, the more we had in common.

"I am in mourning for myself," I said, reprising the old Chekhov joke. "My old self refuses to die. The new is struggling to be reborn. In this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."

"It may seem extreme that . . . "

I suppose this story will be everywhere, but for now it is worth repeating in full:

"A man plotted to kill his adoptive parents with the help of a friend he met on the internet, a court has heard.

Christopher Monks, 24, wanted Shaun Skarnes to murder his parents Christopher and Elizabeth Monks while they slept and then perform an extreme sex act on him, Preston Crown Court was told.

The bisexual pair are alleged to have hatched the plot after meeting on an internet site about "Furries" – people who pretend to be animal characters and share sexual role-playing fantasies.

Skarnes, 19, visited Monks' family home in Preston Road, Clayton-le-Woods, near Chorley, in February after weeks of chatting to him online.

The two played computer games before Skarnes left, telling Mr and Mrs Monks he was getting the train home to Ellesmere Port, Cheshire, and thanking them for having him round.

Monks then watched a DVD with his parents while Skarnes waited for hours in a playpark nearby until he received a text from his friend, telling him the couple were asleep in the four-bedroom house they shared with their son.

Mr Monks woke in the early hours of the morning to find Skarnes beside his bed, clutching a kitchen knife.

He grappled with the intruder and yelled for help from his wife, who was sleeping downstairs.

Dad-of-three Mr Monks told the court: "I thought he was trying to kill me. My wife tried to hit him with a stick but it broke."

She then began to talk to him in a calming way. At that point, his manner changed completely."

The couple went downstairs to find a police officer on the doorstep, who had responded to Mrs Monks' 999 call.

Mr Monks was left with bruised arms, a cut palm and bite marks.

Monks, who was downstairs during the attack, was initially treated as a witness but then later arrested.

Prosecutor Dennis Watson QC told the court that while Skarnes carried out the attack, ex-Runshaw College student Monks stayed downstairs, deleting "incriminating" text messages.

Mr Watson said Monks had talked about his sexual desire for his penis to be bitten off in online chatroom discussions.

He told the jury: "It may seem extreme that he wanted his penis bitten off, but there is ample evidence from websites he visited and conversations with Shaun Skarnes that this was a deeply held interest and one he found sexually stimulating."

It seems that Skarnes was to receive no money for killing Mr and Mrs Monks but the prospect of biting off Monks' penis. This was the climactic act of the conspiracy.

"Elizabeth Monks told the court that her adopted son was a quiet boy who never lost his temper and did well at his temping job at an educational training centre, where she also works.

Her husband added: "We have no doubt that (Christopher) did not intend to go to this extreme.

There is no-one in our closest circle of friends who is not shocked at what has happened."

Skarnes, of Sutton Way, Ellesmere Port, and Monks both deny conspiracy to murder Mr and Mrs Monks."

http://www.lep.co.uk/news/Son-39in-plot-to-kill.5477291.jp

via: http://www.sarahweinman.com/confessions/

From "The Scarab" by James Tate

For my birthday, Donna gave me a scarab from
Egypt, which she said was thousands of years old, and
said to have special powers. Its a beetle carved from
stone. "What kind of powers?" I asked her. "It'll keep
you from being eaten by the hippopotamus god. It'll stop
you from bumping into pyramids. And it will make you
the sexual prince of the universe," she said. "Those are the
three things I wanted most in life. What a great present.
Thanks sweetheart," I said. "Of course that last part
just works with me as your lover," she added. "Believe me,
I fully understood that, " I said. "To tell you the truth,
Peter, I have no idea what kind of special powers it's
supposed to have. . . . "

. . . I was distracted, agitated. I
kept looking around the office for something. At first, I
didn't know what I was looking for. The, slowly, it dawned
on me. The hippopotamus god was coming for me. I reached
in my pocket and clutched the scarab. It was coming, and I
was ready.

Ironic Comfort

The tongue in cheek apotheosis of the song in which the listener is to take comfort from the support and wisdom of the band, a la, say, Hey Jude or Everybody Hurts:

Are you under the impression
This isn't your life?
Do you dabble in depression?
Is someone twisting a knife in your back?
Are you being attacked?
Oh, this is a fact
That you need to know

Oh, oh, oh, oh

Wilco, Wilco,
Wilco will love you, baby

from Wilco (The Song)

I'll like this a lot, some time, some other hour.

The General

Clarity and Incomprehensibility from random blog wanderings

I would like to say that I am truly sorry ;(
I am a bad girlfriend. I should have not said such things about him in the previous post(which i have deleted). Kan people? Such a bad girl, I was. I am so sorry baby. Thanks to Diyana and Kak techic for the help, and thanks cz suruh Echa text emman and mengalah. If not, mesti tk dpt jmpe emman for dinner td ;P Thanks guys. Not to forget my baby boo, Juliet too for the advice, tp i dah okay dengan emman dh sayang. ;;) Thanks friends!! Glad everything's over. We have made a new vow. Secret stuff, haha.

from: http://aisyahhsonceuponatime.blogspot.com/2009/07/i-would-like-to-say-that-i-am-truly.html


SEXPOT ReVeNGeが送るBLOG!!カスタム商品からFETISH系、インポート商品など販売!アンダーグラウンドパンクをテーマに新SEXPOT ReVeNGeがリニューアルOPENし、新ブランドSUICIDE CORPSEも登場!!新作入荷、イベント情報からもちろんプライベートな部分も掲載していきます!!


from: http://sp-revenge.jugem.jp/?eid=229

Joke

One snowman to the other: "You're right. I do smell a carrot."

At a party, the fourteen years old girls, not related to the fifty year old man, asked him to tell them Tom Swifties. He did what he could. "My car broke down and this is the only way I have to get to town," explained Tom hoarsely. And an old one of mine: "I love camping, " said Tom intensely. They appreciated and admired the man.

You always fear what will happen when you run out of jokes, though.

Illustration of the principle from Buster Keaton's "The Cameraman" -- throughout the movie when Keaton left the newsreel office, he managed to break the window in the office door. But when he is banished from the office and the presence of the girl, the window doesn't break. It isn't so much that the joke wouldn't fit the mood, it is that the absence of the joke to be expected given the pattern creates the sadness, it is the sadness.

So you don't want to run out of jokes for 14 year old girls.

A wish comes true

"I wish you well" she said, and thereupon I fell in a narrow dark hole filled with water, never to emerge.


from "Brief Stories of Terror"

Makes me want to regain lost weight, and everything else

C.D. was jolly and obscene. With C.D. I felt happy, amused, outraged. C.D. made me feel that I'd been violated and survived. C.D. went over the hill with a huge yelp of delight and then, every trace of greed and lust and all those appetites that kept him constantly on the boil finally withdrawn, he fell into an unrousable slumber. And I felt like laughing. And I felt good and I felt tough.

Compared with the slim hard-bodied men his figure was a joke -- round, tubby, pillow-paunchy, it had the consistency of foam rubber; rolling around with him was like rolling around with some big beach toy.



from The Old Man and Me

from James Tate's poem "Waylon's Woman"

Waylon, it should be said, is a rooster. Loretta is not a hen.

. . . At closing time, we say our good-byes,
and I kiss Loretta, just a little peck, because
I know she is married to a chicken, and I respect
that. Waylon has made her happy in ways I never
could. The starry sky, the police hiding in the
bushes, God, it’s good to be alive, I think, and
pee behind my car in the darkness of my own private
darkness.

The entire poem can be found here: http://www.takethehandle.com/interactive/?p=790

Doug Glanville on the anxiety of the baseball player: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/14/opinion/14glanville-anxiety.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

from the story "Blue Light" by John Updike:

At the beach, when she and Fleischer were still married to other people . . . Tracy's long-toed bare feet beside Fleischer's groggy face had bronzed insteps and pale soles and cherry-red nails, and he wanted to lick them, every square inch, but for the scandal this would have caused, and the sand grains that would have adhered to his tongue.

Optimism and a helpless dependence on being loved, he saw with the reluctant wisdom of age, are the meager survival weapons we bring with us into the world. Fleischer still wanted to be loved, how ever little he deserved it.

Father Daughter Conversation On The Way To See A Mamet Play

Daughter: This is an older play, right?

Father: Yes. It's a revival. [pause] So there'll be lots of gospel music.

[At least five minutes of silence.]

*

All Water Is Holy

from the story "My Father's Tears" by John Updike. Better in context.


We are surrounded by holy water; all water, our chemical mother, is holy. Flying from Boston to New York, my habit is to take a seat on the right-hand side of the plane, but the other day I sat on the left, and was rewarded, at that hour of midmorning, by the sun’s reflections on the waters of Connecticut—not just the rivers and the Sound but little ponds and pools and glittering threads of water that for a few seconds hurled silver light skyward into my eyes. My father’s tears for a moment had caught the light; that is how I saw them. When he was dead, Deb and I divorced. Why? It’s hard to say. We boil at different degrees, Emerson said, and a woman came along who had my boiling point. The snapshots I took of Deb naked, interestingly, she claimed as part of her just settlement. It seemed to me they were mine—I’d taken them. But she said her body was hers.

After our divorce, my mother told me, of my father, “He worried about you two from the first time you brought her home. He didn’t think she was feminine enough for you.”

“He was big on femininity,” I said, not knowing whether to believe her or not. The dead are so easy to misquote.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/02/27/060227fi_fiction?currentPage=1

Sacred Blue!

A leading French business newspaper is launching a multi-lingual version of its website using automatic translation, dispensing with journalists but producing often comic results.

"Ryanair loan to make travel of the passengers upright," read a typically bizarre headline on La Tribune's site this week above a story in equally mangled English on the low-cost airline's plans to make people fly standing up.

"The Chinese car in ambush," "Internet Explorer: mistrust!" and "Assets of the continental right in management of the crisis" were some other mysterious headlines the same day on the site, which is still in an experimental phase.

http://tech.yahoo.com/news/afp/20090710/tc_afp/francemediaindustrylanguageinternet

Sigh

Pogonophilia — The fixation on bearded men

Once, interviewing a woman with this fetish, I showed her four pictures of naked men: a well-endowed eighteen-year-old model, an extremely thin bearded man in his early thirties, a heavily muscled former professional athlete in his late forties, and Peter North, the porn star. Asked to choose the most "virile and masculine" of the group, she selected the bearded man instantly.


from: http://www.nerve.com/personalessays/Saknussemm/my-ten-favorite-fetishes-a-lifelong-sex-researcher-on-his-most-unusual-discoveries/index.asp?page=1

While it would be nice if all I knew partook of the fetish above, in my case, could most profitably be combined with:

Catoptrophilia — Unusual titillation in the presence of mirrors

Poem From My Dream Last Night, Including Both Titles

Instructions For Staying Alive

Inhale

Exhale

Repeat

(alternate title: Instructions For Smoking Pot)

*

Amusement at another's expense

Amusing critical view of Michael Chabon's young adult book about baseball Summerland:

Everything that makes a bad baseball book bad is here–lyricism laid on with a trowel, the “mythology” of baseball and its deep meaning, aching fancy in place of hard exactness. Supposedly a Young Adult novel. Give it to your son only if you want him to hate the sport forever. “A baseball game is nothing but a great slow contraption for getting you to pay attention to the cadence of a summer day,” Chabon writes. No, it isn’t, any more than cream cheese is a ready smooth device for measuring the contours of a bagel.

from a consideration of best and worst baseball novels: http://www.hardballcooperative.com/?p=1044

[for my future reference - from 1962, re ending a marriage]

http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/62jul/johnson.htm

Even I Not So Sure

from a British show about Elton John:

"Though he had been married before, he had always been a confirmed bachelor."

This amuses me

Though I don't mean to make fun of the [facebook] friend of a [facebook friend] who posted it:

"Leslie.....you are right, there are no coinsidences, thank you."

Breakfast

"I was so darned sorry for poor old Cindy that I hadn't the heart to touch my breakfast. I told Jeeves to drink it himself."

-- from My Man Jeeves.