Absalom, Absalom!

And if you haven't got honor and pride, then nothing matters. Only there is something in you that doesn't care about honor and pride yet that lives, that even walks backward for a whole year just to live; that probably even when this is over and there is not even defeat left, will still decline to sit still in the sun and die, but will be back out in the woods, moving and seeking where just will and endurance could not move it, grubbing for roots and such--the old mindless sentient undreaming meat that doesn't even know any difference between despair and victory, Henry.

Nov 19, 2009 3:52pm

Kafka's The Trial: College Football Edition

[Undefeated University of Cincinati Quaterback Zach] Collaros was 20 when he was cited for presenting a fake ID to get into a bar near the main campus. Completing the diversionary program, ordered Oct. 5, would allow him to have the case dismissed and the record sealed. Otherwise, he could face as many as 180 days in jail.
Bouchard told Collaros, now 21, that skipping the program isn’t like “blowing off a math class” and that he needs to grow up.
Bouchard said afterward that he expected Collaros to quickly take the first step in the program — an interview about life history and any issues with substance abuse. A defendant also must pay $200 and attend an eight-hour class on underage drinking. (ESPN)

Nov 19, 2009 3:32pm
Nov 19, 2009 10:05am
Nov 19, 2009 12:04am
Nov 18, 2009 1:06pm
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Nov 16, 2009 8:32pm
Nov 16, 2009 12:10pm
Nov 14, 2009 3:49pm
Nov 14, 2009 3:12pm

Early chocolate was produced sweetened cakes and sold as a spice. Until the later half of the 19th century, it was primary served as what we know of as hot chocolate. My block of American Heritage chocolate is about 5 oz of pressed cocoa, delicately spiced with anise, red pepper, nutmeg, orange and cinnamon.

(via Four Pounds Flour: Retronovated Recipes: Chocolet Puffs)

Early chocolate was produced sweetened cakes and sold as a spice. Until the later half of the 19th century, it was primary served as what we know of as hot chocolate. My block of American Heritage chocolate is about 5 oz of pressed cocoa, delicately spiced with anise, red pepper, nutmeg, orange and cinnamon.

(via Four Pounds Flour: Retronovated Recipes: Chocolet Puffs)

Nov 14, 2009 2:42pm

Et in Arcadia Ego; or, On Reading Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian

… or The Evening Redness in the West

And the answer, said the judge. If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? … His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is at once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes.

Paradoxically enough, a book like this renews my faith in the possibilities of the world, that there is such a thing to encounter out there as this—that it was even sitting tucked away on my very own bookshelf, waiting, a potentiality waiting to be actualized. I don’t know what rough thing such a book lets loose in the world, something terrible and awesome, in the rooted meaning of those words. It certainly makes the whole mythos of the West tremble and come unmoored, in the looseness of which new histories of life and America become possible.

The judge smiled. Whether in my book or not, every man is tabernacled in every other and he in exchange and so on in an endless complexity of being and witness to the uttermost edge of the world.

It is interesting, too, at the height of the arms race, in 1985, McCarthy writes a book prohphetic of an already apocalyptic human soul, but in 2006, when violence has come to seem more local and endemic, if no less brutal, McCarthy writes a book about the apocalypse of the world. Like all good authors, his mirrors are slightly awry, and we see our own images askew in history and place—as if the end of history, in ashes, was really about the ultimate destiny of the human soul, what makes it human beyond violence, in violence, enduring, but mayhap not forever.

This you see here, these ruins … do you not think that this will be again? Aye. And again.

One wonders if Judge Holden, survives into the desolation after this possibly final war, and if in it he simply see the echoes of other desolations past, dim rumors of the deserts of Texas, Mexico, California, the sutured frontier opened again where some wild chaos spills out to confront the too-easy, too-fragile truth of the present…

Or is the truth of his immortality what he represents from the essence of the human, its mindless, eternal violence.

He never sleeps, the judge. He is dancing, dancing. He says that he will never die.
Nov 14, 2009 1:39pm
Whatever women do they must do twice as well as men to be thought half as good. Luckily this is not difficult. -

Charlotte Whitton | The Quotations Page

Maybe it’s the Nietzschean in me, but I really, consistently appreciate the ‘Quote of the Day’ widget. If only people spoke more often in aphorisms…

Nov 14, 2009 1:01pm
Nov 14, 2009 9:44am
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]

MGMT, “Kids” … a decent song, sure, BUT NOT AT 5:00 AM!

Look, neighbor, I understand, you’re young and drunk, it’s been a long and thrilling night out on the town, the world’s awash in a sea of possibilities. But. But, really. Really. No more loud music at 5:00 a.m. There are other people in the world.

Though, to be fair, the last neighbor that lived right above me would do the same thing upon occasion, except her and her drunk friends would also sing and dance along.

Nov 14, 2009 8:39am

Times Agrees With Wikipedia

Check out this very subtle “fuck you” from the New York Times in this article about German courts trying to censor Wikipedia.

First Graf:

Wolfgang Werlé and Manfred Lauber became infamous for killing a German actor in 1990. Now they are suing to force Wikipedia to forget them.

Last Grafs:

In a written response to Mr. Stopp, Wikimedia questioned the relevance of any judgments in the German courts, since, it said, it has no operations in Germany and no assets there.
“We’ll see,” Mr. Stopp said in an interview. In an e-mail message after the interview, he wrote, “In the spirit of this discussion, I trust that you will not mention my clients’ names in your article.”

I guess their lawyer will be unhappy with the way the article turned out.

Two German Killers Demanding Anonymity Sue Wikipedia’s Parent | NYTimes

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