Books I've actually finished lately: 117

Without my shadow I don't know how the other half feels.

- Nick Cave

(Jury's still out on the audio sample. Cave is reading it himself...)

Books I've actually finished lately:113

The description [in Minima Moralia] of a short-order cook in a place like Teddy’s Cafe, as ‘a juggler with fried-eggs’ is Nabokovian, though in addition to seeing the cook as a juggler Nabokov would probably have put a spin on the eggs too. I thought of this as I made a note in my notebook...

- Geoff Dyer

Inattendance

TOBY ZIEGLER: Was there any press there tonight?
ACADEMIC: For a poetry lecture...?

- The West Wing, 3;17

(Audio)Books I've actually finished lately: 88

Featuring far too many instances of the word 'sensuous' (and variants) - which ought seriously to've been reconsidered and/or edited when Derek Jacobi was booked to do the audio.

Books I've actually finished lately: 79

'Needless to say, ...'

an attempt to instrumentalise or "weaponise" poetry for the purposes of fighting "the cultural war" is probably not something the US military should be engaged in.

- Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, Poetry of the Taliban

Greatest line ever dropped casually into a curriculum vitae

I continued my education as an infantryman in Vietnam.

- Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States

War literature - what is it good for?

What are the humanities about if not the cultivation of an informed conscience, a habit of reflection in which the flow of thoughtless action and means-end calculation is interrupted by a consideration of historical contexts and ethical considerations, by an imaginative awareness of the character and consequences of action, by a deep investment in the human condition and its possibilities? If those with such knowledge and such capacities do not assume some kind of responsibility for worldly action, including the management of violence, then that responsibility passes to the Kilgores, and the Kurtzes, of the world. 

- Geoffrey Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America

Books I've actually finished lately: 54

Favourite footnotes: 3

Responding to the publication of the book One Hundred Authors Against Einstein, a work ostensibly directed at his physics, Albert Einstein said, 'If I were wrong, then one would have been enough.'

- Zia Haider Rahman, In The Light Of What We Know

Books I've actually finished lately: 43

Capitalism. I don't know. Capitalism means pain and fear but also a walk on the moon and a hybrid car and this email and all the comforts that make life less bad. Capitalism is just people and when we say it's evil, we're really just expressing our disappointment with people. In the fact that they're not better than they are. That they're just people.

- Aaron Thier

VEEP book-signing (Hillary Clinton eat your heart out)

1) WOMAN: Can you write: 'To Alice... This is to get you back.'? 

2) SELINA: Look at us. You pretending to be me signing a book I didn't even write.
      BEN: It's politics in a nutsack.

3) SELINA: What d'you think of that title?
      BEN: Well, you're so full of shit there's a colon right smack-dab in the middle.

- VEEP, 3:1

Circular vocabulary

TO:  Gen. Abizaid
CC:  Gen. Myers
FROM:  Donald Rumsfeld [and initialled] 

Attached are the definitions of "guerilla warfare", "insurgency" and "unconventional warfare". They come from the Pentagon dictionary. 

Thanks.

[via Errol Morris, The Unknown Known]

From the horse's mouth

What no-one understands is that I'm only a 'poet' when I'm actually writing the bloody stuff!

- Dylan Thomas: A Poet in New York

Books I've actually finished lately: 14

Ruth put a comforting hand on Albert's. He smiled, but he subtly pulled his hand away. Not because he didn't appreciate Ruth's attempt, but rather because he knew how many local rectums her fingers had been inside. Is it rectums or recta? he wondered. What's the plural? Perhaps tomorrow he would ride over to the next town and see if they had a dictionary. He would look up the plural of rectum. That would be a fun day.

- Seth MacFarlane, A Million Ways to Die in the West

Turning Japanese...?

Two Japanese girls on a late-evening commuter train, talking rapid-fire native, and then suddenly, in purest Californian:

Why d'you even cayre?

Also heard:

passive-aggressive
centre of attention
Oh my God...
No, you cannot have this: you cannot be cooler than me!
I'm a vindictive bitch.

Books I've actually finished lately: 10

Books I've actually finished lately: 8

Teensy bit snooty perhaps, but still...

I’ve been dipping in Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics and Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, for no particular reason, other than that I like thought — I’m sick of the relentless, numbing emotionalism of American culture.

- Aleksandar Hemon, in The Millions

Because I HAD often wondered...

Up to the Civil War “the United States” was invariably a plural noun: “The United States are a free country.” After Gettysburg it became a singular: “The United States is a free country.” This was a result of the whole mode of thinking that Lincoln expressed in his acts as well as his words, making union not a mystical hope but a constitutional reality.

- Gary Wills, via Andrew Sullivan