Quotes & clippings

daveomitchell.com

[daveomitchell]

The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential, like a musical score or seed. It exists fully only in the act of being read; and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates. A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.

Rebecca Solnit, <i>The Faraway Nearby</i>

[daveomitchell]

His mind was freshly inclined to sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in the world one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact; that his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated, because, in this state, he could be of no help to anyone, and given that his position in the world situated him to be either of great help or great harm, it would not do to stay low, if he could help it. All were in sorrow, or had been, or soon would be. It was the nature of things. Though on the surface is seemed every person was different, this was not true. At the core of each lay suffering; our eventual end; the many loses we must experience on the way to that end. We must try to see one another in this way. As suffering limited beings- Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces. His sympathy extended to all in this instant, blundering in its strict logic, across all divides. He was leaving here broken, awed, humbled, diminished. Ready to believe anything of this world, made less rigidly himself through this loss. Therefore quite powerful. Reduced, ruined, remade. Merciful, patient, dazzled…

George Saunders, <i>Lincoln in the Bardo</i>

[daveomitchell]

The contemporary landscape of social media . . . is littered with the bitter fallout from an endless torrent of outrage and anger. Given the individualism of current social media platforms – premised on the maintenance of an online identity – it is perhaps no surprise to see online ‘politics’ tend towards the self-presentation of moral purity. We are more concerned to appear right than to think about the conditions of political change.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (Nick Srnicek & Alex Williams)

[daveomitchell]

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close at hand, and make it stand in for the whole....

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch

[daveomitchell]

No sovereign nation should be obliged to pay foreign debts that cannot be paid in the normal course of business. It also should be a basic premise of international finance that debts should be denominated in one's own currency. All hyperinflations have stemmed from trying to pay foreign debts, not central banks monetizing domestic spending.

Michael Hudson, The Bubble and Beyond

[daveomitchell]

There’s an old joke, which holds that in heaven, the cooks are French, the cops are English, and the engineers are German; whereas in hell, the cooks are English, the cops are German, and the engineers are French. We live in a sort of silly cultural hell where the columns are composed by Thomas Friedman, the novels are written by Jonathan Franzen, the debate is framed by CNN, and the fact-checking is done by no one.

Barrett Brown, “Stop sending me Jonathan Franzen Novels”, The Intercept

[riotpieces-blog]

What They Did Yesterday Afternoon, by Warsan Shire

what they did yesterday afternoon by warsan shire

they set my aunts house on fire

i cried the way women on tv do

folding at the middle

like a five pound note.

i called the boy who use to love me 

tried to ‘okay’ my voice

i said hello

he said warsan, what’s wrong, what’s happened?

i’ve been praying,

and these are what my prayers look like;

dear god

i come from two countries

one is thirsty

the other is on fire

both need water.

later that night

i held an atlas in my lap

ran my fingers across the whole world

and whispered

where does it hurt?

it answered 

everywhere

everywhere

everywhere.

Editor’s note: Warsan Shire’s poetry and words can be found on 

http://warsanshire.blogspot.com/

http://warsanshire.tumblr.com/

[daveomitchell]

I was learning the craft of poetry, which is to say I was learning the craft of thinking. Poetry aims for an economy of truth — loose and useless words must be discarded, and I found that these loose and useless words were not separate from loose and useless thoughts. Poetry was not simply the transcription of notions — beautiful writing rarely is. I wanted to learn to write, which I discovered was more than learning to record, was in fact an act of confrontation with everything I thought I knew. Poetry was the processing of my thoughts until the slag of justification fell away and I was left with the cold steel truths of life.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me

[daveomitchell]

One day you will be called on to break a big law in the name of justice and rationality. Everything will depend on it. You have to be ready. How are you going to prepare for that day when it really matters? You have to stay in shape, so that when the big day comes, you will be ready. What you need is anarchist calisthenics. Every day or so, break some trivial law that makes no sense. Even if it's only jaywalking. Use your own head to judge whether a law is just or reasonable. That way, you'll keep trim, and when the big day comes, you'll be ready.

James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism

[daveomitchell]

Can’t you see that the problem is you? That politics has nothing to do with being right, that politics is about succeeding? One can have the best analysis, understand the keys to political developments since the sixteenth century, know that historical materialism is the key to understanding social processes. And what are you going to do — scream that to people? 'You are workers and you don’t even know it!' The enemy wants nothing more than to laugh at you. You can wear a T-shirt with the hammer and sickle. You can even carry a huge flag, and then go back home with your flag, all while the enemy laughs at you. Because the people, the workers, they prefer the enemy to you. They believe him. They understand him when he speaks. They don’t understand you. And maybe you are right! Maybe you can ask your children to write that on your tombstone: 'He was always right — but no one ever knew.' When you study successful transformational movements, you see that the key to success is to establish a certain identity between your analysis and what the majority feels. And that is very hard. It implies riding out contradictions.

Pablo Iglesias, “The Left Can Win” 

[daveomitchell]

Politics isn’t, first and foremost, a matter of making allegations and raising awareness; there is no one straw that breaks the camel’s back, and what’s bad can be tolerated indefinitely. Instead, it is a sort of shedding of the skin, by which we become sensitive to this or allergic to that. Nor has it much to do with convincing (discourse), or seducing (marketing), but rather with opening all sorts of spaces to experience another way of living, another definition of reality, another vision of the world. In the struggle for hegemony, the skin – yours, mine, everyone’s – is the battlefield.

Amador Fernández-Savater, “Strength and Power Reimagining Revolution”

[daveomitchell]

Shaving is a way to start the workday by ritually not cutting your throat when you’ve the chance.

Ben Lerner, 10:04

[daveomitchell]

A writer takes earnest measures to secure his solitude and then finds endless ways to squander it.

Don DeLillo

[daveomitchell]

I accept the consequences of doing things which I will later regret. In a sense then I regret them before I do them. Instead of resolving to learn to cook I regret to inform myself that by the end of the year I will still not know how to cook (because I hate cooking) even though learning to cook would improve my life no end. Instead of doing the exercises that will save my right knee... I resign myself to regretting not having done something about what will, in a few years, be a debilitating, potentially crippling ailment. I resign myself to things: this is my own warped version of amor fati: regretting everything but resigning myself to this regret. However things turn out I am bound to wish they had turned out differently. I am resigned to that.

Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage

[daveomitchell]

Although I thought I had settled in Paris, really I had just been passing through, extremely slowly. That is all anyone English or American can do in Paris: pass through. You may spend ten years passing through but essentially you are still a sightseer, a tourist.... The longer I stayed the more powerful it became, this feeling that I was just passing through. I had thought about subscribing to Canal Plus as a way of making myself feel more settled but what was the point in subscribing to Canal Plus when, in all probability, I would be moving on in a few months? Obviously the way to make myself more settled was to acquire some of the trappings of permanence but there never seemed any point acquiring the aptly named trappings of permanence when in a couple of months I might be moving on, might well be moving on, would almost certainly be moving on, because there was nothing to keep me where I was. Had I acquired some of the trappings of permanence I might have stayed put but I never acquired any of the trappings of permanence because I knew that the moment these trappings had been acquired I would be seized with a desire to leave, to move on, and I would then have to free myself from these trappings. And so, lacking any of the trappings of permanence, I was perpetually on the bring of potential departure. If I felt settled I would want to leave, but if I was on the brink of leaving then I could stay, indefinitely, even though staying would fill me with still further anxiety because, since I appeared to be staying, what was the point in living as though I were not staying but merely passing through?

Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence

[daveomitchell]

Anyone who is willing to work and is serious about it will certainly find a job. Only you must not go to the man who tells you this, for he has no job to offer and doesn't know anyone who knows of a vacancy. This is exactly the reason why he gives you such generous advice, out of brotherly love, and to demonstrate how little he knows the world.

B. Traven, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

[daveomitchell]

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries most direct protests against social injustice were in prose. They were reasoned arguments written in the belief that, given time, people would come to see reason, and that, finally, history was on the side of reason. Today this is by no means clear. The outcome is by no means guaranteed. The suffering of the present and the past is unlikely to be redeemed by a future era of universal happiness. And evil is a constant ineradicable reality. All this means that the resolution—the coming to terms with the sense to be given to life—cannot be deferred. The future cannot be trusted. The moment of truth is now. And more and more it will be poetry, rather than prose, that receives this truth. Prose is far more trusting than poetry; poetry speaks to the immediate wound.

John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photographs