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Still she knows more about cows, horses and chickens than most people I know, who read Plato and Proust; she wanted to name her newly-born colt Platon but I told her the name was too precious and she said that it was musical and went well with his languid eyes. Imagine that. You cannot mention strange, exotic names in front of her; one never knows where they are going to pop up again.

José Rodrigez-Feo, Secretaries of the Moon

Written word: A play in one scene

~Cast~

Steve – Guy

Cam – Guy

Steve, dressed quasi bohemian, is sitting at a shitty kitchen table with a peeling linoleum top. He’s drinking a glass of red wine and has a cheap bottle (Cock and Bull or Fifth leg or Bowler’s Run or Gossips) beside him. He is looking over some pieces of yellowing paper. Cam walks in with a toasted cheese sandwich and book, he sits at the table.

Cam: [indicating to the bottle] Could I grab a bit?

Steve: Sure

Cam pours himself a drink and takes a sip.

Steve: Can I read you something I’ve been working on?

Cam: Yeah man - Go ahead…

Steve: Okay - - - alright:

The day was heavy. Ralph dragged himself along with the rest of the weight as his oddly shaped friend asked for a ciggy - “Sure”.

They went along for a while before Ralph said to his mate, “What’d you think of me Mum’s place?” – a thoughtful suck of the durrie – “Dunno, the wallpaper was a bit shit”. Ralph steadied his gaze on a crack a bit up the footpath, “Yeah, all wrinkled – like time’s gone funny”. They continued with a-

Cam: [interjecting] Whoawhoawhoa wow that was fucking awful and I could see it about to go to a really bad place just there St-

Steve: [cutting in] Where…

Cam: [finishing] Steve.

Steve: Where… ummmm… like whaddaya mean?

Cam: Very fucking shit and everything that is wrong with writing today.

Steve: Okay – but can you give some constructive criticism?

Cam: Construction?!… you’ve given me nothing to construct on. You’ve given me damp gizzards, shitty damp gizzards to construct on. That’s no foundation to work off.

Steve: Hhhhh… just back up your crit with reasons, there’s no need to be an arsehole.

Cam: Sure… ok. Reasons. Let’s go through. [Takes the papers from Steve]. “The day was heavy.”

Ok, not necessarily a bad start; but it does set the bar very fucking high. It’s saying, ‘I’m writing some literature here; Hey! Listen up! I’m writing lit…

No! - What it is is a fuck you! It says ‘Fuck you!’.

And I say ‘very well ‘fuck you’, I will accept that little invective as long as you back it up’.

So it starts with a ‘fuck you’… it starts with a ‘fuck you’ and follows up with nothing! Absolute jack shit.

The second sentence, “Ralph dragged himself along with the rest of the…” yadda yadda is nothing! You shouted ‘Fuck you!” and then just pretended someone else said it! Just looking around, avoiding eye contact, “wasn’t me…”.

And the rest…

[Eyes scan down the page]

Ah! This is what is so very fucking wrong with writing today. Dialogue! No one talks like this. No one, especially someone named fucking Ralph, would ever say, “All wrinkled, like time’s gone funny”. That is shit shit shit shit shit! Is this some kind of dream sequence Cartesian thought-experiment bullshit you’ve spliced in to give your shitty story some edge? Some thoughtfulness? Some depth? Fucking hell… So godawful fucking...

Steve: Well read some of your shit them!

Cam: I just finished a piece.

Steve: Read it then.

Cam: Alright I’ll just go get it.

[Runs out and quickly returns with some paper]

Cam: Cool, ok. Here it is:

There was once a sad little rabbit who made some mistakes. He felt bad about this and wanted to make amends. Unfortunately he didn’t know how to do this because he was so small in the world.

He never quite worked out what he could do and remained sad.

What could our rabbit have done? And how could he have gotten to know the world better?

[Cam looks up at Steve who is silent for a moment before speaking.]

Steve: That’s actually pretty great.

Cam: [quickly] It’s very fucking great.

Steve: Yeah…

Cam: Very fucking great indeed.

Steve: Yeah.

Cam: I’ve actually got a new piece I just started; couple of sentences…

Steve: Yeah?

Cam: Yeah, I’ll read a bit:

“Cunt!” yelled the lollipop lady, propped up in the back of her van. ‘That’s the last time I let some fourteen-year-old finger me’ she thought, tiredly watching the whippersnapper sprint out of view.

That’s all I’ve got.

Steve: Very fucking promising.

Cam: Very fucking promising indeed.

END

The education system is not serving any fruitful purpose in the society, except for keeping a handful of people in jobs. A larger objective of creating a healthy society, where all the needs of all human beings can be satisfied easily, is simply not on its agenda.

Sandeep Pandey June 2001

Full Article

The greatest audio-visual experience of your life.

Kafka - The third blue octavo notebook

More edifying than the sermon on the mount

It was one of those delightfully irregular houses where you go up and down steps out of one room into another, and where you come upon more rooms when you think you have seen all there are, and where there is a bountiful provision of little halls and passages, and where you find still older cottage-rooms in unexpected places, with lattice windows and green growth pressing through them. Mine, which we entered first, was of this kind, with an up-and-down roof that had more corners in it than I ever counted afterwards and a chimney (there was a wood fire on the hearth) paved all around with pure white tiles, in every one of which a bright miniature of the fire was blazing. Out of this room, you went down two steps, into a charming little sitting-room, looking down upon a flower-garden, which room was henceforth to belong to Ada and me.

Bleak House

Philosophy as investigation, but not wholly cerebral.

Does morality have a semblance of objectivity? Don't just wonder! Get out there and do some groundwork. Find an 'immoral' agent; be 'good' around them. Do they feel a desire to change? Note it down!

We obviously dictate our own rules but maybe we are not impervious to other influences and rules that permeate the human sphere. Our architecture? Our literature? Our language?

Kant was in his study in his house so of course he found the moral law within himself: he never left Königsberg.

life is a fuckwit said the cleaner's son,

"it's not so bad", replied his weeping mum,

"life can be managed so it's not all that shit"

but we're all in Siberia without knowing it

Katerina Rudcenkova

I tensed as I passed a front yard with a little dog in it. He looked like he'd yap at me. But he didn't. He just looked at me without concern. I gave him a little nod to show my genuine appreciation. This seemed to have an effect on him and he altered the angle of his head. In a moment he was bounding towards the gate barking, realising what he was meant to do. I truly believe that the dog had been lost in thought.

Wittgenstein asked 'Can a dog hope?'. I wasn't sure till this moment. If a dog can wonder, I think he can probably hope. He may have been considering what kind of a dinner he was going to have. It is a small step from imagining the kind of dinner you'll have to then preferencing some dinners over others thinking that you'd be really happy if it was one of your favourites and wanting that to happen. Which is what I think hope is.

The irreproachable wisdom of Arvo Pärt.

Reviewer Mark is unimpressed with his purchase 'Plato: Complete Works'. What the fuck were you expecting Reviewer Mark?

I love that Reviewer Mark's walked into a bookstore, taken this off the shelf like a it's new release and thought, 'Cool, looks like it might have some interesting ideas', taken it home and started to read it only to be appalled by its poor reasoning so he immediately jumped on goodreads to let people know not to even bother with this book filled with works THAT WERE WRITTEN BEFORE LOGIC WAS INVENTED!

I love the candour Reviewer Mark but let's have a little context.

Certainly what I had experienced in the library and was trying to protect was still pleasure, but it was no longer selfish pleasure, or at least its selfishness (for all the fruitful altruisms in nature develop in a selfish way, human altruism that is not selfish is sterile, like the altruism of a writer who breaks off his work to see a friend in trouble, or to accept a public office, or to write propaganda articles) is of a kind that is useful for other people.

Proust regarding the duties of an artist. From Time Regained.

The taxi driver shared something with me.

"I sat on a wall looking over Pompeii and wept because nothing, excusing technological advances, has changed. Buses still move about like horses used to, we still fight, our problems are the same problems..." Ok, this guy is onto something. He continued: "I mean, why haven't we built a civilisation in the sky or greenhouses on roofs. Like vegetable gardens." Ooohhhhh god he had me fooled, he is not a deep thinker.

Is there something at least a bit insane about a critic demanding a gallery space free of "jarring juxtapositions" so that they may have a more "sincere and genuine" experience?

Just piss off. The world doesn't owe you anything mate.

I’m not saying Monet’s work is of any greater depth than the diary of a teenager. It is, however, the enormous readership and cultural permeation of Monet’s paintings that makes them worth contemplating. We are seeing the materials used to construct ‘us’ firsthand. We are seeing part of the architecture of ourselves.

If we are to look at literature as Popperian myth-making we can’t evaluate it in terms of its predictive power. That cheapens the human lot. What we want is to explain and understand ourselves in a thousand different ways, not find singular inevitable paths.

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Love is not the child of poverty