Another Jigger Of Rye

Brian Phelan, writer. Welcome to my world of procrastination. For all things literary I'll be here having a jigger of rye with Don Birnam. For non-verbal kicks there's The Thrill Of It All, for music Unseen Power of the Picket Fence. my own photos can be found lurking on Eyes Wide Shut. while musings on film reside at The Stuff Dreams Are Made Of.

[secretcinema2]

Irish Dance Hall, The Bronx, 1954, George Zimbel

[arkoftheache]

Love is by definition an unmerited gift; being loved without meriting it is the very proof of real love. If a woman tells me: I love you because you’re intelligent, because you’re decent, because you buy me gifts, because you don’t chase women, because you do the dishes, then I’m disappointed; such love seems a rather self-interested business. How much finer it is to hear: I’m crazy about you even though you’re neither intelligent nor decent, even though you’re a liar, an egotist, a bastard.

Milan Kundera (via heteroglossia)

[lifeinthearctic]

in the 18th and 19th centuries, wealthy british and european lovers exchanged ‘eye miniatures…’ love tokens so clandestine that even now it is almost impossible to identify their recipients or the people they depict. they were meant to be worn inside the lapel, near the heart.

[worldsandemanations]

René Magritte L’apparition (The Apparition), 1928

[abstrakshun]

Shahzia Sikander (Pakistani, b.1969)

sequence of stills from her HD video animation Singing Suns (3 min 24 s) with music by Du Yun  -  2016 

A one-minute extract of Singing Suns is available here on vimeo*

*When watching for the very first time, I strongly suggest setting the volume to zero or dis-activating the audio altogether - but that’s just me, Jeffrey.

[days-of-reading]

On April 20, 1970, the poet Paul Celan left his home in Paris, walked to a bridge over the River Seine, and jumped to his death. He left a biography of Hölderlin open on his desk, with the following words underlined: Sometimes this genius goes dark and sinks down into the bitter well of his heart. The sentence does not end there. Celan chose not to underline the rest: but mostly his apocalyptic star glitters wondrously.

Maggie Nelson, The Red Parts: a Memoir (via days-of-reading)

[neutron669]

slimesunday

Lucid dream compilation

[coeuropale]

“I’ve dreamed a lot. I’m tired now from dreaming but not tired of dreaming. No one tires of dreaming, because to dream is to forget, and forgetting does not weigh on us, it is a dreamless sleep throughout which we remain awake. In dreams I have achieved everything.”

Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (via sultrees)

[yama-bato]

Paris, Notre Dame, Evening by Yoshijiro Urushibara

[manyphasedgod]

Spirited Away (2001)

[statuvariabilis-deactivated2014]

[lajetee]

La chinoise (1967), dir. Jean Luc Godard

[philosophybits]

The truth is a trap: you cannot get it without it getting you.

Søren Kierkegaard, from Papers and Journals, transl. by Alastair Hannay (Penguin, 2015)

[art-and-anarchism-deactivated20]

“Nothing is more anarchic than power: power does what it wants.”

[tragikempyre-deactivated2013040]

[lightspeedsound]

oh god, forever reblog 

[secretcinema2]

“Ratfucking” was the word used by Donald Segretti and a number of other officials in the Nixon White House for the dirty tricks they ran in student elections when they all were at the University of Southern California. Segretti — as well as his pal, Dwight Chapin — simply transferred these techniques to our national elections. There are two basic philosophical foundation stones to ratfucking. The first is that political sabotage for its own sake is a worthy enough goal. There doesn’t necessarily have to be an obvious purpose or obvious logic behind it. Everything is simply tactics. Those tactics either work or they don’t. To believe this, of course, one must first believe that all politics is essentially a zero-sum game of power; you win and the other guy loses. One cannot for a moment contemplate the notion that politics, and therefore, government, has anything to do with the public good. The second basic philosophical tenet of ratfucking is that it is essentially bullying. It is about ridicule and deceit as ends in themselves. Segretti’s activities were meant to bring embarrassment and public scorn upon his targets. They were not aimed at proving to voters that the opposition was wrong. They were aimed at making it look ridiculous. — Charles P. Pierce, Esquire, 2013

[sacredwhores]

Jindřich Polák - Ikarie XB 1 (1963)

[gyllenhey]

A Quiet Passion (2016) dir. Terence Davies