∞
You speak of ‘the curriculum [you] impose,’ but I deny that you have the right to impose anything. I am passing through this place, headed for the next stage of my life — possibly graduate education in some form or another, more probably a job — and I am paying you to prepare me for that next stage. In short, we have a business contract in which I am your client, and it is your job to serve what I perceive my needs to be, not what you may happen to think they are. It’s not as though we’re living in that long-ago age when universities were considered repositories of timeless wisdom and professors custodians of that wisdom. You faculty are employees of an ideological state apparatus in a neoliberal regime that constitutes itself by a series of implied or explicit contracts in which goods are exchanged for fees. Please stop acting like this is the University of Paris in the age of Aquinas and we’re all seeking transcendent wisdom. I control my own values and am not even interested in yours, much less willing to be subservient to them. So do the job I am paying you to do and shut up about all that other crap.
∞
When we started, and were playing in pubs, I wasn’t the singer … I was the drunk rhythm guitarist who wrote all these weird songs. We went through about five different singers – they were f***ing useless, basically. I always ended up thinking, ‘I could do better than this.’ … I mean, I hated my voice, but I didn’t hate it more than I hated everyone else’s voice … So I thought, 'If I can get away with that, I can be the singer.’ I’ve worked on that basis ever since.
Robert Smith of The Cure. I feel like this is a parable of something, but I’m not sure what.
∞
[gallery] fromwithinabook:
Last week these two book sculptures joined Byard Art’s Mixed Summer Exhibition, which continues until 13 Sep
∞
[gallery]
∞
the chief principles of Texas driving as I have inferred them in my 26 months of living in the Lone Star State
- At some point during the execution of a right turn, but always before your car is completely out of the road you have been driving on, be sure to come to a full stop.
- Merge onto interstate highways at a speed no greater than 35 miles per hour.
- Once on the interstate, if you are driving below the speed limit, make sure to stay in the far left lane and never leave it for any reason except to exit.
∞
Al helped himself to my fries as I chatted him up over a dinner of ‘ugly burger’ (double-decker burger and fried egg on toasted wheat). He told me about his stint with the Marines during World War II, and how he had watched the Enola Gay take off on its fateful flight to Hiroshima. I asked him what his secret to long life was. He said it was the wrong question. ‘I would recommend that you don’t live past 80,’ he said. ‘This 100 business is the worst.’
∞
The full significance - canonically, ecumenically and theologically - of Francis’s bold move will be picked over for a long time. But its real point is to bring healing. Many suffer hugely as result of abortion, but it is a silent suffering, that in contemporary society can barely ever be acknowledged. Those who have taken the lives of the unborn long to unburden themselves, to admit to their sorrow, confusion and regret, and to find healing. This is what the Church - God’s heart amid humanity - exists for: a battlefield hospital, ready to tend the wounds inflicted by contemporary mythology about individual sovereignty.Yet many are persuaded - by the strident voices asserting women’s “right” to abort - that the Catholic Church is a place of judgement and condemnation. If just some among these women in pain hear a different message - which given yesterday’s massive coverage is very likely - and if among those some take up this offer of liberation from guilt and a path back to God - which is also very likely - then Pope Francis’s grand gesture will have succeeded spectacularly.
∞
[gallery columns=“1” size=“full” ids=“17875”]
Dan K Norris creates alternative movie and TV posters. Via Tim Carmody on Twitter.
