Alpa Reflex Camera with printed manual, designed 1944. Switzerland. Photo: Hans Hansen, Hamburg
And they pressed so hard on him that he was constrained to rest himself upon the towers of Notre-Dame.Louis Chalon, from Five books of the lives, heroic deeds and sayings of Gargantua and his son Pantagruel vol. 1, by François Rabelais, London, 1892
(Source: archive.org)
Listen, I understand it must be tough to see someone you love break the circle of death and rebirth when you’re nowhere near accomplishing it. But the fact is, I glued myself to my meditation cushion all these years while you bedazzled yours to use as an accent pillow. Your negative emotional state toward me won’t get you close to enlightenment, believe me. That’s assuming you still want it. And can relegate your scrapbooking habit to the back burner long enough to open chakra one.I know you’re upset about me abruptly quitting my job, but do you really think that an enlightened being should work the garden section of his local hardware store? After the Buddha emerged from under the Bodhi tree, did he start stacking bags of mulch? I always knew that at its core work was folly, but now I can’t ignore that fact any more. And, no, this has nothing to do with being overlooked for the assistant manager position, though that’s a case of spiritual discrimination if I’ve ever seen one. Did I tell you they wouldn’t let me wear my Ganesh T-shirt under my little red vest? Truth is, if I have to attend another Monday morning staff meeting with that asshole co-worker Brad, I’ll flip out and be back to spiritual square one.
long-horned orb weaver; photo by Nicky Bay
A frightening and violent mob swept through the normally quiet seaside community of Huntington Beach last night following a surfing competition in the area. Businesses were vandalized and looted, portable toilets overturned, and brutal fistfights waged right out in the open. It was an ugly display and a sad day for California. But more than that, it was a reminder that we must begin to seriously consider the values of our thuggish white youth.Many people don’t want to hear this kind of tough love, of course. They’d like to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that all white children are as sweet and harmless as Taylor Swift. But the reality is that the statistics tell a different story. For instance, according to research from the Department of Justice, 84 percent of white murder victims are killed by other white people [PDF]. Similarly, white rape victims tend to be raped by other whites [PDF]. White-on-white violence is a menace to white communities across the country, and yet you never hear white leaders like Pastor Joel Osteen, Bill O'Reilly, or Hillary Clinton take a firm stance against the scourge.
I took some apples out of a paper bag where they had been lying for a long time; I had to cut off and throw away half of many of them. Afterwards as I was copying out a sentence of mine the second half of which was bad, I at once saw it as a half-rotten apple. And that’s how it always is with me. Everything that comes my way becomes for me a picture of what I am thinking about.
Delay is natural to a writer. He is like a surfer—he bides his time, waits for the perfect wave on which to ride in. Delay is instinctive with him. He waits for the surge (of emotion? of strength? of courage?) that will carry him along. I have no warm-up exercises, other than to take an occasional drink. I am apt to let something simmer for a while in my mind before trying to put it into words. I walk around, straightening pictures on the wall, rugs on the floor—as though not until everything in the world was lined up and perfectly true could anybody reasonably expect me to set a word down on paper.
It is the nature of an hypothesis, when once a man has conceived it, that it assimilates every thing to itself, as proper nourishment; and, from the first moment of your begetting it, it generally grows the stronger by every thing you see, hear, read, or understand. This is of great use.
And so, among Jews, Braun now becomes a familiar figure: a shanda fur die Goyim. The Yiddish phrase translates, roughly, to “a shame before the non-Jews.” The idea is sort of two-fold: That more is expected of Jews, specifically by Jews; and that when a famous Jew fails to live up to those high standards, it makes us all look bad in the eyes of the rest of the world. Madoff is a shanda. Maybe Weiner and Spitzer. You get the idea. And Braun, now, will surely join their ranks.This is something relatively assimilated Jewish people still say, and still mean sincerely; it’s not just, like, a Twitter thing. But it is interesting that the phrase persists in the original Yiddish. That language, essentially a German dialect written in Hebrew script which is now spoken only by a handful of native speakers from Eastern Europe as well as by members of several Hasidic sects, is explicitly ethnic (yid is Yiddish for “Jew”) and as such unavoidably paints the world in expressly ethnic, tribal terms. To call someone a shanda, in other words, is to think in ethnic terms doubly.