I read The Last Lecture quickly, huddled in the tiny, drafty studio apartment that I lived in for six months in Manhattan’s Koreatown following the end of a relationship for which I’d given up a great 1 BR on the Lower East Side. I was newly single, sleeping on the extra long twin bed that I’d had since my youth, and I’d work all day at the company I’d started and then late in the evening would snuggle into bed and read books with WQXR playing softly on my clock radio.

I guess, then, I read this book at the right time. It’s a story told by a Carnegie Mellon professor, more than a little cocky, who was dying of pancreatic cancer. The story is the last lecture that he gave, his reflections on life. While he comes across as just the kind of smart-ass I loathe, at the same time, I think I found parts of his personality despicable because he reminded me of, in part, me.

What follows are passages that spoke to me at the time:

From Chapter 4, ‘The Parent Lottery’:

“Just because you’re in the driver’s seat,” [my father would] say, “doesn’t mean you have to run people over.”

From Chapter 14, ‘The Dutch Uncle’:

Anyone who knows me will tell you I’ve always had a healthy sense of myself and my abilities. I tend to say what I’m thinking and what I believe. I don’t have much patience for incompetence.

These are traits that have mostly served me well. But there are times, believe it or not, when I’ve come across as arrogant and tactless. That’s when those who can help you recalibrate yourself become absolutely critical.

From Chapter 23, ‘I’m on My Honeymoon, But If You Need Me…’

Time must be explicitly managed, like money…

You can always change your plan, but only if you have one. I’m a big believer in to-do lists. It helps us break life into small steps. I once put “get tenure” on my to-do list. That was naive. The most useful to-do list breaks tasks into small steps. It’s like when I encourage [my son] Logan to clean his room by picking up one thing at a time.

Ask yourself: Are you spending your time on the right things? …

Develop a good filing system. When I told [my wife] Jai I wanted to have a place in the house where we could file everything in alphabetical order, she said I sounded way too compulsive for here tastes. I told her: “Filing in alphabetical order is better than running around and saying, ‘I know it was blue and I know I was eating something when I had it.’”

Rethink the telephone…

Delegate. As a professor, I learned early on that I could trust bright, nineteen-year-old students with the keys to my kingdom, and most of the time, they were responsible and impressive. It’s never too early to delegate.

Take a time out. It’s not a real vacation if you’re reading email or calling in for messages. When Jai and I went on our honeymoon, we wanted to be left alone. My boss, however, felt I needed to provide a way for people to contact me. So I came up with the perfect phone message:

“Hi, this is Randy. I wanted until I was thirty-nine to get married, so my wife and I are going away for a month. I hope you don’t have a problem with that, but my boss does. Apparently, I have to be reachable.” I then gave the names of Jai’s parents and the city where they live. “If you call directory assistance, you can get their number. And then, if you can convince my new in-laws that your emergency merits interrupting their only daughter’s honeymoon, they have our number.”

We didn’t get any calls.

Some of my time management tips are dead-on serious and some are a bit tongue-in-cheek. But I believe all of them are worth considering.

Time is all you have. And you may find one day that you have less than you think.

From Chapter 24, ‘A Recovering Jerk’:

This chapter explains a 360 review methodology that he developed to help his students get better insight into their ‘growth opportunities’ from a ‘team player’ standpoint. Every two weeks, he’d have everyone in the class rate everyone else on stuff like:

Did his peers think he was working hard? Exactly how many hours did his peers think he had devoted to a project?

How creative was his contribution?

Did his peers find it easy or hard to work with him? Was he a team player?

From Chapter 29, ‘Earnest Is Better Than Hip’:

Earnestness is highly underestimated. It comes from the core, while hip is trying to impress you with the surface.

I highlighted the entirety of Chapter 31, ‘Let’s Make a Deal’, which begins:

When I was in grad school, I developed the habit of tipping back in my chair at the dining-room table.

From Chapter 35, ‘Start By Sitting Together’:

This chapter’s also worth reading in its entirety, especially if you intellectually understand the importance of ‘networking’ but find it a wee bit vomitrocious on some levels.

Meet people properly: It all starts with the introduction…

Find things you have in common: You can almost always find something in common with another person, and from there, it’s much easier to address issues where you have differences…

Try for optimal meeting conditions: Make sure no one is hungry, cold or tired. Meet over a meal if you can; food softens a meeting…

Let everyone talk: Don’t finish someone’s sentences…

Check egos at the door…

Praise each other: Find something nice to say, even if it’s a stretch…

Phrase alternatives as questions: instead of “I think we should do A, not B,” try “What if we did A, instead of B?”…

From Chapter 39, ‘Be the First Penguin’:

Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.

From Chapter 53, “Never Give Up’:

“… If you’re going to be a salesman, you might as well be selling something worthwhile, like education.”

From Chapter 59, ‘Dreams for My Children’:

It can be a very disruptive thing for parents to have specific dreams for their kids. As a professor, I’ve seen many unhappy college freshman picking majors that are all wrong for them. Their parents have put them on a train, and too often, judging by the crying during my office hours, the result is a train wreck.

I’m glad I read The Last Lecture.

I’m also glad that that relationship ended and that I lived in that drafty ground floor studio for six months. But I wish I hadn’t sold that bed on Craigslist!

When I first posted Pablo Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry” in December of 2009, the price for a copy of the hardback in which the piece was printed (William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues for Boys and Girls) was around ten bucks:

Now, though,it’s $20.76 at both Amazon and Barnes & Noble (and Borders.com redirects to the product page on BN.com).

!!! Is this standard for book prices over the past couple of years, or is this an outlier?

The Haiku

Fails the Bechdel test / Bloviations writ large / Not bad plane reading

The Short

Lengthy films in Thailand, all other factors equal, fared better than short films on account of the dollars-per-minute air-conditioned respite they offered their viewers. So claims my mother. Perhaps wordy books in the olden days fared similarly well against their more tightly composed cousins. What else could explain the description of Albert Camus’ The Plague as one of “the great novels of the twentieth century”? The verbose and repetitive expositions, many of which spout fountains of philosophical blah blah blah stylistically (but not substantively) reminiscent of Ayn Rand, could possibly be defended as a device that cleverly subjects the reader to that which the citizens of plague-stricken Oran were subject. But a clever device, while fine for the pages of the Hammacher Schlemmer catalog, does not a great twentieth century novel make, and boy are those bold words for Mr. Book Jacket Writer to have penned when only 72% of the twentieth century was finished.

It would be interesting to see how a book like this would be edited today. Its message is fairly no duh (though perhaps it was for me, thanks to the existential lit class that I often skipped) but it afforded me a fictional glimpse at the north coast of Africa, and there are some cats who make an adorable appearance. Its narrative style reminded me, for some reason, of Graham Greene’s The Captain and The Enemy, but maybe this memory was conjured only by the feeling and scent of the yellowing paper onto which the text was printed.

The Vocabulary Quiz

Know all these words? Then you got me beat.

• assizes
• carapaced
• embrocation
• fillip
• imprimatur
• lassitude
• multitudinous
• objurgations
• parapet
• pestiferous
• pestilence; pestilential
• strophes
• tenterhooks
• tocsin
• tremolos
• vouchsafed
• weal

Stuff My Dad Likes

The copy of The Plague that I read was ganked from my dad’s book collection. Highlighted in pencil decades ago by, presumably, my father:

“The important thing isn’t the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.” (Castel, p. 47)

(Does it matter that my father is a devoted Republican?)

It was undoubtedly the feeling of exile – that sensation of a void within which never left us, that irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire. (p. 67)

I didn’t need to mark this, as I stumbled upon these words by James Baldwin in Giovanni’s Room years ago:

Perhaps everybody has a garden of Eden, I don’t know; but they have scarcely seen their garden before they see the flaming sword. Then, perhaps, life only offers the choice of remembering the garden or forgetting it. Either, or; it takes strength to remember, it takes another kind of strength to forget, it takes a hero to do both. People who remember court madness through pain, the pain of the perpetually recurring death of their innocence; people who forget court another kind of madness, the madness of the denial of pain and the hatred of innocence; and the world is mostly divided between madmen who remember and madmen who forget. Heroes are rare.

Hmm. Maybe Camus said it better.

Dad Intersection Daughter

Thus, in a middle course between those heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the pretty of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that would have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress. (p. 68)

This reminds me of something I wrote in one my zine rants ages ago, something to the effect of my desire to tumble into a place where I am living and not simply existing. I wonder what my dad was thinking of when he highlighted the passage?

Hats Off

When a war breaks out, people say: “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But though a war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves. (pp. 35-36)

Ain’t that the truth. And if you think not, perhaps you have not experienced the delight of working in a modern American corporation?

People linked together by friendship, affection, or physical love found themselves reduced to hunting for tokens of their past communion within the compass of a ten-word telegram. And since, in practice, the phrases one can use in a telegram are quickly exhausted, long lives passed side by side, or passionate yearnings, soon declined to the exchange of such trite formulas as: “Am well. Always thinking of you. Love.” (p. 65)

But are we not often hunting for tokens of affection in one way or another?

The common lot of married couples. You get married, you go on loving a bit longer, you work. And you work so hard that it makes you forget to love. (p. 77)

Oh, please say it isn’t so.

Says Rambert, a journalist from somewhere else stuck in Oran away from the woman he loves for the duration of the plague:

“The truth is I wasn’t brought into the world to write newspaper articles. But it’s quite likely I was brought into the world to live with a woman.” (p. 80)

He continues:

“Public welfare is merely the sum total of the private welfares of each of us.” (p. 80-83)

!!!

But again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. (p. 125)

You could see, for instance, even the most intelligent among them making a show like all the rest of studying the newspapers or listening to the radio, in the hope apparently of finding some reason to believe the plague would shortly end. They seemed to derive fantastic hopes or equally exaggerated fears from reading the lines that some journalist has scribbled at random, yawning with boredom at his desk. (p. 173)

Again, extrapolating from tokens …

“At my age one’s got to be sincere. Lying’s too much effort.” (Tarrou, p. 192)

Ain’t that the truth?

A loveless world is a dead world, and always there comes an hour when one is weary of prisons, of one’s work, and of devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart. (p. 243)

Hats On

“sensibilitiy” (sic) (p. 178)

Context Clues

• There followed objurgations, screams, batterings on the door, action by the police, and later armed force; the patient was taken by storm. (p. 85)
• Whatever the reason might be, people living in the central districts realized that their turn had come when each night they heard oftener and oftener the ambulances clanging past, sounding the plague’s dismal, passionless tocsin under their windows. (p. 158)
• The silent city was no more than an assemblage of huge, inert cubes, between which only the mute effigies of great men, carapaced in bronze, with their blank stone or metal faces, conjured up a sorry semblance of what the man had been. (p. 161)
• And all the time nothing more important befell us than that multitudinous marking time. (p. 175)
• Throughout the first act Orpheus lamented suavely his lost Eurydice, with women in Grecian tunics singing melodious comments on his plight, and love was hymned in alternating strophes. (p. 185)
• Only a few people noticed that in his song of the second act Orpheus introduced some tremolos not in the score and voiced an almost exaggerated emotion when begging the lord of the Underworld to be moved by his tears. (p. 185)
• Then the storm-wind passed, there came a lull, and he relaxed a little; the fever seemed to recede, leaving him gasping for breath on a dank, pestilential shore, lost in a languor that already looked like death. (p. 199)
• [Rieux’s] lassitude had returned and from its depths he spoke, more gently: “[Grace is] something I haven’t got; that I know.” (p. 203)
• Thus today God had vouchsafed to His creatures an ordeal such that they must acquire and practice the greatest of all virtues: that of the All or Nothing. (p. 208)
• There was no question of not taking precautions or failing to comply with the orders wisely promulgated for the public weal in the disorders of a pestilence. (p. 211)
• The young deacon, his head bowed to protect his face from the wind, replied that he saw much of the Father, had followed the evolution of his views, and believed his forthcoming pamphlet would be bolder still; indeed it might well be refused the imprimatur. (p. 212)
• The authorities, who had long been desirous of giving a fillip to the morale of the populace, but had so far been prevented by the plague from doing so, now proposed to convene a meeting of the medical corps and ask for an announcement on the subject. (p. 219)
• And then [Gonzales] fell to conjuring up, as best he could, the once familiar smell of embrocation in the dressing-rooms, the stands crowded with people, the colored shirts of the players, showing up brightly against the tawny soil, the lemons at intermission or bottled lemonade that titillated parched throats with a thousand refreshing pin-pricks. (p. 222)
• Tarrou had moved and now was sitting on the parapet, facing Rieux, who was slumped back in his chair. (p. 228)
• “There was a big case on at the assizes, and probably [my father] thought I’d see him to his best advantage.” (Tarrou; p. 230)
• “I didn’t want to be pestiferous, that’s all.” (Tarrou; p. 232)
• Every passenger had reserved his seat long in advance and had been on tenterhooks during the past fortnight lest at the last moment the authorities should go back on their decision. (p. 273)

The Plague Intersection Flannery O

Tarrou remarked that he’d known a priest who had lost his faith during the war, as the result of seeing a young man’s face with both eyes destroyed.

“Paneloux is right,” Tarrou continued. “When an innocent youth can have his eyes destroyed, a Christian should either lose his faith or consent to having his eyes destroyed. Paneloux declines to lose his faith, and he will go through with it to the end.” (p. 213)

/

Albert Camus’ The Plague on Amazon.com | Thoughts on Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood

Picked up an uncorrected proof of Maxine Hong Kingston’s “unconventional memoir” I Love A Broad Margin To My Life a couple of months ago. It’s really a big long poem (free verse maybe? not sure if there’s a difference?), and for me, personally, I felt like I was sloshing through flooded language. The words and pictures oozed underfoot, and I felt grounded in nothing.  I rarely give up on books entirely — at the very least, I’ll read the first sentence of every paragraph — but I gave up on this a quarter of the way through. Just not my style.

(Admittedly, I am not fluent in the reading of poetry. This is possibly a stellar prose poem but I lack the literary sophistication to notice!)

Though, I learned the words ‘doubloon’ and ‘enow’, and I do like these bits:

Mother’s eyesight blurred; she saw trash as

flowers. “Oh. How very beautiful.”

She was lucky, seeing beauty, living

in beauty, whether or not it was there.

(p. 4)

Everywhere wander people who have not

the ability to handle this world.

(p. 14)

When I

complete this sentence, I shall begin

taking my sweet time to love the moment-

to-moment beauty of everything. Every one. Enow.

(p. 223; final line)

I am not a fan of the preciously twee but twee in leetle-beady doses is okay by me. As spotted at Watson Kennedy in Seattle this past week:

1.  A dozen completely fabulous file folders which of course will by themselves naturally organize my 77 boxes of paperstuffs into neat little piles.

2.  A very cute 2″x4″ hardback that reminds me of leafing through old women’s magazines at Ball State University’s Bracken Library.

3.  Umm, packing tape that looks like measuring tape. Duh.

I know, I know: that which counts cannot always be counted, and what’s counted doesn’t always count. But still!

If you are ever in Seattle, I highly recommend stopping by Watson Kennedy. The location I was at was at 1022 First Avenue; (206) 652 8350.

Wish list:

• A trio of mini-notebooks by Cavallini & Co.
• Telephone thank-you cards by Cavallini & Co.
• Keep Calm & Carry On rubber stamp (a reminder to higher-ups!)

The “short”:

I can’t figger out if the engrossing world that Flannery O’Connor creates draws me in ’cause it’s a world I’m sorta familiar with (a small Midwestern town that gits dusty in the summer and is populated by people who’s liable to say reckon) and yet not (given that people still wore suits back then) — if it intrigues me ’cause it’s about a man’s struggle with faith — but no matter why I got sucked in, I did, and I’m still thinkin’ ’bout this book and I imagine I will for a while. It has a koan-like quality for me, but I’m not edumacated ‘nough to know if it’s ’cause she’s a real good writer and stuff, or if it’s more like Wise Blood is like them poems I used to try and write in high school about, like, forsythia bushes, tryin’ all hard to be deep and stuff and floaty and ambiguous and mysterious but really all surface and no substance. But if Wise Blood’s all surface then I guess I’m okay with that, I’m glad I read it, I’m still turnin’ it over, and maybe the effect the book had on me was sorta like the effect that the search for faith had on the main character Hazel Motes. But don’t worry; I ain’t gonna pluck my eyeballs out, orbital blowout or otherwise.

The “long”:

Hazel Motes is preachin’ outside a movie theater when interloper Onnie Jay Holy steps in and starts to bringin’ it to the crowd:

“Not even my own dear old mother loved me, and it wasn’t because I wasn’t sweet inside, it was because I never known how to make the natural sweetness inside me show. Every person that comes onto this earth,” he said, stretching out his arms, “is born sweet and full of love. A little child loves ever’body, friends, and its nature is sweetness — until something happens. Something happens, friends, and I don’t need to tell people like you that can think for theirselves. As that little child gets bigger, its sweetness don’t show so much, cares and troubles come to perplext it, and all its sweetness is driven inside it. Then it gets miserable and lonesome and sick, friends. It says, ‘Where is all my sweetness gone? where are all the friends that loved me?’ and all the time, that little beat-up rose of its sweetness is inside, not a petal dropped, and on the outside is just a mean lonesomeness. It may want to take its own life or yours or mine, or to despair completely, friends.”

(Stuff like this makes me feel bad for Osama.)

But Hazel Motes doesn’t want anything to do with Onnie Jay Holy, who was only tryin’ to help. So Onnie Jay Holy stamps his feet at Hazel Motes and speaks his truth:

“That’s the trouble with you innerleckchuls,” Onnie Jay muttered, “you don’t never have nothing to show for what you’re saying.”

Them’s fightin’ words, says this here wannabe-innerleckchul.  But Haze don’t back down, and he’s back the next day in front of the theater to preach to the folks comin’ out of the picture shows.

“Your conscience is a trick,” he said, “it don’t exist though you may think it does, and if you think it does, you had best get it out in the open and hunt it down and kill it, because it’s no more than your face in the mirror is or your shadow behind you.”

He sounds a little Buddhist here, minus the killing bit, insofar as he advocates an illumination of one’s shadow conscience, a bringing-it-out-into-the-open type action. Not sure I’d go so far as to say you need to skewer your conscience and jam it into your Ronco rotisserie oven for din-din, but it sure don’t hurt to know what you’re dealing with, to know what informs the way in which you interact with the world, to confront your own secret personal Jesus and take a look at it real good, no matter how ugly, shrunken, hideous, or un-sweet some if its parts may be. When we are gentle with ourselves, we are naturally gentle with others.

Continues Haze:

“If you don’t hunt it down and kill it, it’ll hunt you down and kill you.”

Now, now, Haze. I think we’re getting a little bit dualistic-mind there, don’t you? Take it down a notch, buddy.

But he doesn’t take it down a notch. Instead, he ratchets it up.

And by golly, just in writing this up I realize that this book has ratcheted up its rating in my mind. This thing is four stars. I can’t explain why. But I guess that’s just sometimes how it is. No rhyme. No reason. Just is.

——–

• Buy Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood on Amazon.com
• Read where that “gentle with ourselves” thing came from
• My thoughts on Bernard Shaw’s thoughts on Christianity

The short:

The preface to Bernard Shaw’s Androcles and the Lion is a recommended read for anyone not terribly familiar with the Bible.  Shaw’s exegesis is funny, dry, and sociohistorically illuminating — and still relevant.  Plus, the play’s pretty funny, too; mewonders if Shaw cast Androcles as a prancing fairy.

The long:

My father was raised Methodist by a man who had his own local Sunday morning radio sermon on all manners of, from what I gather, what not to drink and what not to say and how to shoot your arrow ever-narrower, ever-straighter; my mom was Buddhist.  That meant us four kids were the town heathens. By the time I hit sixth grade, the “burn in Hell” proselytizing was so 1981 — and generally, promulgated by the kids most likely to drink, smoke, fornicate, and not read so good — that I began to fly my atheism flag proudly.

My smug pride in my disbelief didn’t help me navigate sophomore English class, though, with East of Eden on the syllabus and knowledge of All Things Bible assumed.  Cain and who?  David and what?

If only I’d read Bernard Shaw’s exegesis of Mr. Jesus!  Then perhaps my A in sophomore English would’ve been a bit easier to come by.

Here are some notes from Bernard Shaw’s On the Prospects of Christianity, his preface to Androcles and The Lion.  The thoughts were written in London, December 1915 (which is an important socio-historical grounding).

Like the late Samuel Butler, he [Jesus] regards disease as a department of sin, and on curing a lame man, says “Thy sins are forgiven” instead of “Arise and walk,” subsequently maintaining, when the Scribes reproach him for assuming power to forgive sin as well as to cure disease, that the two come to the same thing.

From Matthew – The Savage John and the Civilized Jesus

(Or, why folks in my hometown said that my sister’s disease was because of that “miscegenation” my parents got up to.)

Then there’s this little tidbit in Matthew – The Teachings of Jesus that reminds me a little bit of Buddhism:

[Jesus] advocates communism, the widening of the private family with its cramping ties into the great family of mankind under the fatherhood of God, the abandonment of revenge and punishment, the counteracting of evil by good instead of by a hostile evil, and an organic conception of society in which you are not an independent individual but a member of society, your neighbor being another member, and each of you members one of another, as two fingers on a hand, the obvious conclusion being that unless you love your neighbor as yourself and he reciprocates you will both be the worse for it.

And in Matthew – The Miracles, I realized Bernard Shaw was a funny dude, and that even in the olden days (A&TL was first produced in 1913) not everyone was chanting a chorus of burn in Hells:

Jesus’s teaching has nothing to do with miracles. If his mission had been simply to demonstrate a new method of restoring lost eyesight, the miracle of curing the blind would have been entirely relevant. But to say “You should love your enemies; and to convince you of this I will now proceed to cure this gentleman of cataract” would have been, to a man of Jesus’s intelligence, the proposition of an idiot.

Never mind Shaw’s blatant intelligence-ism; this last sentence sounds like something I would think.  And thus, me like Bernard Shaw long time.

From John – Credibility of the Gospels, I hear notes similar to Russian authors’ explorations of the irrational (au courant, given the rise of the Men of Reason (see: What Is To Be Done?) in decades preceding A&tL):

… credibility is a subjective condition… Belief is not dependent on evidence and reason… Belief is literally a matter of taste.

He continues in John – Fashions in Belief:

… matters of taste are mostly also matters of fashion.

Which then builds into John – Shall he who Makes, Own?

We are bewildered by an absurdly unpractical notion that in some way a man’s income should be given to him, not to enable him to live, but as a sort of Sunday School Prize for good behavior. And this folly is complicated by a less ridiculous but quite as unpractical belief that it is possible to assign to each person the exact portion of the national income that he or she has produced.

And in John – Labor Time:

How much is a worker’s labor time worth?

When that question came up, the only answer was “as little as he can be starved into accepting,” with the ridiculous results already mentioned, and the additional anomaly that the largest share went to the people who did not work at all, and the least to those who worked hardest.  In England nine-tenths of the wealth goes into the pockets of one-tenth of the population.

And if you hadn’t yet fallen in love with him, he really makes this modern girl swoon in John – The Dream of Distribution according to Merit:

Against this comes the protest of the Sunday School theorists “Why not distribute according to merit?” Here one imagines Jesus, whose smile has been broadening down the ages as attempt after attempt to escape from his teaching has led to deeper and deeper disaster, laughing outright. Was ever so idiotic a project mooted as the estimation of virtue in money? The London School of Economics is, we must suppose, to set examination papers with such questions as “Taking the money value of the virtues of Jesus as 100, and of Judas Iscariot as zero, give the correct figures for, respectively, Pontius Pilate, the proprietor of the Gadarene swine, the widow who put her mite in the poor-box, Mr Horatio Bottomley, Shakespear, Mr Jack Johnson, Sir Isaac Newton, Palestrina, Offenbach, Sir Thomas Lipton, Mr Paul Cinquevalli, your family doctor, Florence Nightingale, Mrs Siddons, your chairwoman, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the common hangman.”

No doubt there’s a free-marketeer out there who reads this and thinks, “Why, yes, exactly; each participant in a market economy determines the value of each other participant, to them, and the participants who in aggregate are deemed the most valuable by other participants de facto receive the highest sum of monies.”

Which, of course, is entirely missing the point, which is — how can one estimate virtue via money? Here’s how: by being a boor!

And speaking on boors, Shaw continues in John – Vital Distribution:

They corrupt culture and statecraft instead of contributing to them.

And on the normative bias of fucking, in John – The Political and Biological Objections to Inequality:

Worst of all, marriage becomes a class affair: the infinite variety of choice which nature offers to the young in search of a mate is narrowed to a handful of persons of similar income; and beauty and health become the dreams of artists and the advertisements of quacks instead of the normal conditions of life.

I don’t know.  Call me crazy, but Shaw’s perspective on social issues still seem relevant today.

And if he’s summarized the Bible correctly, then, I totally want to make out with Luke (from Luke – Luke the Literary Artist):

Before you have read twenty lines of Luke’s gospel you are aware that you have passed from the chronicler writing for the sake of recording important facts, to the artist, telling the story for the sake of telling it.

Swoon!

Ye Olde Gutenberg Bible

I think we are well advised to keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not. Otherwise they turn up unannounced and surprise us, come hammering on the mind’s door at 4 a.m. of a bad night and demand to know who deserted them, who betrayed them, who is going to make amends. We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget. We forget the loves and the betrayals alike, forget what we whispered and what we screamed, forget who we were.

– From Joan Didion’s essay “On Keeping A Notebook”

Quoth the MoMA catalog:

Each of the three notebooks in this set features 64 blank, lined, or graphed pages. The three covers are adapted from Tadanori Yokoo’s works: Poster for a Noh Play (1969), Post for National Bunraku Theatre (1971), and Untitled (graphic image) (1974). comes with a stylish slipcase. 6″h x 4.25″w x 1″d.

• Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem contains “On Keeping A Notebook”
• Yokoo notebook set > at MoMAStore.org, $18.95; $15.16 for MoMA members
• Yokoo notebook set > at Velocity, $18.95

Bonus: you can keep on nodding terms with Japan’s early seventies’ design aesthetic, too.  !

To feel the love of people whom we love is a fire that feeds our life. But to feel the affection that comes from those whom we do not know, from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses — that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being, and unites all living things.

– From Pablo Neruda’s essay “Childhood and Poetry”

William Bennett’s The Book of Virtues for Boys and Girls includes Neruda’s “Childhood and Poetry” in full.

• The Book of Virtues for Boys and Girls > Hardback $9.99 at Amazon.com
• The Book of Virtues for Boys and Girls > Hardback $8.99 at Barnes&Noble.com
• The Book of Virtues for Boys and Girls > Hardback $9.99 at Borders.com

Photograph (c) 2007