bright steel rocking

"I'm crazy about this City.

Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it's not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stone masons. Below is shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things. Hep. It's the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it. When I look over strips of green grass lining the river, at church steeples and into the cream-and-copper halls of apartment buildings, I'm strong. Alone, yes, but top-notch and indestructible."

From Jazz by Toni Morrison

pic here

to constantly accelerate

"Because our lifestyle has become so expensive to maintain, every new resource now becomes exhausted at a faster rate. This means that the cycle of innovations has to constantly accelerate, with each breakthrough providing a shorter reprieve. The end result is that our creativity isn’t just increasing the pace of life; it is also increasing the pace at which life changes." 


From here

ultimate knowledge apprehended

Spirituality and science are different fields of enquiry. While the former examines the nature of the self and finds the same underlying truths in any culture and age, science measures matter and its truths change with every new discovery, developing discursive norms to describe its culturally specific version of the world - a necessary function of the means of production and exchange (scientific research is chiefly financed by corporations for the purpose of producing consumer goods). So the spiritually aware among us cannot be that enamoured of theories about the nature of material reality that currently predominate here in our technocratically advanced nations. Spiritual truth reveals itself in the individualised mind opening up to deeper and broader awareness, ultimate knowledge apprehended in the formless infinity of pure consciousness that underlies it, and serves as the singular basis of all material form. Which is neither culturally or socially specific, even if our modes of discourse are influenced by our period and place. But it is interesting to see how the limitations of current materialist enquiry bumps up against such truth. This pair of videos present the evidence from a Buddhist perspective, and is useful in drawing parallels between certain strands of scientific enquiry and spiritual understanding. I question that there are real parallels though, as science can never understand the nature of the self and reality by focussing on the world as exterior object, as ultimately this will always reveal itself as a delusion constructed by the viewer - as even science itself acknowledges. 

sweaty heated combat

"No sport is more physical, more direct, than boxing. No sport appears more powerfully homoerotic: the confrontation in the ring – the disrobing – the sweaty heated combat that is part dance, courtship, coupling – the frequent urgent pursuit by one boxer of the other in the fight's natural and violent movement toward the “knockout”: surely boxing derives much of its appeal from this mimicry of a species of erotic love in which one man overcomes the other in an exhibition of superior strength and will. The heralded celibacy of the fighter-in-training is very much part of boxing lore: instead of focusing his energies and fantasies upon a woman the boxer focuses them upon an opponent. Where Woman has been, Opponent must be."

From On Boxing by Joyce Carol Oates

pic: here 

like roman candles

Not expecting much from this as Jack's book gets the Hollywood treatment. The short trailer suggests a glossy literary heritage interpretation that couldn't be further from the ideas behind his artistic vision - which attempted to realise a textual interpretation of intoxicated youthful life in its moment-to-moment innocent wonder, using spontaneous and rhythmic prose that equated with Bebop jazz's improvised soloing. Also expect it to focus on drinking, sex and driving cars really fast, but miss the contemplative meditation on the state of being that characterised Kerouac's writing at its best. And for godsake, that voice-over. And that pretty boy look - like he's stepped out of a jeans commercial. Jack was handsome and he wore jeans occasionally, but he spoke with a conscientious delivery when reading his own words, emphasising meaning through poetic cadence and intonation. A long way from that breathy Dawson's Creek inflection Sam Riley has been coached to affect here.

more uses for dead books

Birdhouse

From: here

one damn thing

"Life is dead. Isn't that peculiar? It lies there inert and turgid, because it's not... You know, what the novelist does is inject symmetries and epiphanies and bestiaries and unities above all, and streamlines reality, so that it tells, you know, so that it can be told, in an enjoyable way, a stimulating way. But life is just one damn thing after another."

Martin Amis in an interview with Mark Lawson on the BBC 2010

pic: guardian

grounded and stoic

Engaged non-dual thinking for a post-postmodern world:


"This, then, is our post-postmodern politics, a grounded and stoic, yet joyful and celebratory engagement of the world as it is, in all its imperfections, with the end goal of using those insights available to fashion a politics of skillful means that is, at its core, always aware of its partiality and open to revisions of emergence and shifting conditions."

From: here
See also: