my dustbin of history

             

“It doesn’t make a damned bit of difference who wins the war to someone who’s dead.” 

Joseph Heller, Catch-22

“To have faith means to dare, to think the unthinkable, yet to act within the limits of the realistically possible.”“Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair. If one truly responds to man and his future, i.e.,...

“To have faith means to dare, to think the unthinkable, yet to act within the limits of the realistically possible.”

“Optimism is an alienated form of faith, pessimism an alienated form of despair. If one truly responds to man and his future, i.e., concernedly and “responsibly,” one can respond only by faith or by despair. Rational faith as well as rational despair are based on the most thorough, critical knowledge of all the factors that are relevant for the survival of man. The basis of rational faith in man is the presence of a real possibility for his salvation: the basis for rational despair would be the knowledge that no such possibility can be seen.”

“The statement, “Human nature is evil,” is not a bit more realistic than the statement, “Human nature is good.” But the first statement is much easier to make: anyone who wants to prove man’s evilness finds followers most readily, for he offers everybody an alibi for his own sins — and seemingly risks nothing. Yet the spreading of irrational despair is in itself destructive, as all untruth is; it discourages and confuses. Preaching irrational faith or announcing false Messiahs is hardly less destructive — it seduces and then paralyzes.”

“Humanist radicalism … seeks to liberate man from the chains of illusions; it postulates that fundamental changes are necessary, not only in our economic and political structure but also in our values, in our concept of man’s aims, and in our personal conduct.To have faith means to dare, to think the unthinkable, yet to act within the limits of the realistically possible; it is the paradoxical hope to expect the Messiah every day, yet not to lose heart when he has not come at the appointed hour. This hope is not passive and it is not patient; on the contrary, it is impatient and active, looking for every possibility of action within the realm of real possibilities.”

Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (library) | BrainPickings

skunkbear:

“In a time before the digital devices that we’re used to today, it was humans that were doing the calculations,” says author Nathalia Holt. “And so you needed these teams of people — many of whom were women, especially during World War II — and they were responsible for the math.”

Holt wrote a book about these badasses (called “Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars”) and we interviewed her. You can read some of the highlights here.

Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars 

(via kenyatta)

“I like grit, I like love and death, I’m tired of irony.” “Jim Harrison, whose lust for life — and sometimes just plain lust — roared into print in a vast, celebrated body of fiction, poetry and essays that with ardent abandon explored the natural...

“I like grit, I like love and death, I’m tired of irony.” 

“Jim Harrison, whose lust for life — and sometimes just plain lust — roared into print in a vast, celebrated body of fiction, poetry and essays that with ardent abandon explored the natural world, the life of the mind and the pleasures of the flesh, died on Saturday at his home in Patagonia, Ariz. He was 78.”

“A native of Michigan, Mr. Harrison lived most recently during the summers in the wild countryside near Livingston, Mont., where he enthusiastically shot the rattlesnakes that colonized his yard, and during the winters in Patagonia, where he enthusiastically shot all kinds of things.

In both places, far from the self-regarding literary soirees of New York, for which he had little but contempt, and the lucre of Hollywood, where he had done time as a dazzlingly dissolute if not altogether successful screenwriter, he could engage in the essential, monosyllabic pursuits that defined the borders of his life: to walk, drive, hunt, fish, cook, drink, smoke, write.”

“Barring love I’ll take my life in large doses alone–rivers, forests, fish, grouse, mountains. Dogs.” 

“There was the eating. Mr. Harrison once faced down 144 oysters, just to see if he could finish them. (He could.)

There was the drinking. One fine summer, he personally tested 38 varieties of Côtes du Rhône. (“It was like a small wine festival. Just me, really,” he told The Washington Post afterward.)

There was the drugging…There was the hobnobbing…All these ingredients were titanically encapsulated in a dinner Mr. Harrison once shared with Orson Welles, which involved, he wrote, “a half-pound of beluga with a bottle of Stolichnaya, a salmon in sorrel sauce, sweetbreads en croûte, a miniature leg of lamb (the whole thing) with five wines, desserts, cheeses, ports” and a chaser of cocaine.

But constructing Mr. Harrison merely as a rough-and-ready man of appetite — a perennial conceit of profile writers, and one he did relatively little to dispel — ignores the deep intellectualism of the writer and his work. In conversation, he could range easily and without affectation over Freud, Kierkegaard, Stravinsky, Zen Buddhism, Greek oral epic and ballet.”

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy… or they become legend.

Has happiness changed with age? Yes, I expect less of everything.

What’s the meaning of it all? Seems to me nobody’s got a clue. Quote Jim Harrison on that: Nobody’s got a clue.

Now, where did I put my cane?

The Last LionJim Harrison 1937-2016 | Paris Review 

“We are in a time when the one per cent are richer than any human has been before, an era when a jet is the new car and million-dollar rents are the reality. New York today is American Psycho on steroids. And despite the idea of interconnectivity via...

“We are in a time when the one per cent are richer than any human has been before, an era when a jet is the new car and million-dollar rents are the reality. New York today is American Psycho on steroids. And despite the idea of interconnectivity via the internet and social media, many people feel more isolated than ever, increasingly aware that the idea of interconnectivity is an illusion.”

Bret Easton Ellis: today’s American Psycho would be an online troll

“Some of the most widely acclaimed movies of the year have been science fiction, a genre that is rapidly losing the stigma it once had when compared with supposed “cinema” or its ink-stained cousin, “literary fiction.” So it’s appropriate that, in...

“Some of the most widely acclaimed movies of the year have been science fiction, a genre that is rapidly losing the stigma it once had when compared with supposed “cinema” or its ink-stained cousin, “literary fiction.” So it’s appropriate that, in one of the best pieces of Hollywood news in some time, novelist Zadie Smith is teaming up with filmmaker Claire Denis to go where neither has gone before: The pair are working with Smith’s husband, poet Nick Laird, on what will reportedly be a film set in “a future that seems like the present.” (Besides sci-fi, Denis is also making her first foray into English-language filmmaking.)

What kind of science fiction movie will Smith, Denis, and, kind of, Laird, end up making? A painstakingly crafted, broad in scope but narrow in focus look at interstellar immigration? (Kinda in their zone.) A near-future allegory about a Big Issue like most critically-acclaimed science fiction films these days? (In addition to Ex Machina, this loose subgenre includes District 9, Her, and Children of Men, and… eh.) A stealth remake of The Fifth Element? (Yes, please.) Until we know more details, we’re left to do the one thing sci-fi does best: speculate.”

PAPER

“I’m writing for black people, in the same way that Tolstoy was not writing for me, a 14-year-old coloured girl from Lorain, Ohio. I don’t have to apologise or consider myself limited because I don’t [write about white people] – which is not absolutely true, there are lots of white people in my books.

The point is not having the white critic sit on your shoulder and approve it.”
“I’d wanted to write a story for my daughters that told them something I wished I’d know when I was a boy: that being brave didn’t mean you weren’t scared. Being brave meant you were scared, really scared, badly scared, and you did the right thing anyway.”
Neil Gaiman, foreword to Coraline
©2011 Kateoplis