Goodreads
del.icio.us
Thought Sparks
a photo/text essay by Jeff Crouch, July 2006
"Zeno of Elea, famous for his paradoxes, assumed that at any instant, an instant being of zero duration, all motion stopped. Hence, Zeno showed the fast cannot overtake the slow, and yet the fast overtake the slow."
Noise, an Ode
by Benjamin Buchholz, July 2006
" As if I had flicked a switch, as if in mentioning your name beyond the blue screen some witching hour welled up into the realm of the physical, real, capital, combustible now. Those generators, ever-present licorice of my dreams, drowned long ago since the always, always around me, those generators die."
The Great American Toilet Seat Flap
by Dick Bakken, July 2006
"The Fourth of July—as we stand up to salute or sit down to ponder the flag that symbolizes our country—is an apropos time to discuss ongoing national controversy. And we Americans do hold some views too gut-level-passionately to be polite about them."
Denying the Irrational: Affirming the Subordinate
by Iftekhar Sayeed, July 2006
'To be economically and militarily weak was to be uncivilised, irrational. "We used to be a nation of artists," a Japanese diplomat once remarked, "but now...we have learned to kill, you say that we are civilised." When, on 30th January 1902, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was signed, Japan, it was said, had joined Europe: Japan was now free to attack Russia, as she had attacked China in 1895.'
The Erosion of Privacy
by Susan Lago, June 2006
'Several months later I stopped into Radio Shack to purchase a $50 gift certificate. "Driver's license, please," the clerk said. I told him I didn't see why this was necessary as I was, after all, paying cash. I asked to speak to the manager. A perspiring man with smudged glasses, the manager explained that they needed the information for verification purposes. He assured me my privacy would be protected. And furthermore, they wouldn't sell me the gift card otherwise.'
Masks: Meanings and Ideas
by Tala Bar, June 2006
"Human purposes in using masks are more subtle, because they do not depend on genetic makeup but on a purposeful, thought out, deceiving; their uses are many times psychological, their purposes are not only to hide but also to reveal a person's true nature."
from Road Dog: Tales from the Honkey-Tonk Highway
by Bob Malone, May 2006
"After the whiskey found it's way to my brain and blessed my overtaxed central nervous system with sweet relief, I was able to discern that the establishment I was in was a French Quarter legend called Tujague's ("Best Brisket In New Orleans"). This seemed as good a place as any to begin a well-deserved bender."
Psychological Ecology: Walking the Rice Paper
by Andrew P., May 2006
"This is what might be called psychological ecology; we have respected our being by not trying to make our mark on it. And psychological ecology leads to real ecology, otherwise, it makes no sense to expect a society to have less impact on this planet when each member of that society is positively encouraged to have maximum impact in that society."
Why the Beatles Made More Money than Einstein
by Sam Vaknin, May 2006
"Music and football and films are more accessible to laymen than physics. Very little effort is required in order to master the rules of sports, for instance. Hence the mass appeal of entertainment - and its disproportionate revenues. Mass appeal translates to media exposure and the creation of marketable personal brands (think Beckham, or Tiger Woods)."
They're All Insane and Do Nothing for Your Films:
A Conversation on Low-Budget Film with Matt Hoos, Mark A. Lewis, and Gabriel Ricard, May 2006
"GR: Yeah. But sometimes... you can be so in the thick of your idea that your perception of what can work and what won't can get a little screwed up. It's very easy to get petty.
ML: If you have a smart director who facilitated your vision... making it better... in a perfect world.
MH: It's such a tough balance between a director being able to put his vision on a film, while respecting the writer's original intent."
The Rucksack Letters: July 12, 2001—Tampa, Florida
by Steve McAllister, April 2006
"To truly understand why I'm doing what I'm doing is going to take awhile. Basically, I'm starting at the bottom again. I'm starting from the beginning. I want to learn everything again for the first time."
The Freedom Industry and the Dead Students of Bangladesh
by Iftekhar Sayeed, April 2006
"For years, a notorious gang of 20-30, allegedly with links to the Chatra Shibir and Chatra Dal [ruling coalition student and youth wings], has unleashed a reign of terror in the area. On the day of the incident the criminals raped three women, collected illegal tolls from about 50 traders and also tortured some."
Just War and the Construct of the West
by Sam Vaknin, April 2006
"Rights and corresponding duties are ill-defined or mismatched. What is legal is not always moral and what is legitimate is not invariably legal. Political realism and quasi-religious idealism sit uncomfortably within the same conceptual framework. Norms are vague and debatable while customary law is only partially subsumed in the tradition (i.e., in treaties, conventions and other instruments, as well in the actual conduct of states)."
The Thin Wet Line
by T. S. Ross and Jonathan Penton, April 2006
"In southwestern Texas, a section of the Rio Grande runs through a lush forest. On the US side of this area, you'll find the Big Bend National Park, an area of great pride to Texans. By day, tourists can enjoy a unique mixture of flora, fauna, culture and architecture. By night, Texans and tourists have occasionally been able to quietly sit inside their rooms and watch, through their windows, Mexican soldiers crossing the Rio with crates, and loading those crates into trucks."
Join the Resistance: Fall in Love
by CrimethInc., April 2006
"In this sense love is subversive, because it poses a threat to the established order of our modern lives. The boring rituals of workday productivity and socialized etiquette will no longer mean anything to a man who has fallen in love, for there are more important forces guiding him than mere inertia and deference to tradition. Marketing strategies that depend upon apathy or insecurity to sell the products that keep the economy running as it does will have no effect upon him."
Flogging Frey
by P. L. George, March 2006
"And now we arrive at Oprah, who's fast approaching canonization. She should be the last person leading the crucifixation of Frey. She misrepresents herself everyday, manipulating bored, ignorant, lonely housewives into believing that she is their friend, just one of the girls. And through that belief, she gets them to buy merchandise and contribute to charities that she gets a kick back from."
The Kids Are Alright
by Andrea Gregg and Pat Vert, March 2006
"She told tales of systemic racism, sexism, and abject poverty, the bulk of it stemming from three professors in particular. In return, the Assistant Dean tried relentlessly to force a confession from Andrea or some kind of sexual grudge she must have had against a professor."
Writing out of Hell: The Practice of William Carlos Williams and the Opening of the Field
by Paul Nelson, March 2006
"If that does not peg the state of the modern, TV-fed, terrorized American consumer, I am not sure what can. After all, North America is a continent made up of people escaping something. The spin we have been given is that of religious freedom and opportunity, and there is a kernel of truth in that. The truth is, in America, diversions from introspection have been perfected."
Russia: Revolution, Counter-Revolution: An Anarcho-Communist Analysis of the Russian Revolution
by Joe Licentia, March 2006
'Firstly, the revolution validates anarchist critiques of the "workers' state" or "dictatorship of the proletariat" advocated by Marxists and other authoritarian socialists. Anarchists have long predicted that these schemes would inevitably result in the creation of a new bureaucratic ruling class that dominated and exploited the proletariat, a prediction that was proven correct in Russia and subsequent state socialist revolutions.'
The Infallible, the Irrational, and the Sinister
by Iftekhar Sayeed, February 2006
'Virginia Woolf made the following entry in her diary: "On the tow path we met and had to pass a long line of imbeciles...They should certainly be killed."'
Paganism and Feminism
by Tala Bar, February 2006
"My contention is that, if a person has any religious inclination, that person cannot be a feminist unless he or she is a pagan. No male monotheistic religion can allow the advent of real feminism in society."
Reaganetic Biblical foreign policy: The Unacknowledged Precursor to Bush Jr.'s Antipathy Toward Democratic freedom
by Kane X. Faucher, February 2006
"Reaganism, as a prelude, privileged the faculties of capitalist super-oppression over the will-to-decency, a regulative function of thought that could produce systematic control over the rumbling desires that threatened to undermine the moral solidarity of the thinking subject—Just say No to drugs, but say Yes to Rambo."
The Spanish Civil War: From Syndicalism to Fascism
by Joe Licentia, February 2006
"On July 19th, 1936 the CNT, an anarcho-syndicalist union, and the UGT, a union affiliated with the Spanish socialist party, called a general strike in response to a fascist coup led by General Francisco Franco. The left-wing socialists tried to get the government to release arms to the workers so they could put down the coup, but the government refused. So the workers broke into the barracks and took the weapons themselves."
'...captured forever in the amber of ... memory and forming the substance of yearning dreams...'
A critical essay on Darryl Accone's All Under Heaven: The Story of a Chinese Family in South Africa
by D. Govinden, December 2005
'The Chinese who decided to come, however, nurtured many alluring tales about Namfeechow, (the Chinese, or Cantonese, name for South Africa) and of Johannesburg, whose Chinese name was Kum Saan. Most immigrants longed to come to this "city of the gold mountain", to seek their fortune, a place seen as The Promised Land. To other groups as well, Johannesburg is iGoli (its Nguni name), the city of gold.'
The Two One Five Shuck & Drive
by Timber Masterson, November 2005
"So, I'm prepping in the bathroom for my performance and what do I find but amphetamines. Basically, speed in a pill. Now this gets me excited, hot under and over the collar. One magical capsule down my gullet and I'll be off to the races, absurdly joyous and free, free free to be me and me! But that promise. To myself and friends back home. This would count as a definite relapse, no question."
All Endings Are the Same
by Lee Reynoldson, November 2005
"Once you start looking at it, you realise just how BIG things are, how long it takes the universe to do stuff. How stupidly short-lived we are. Obviously I mean how stupidly short-lived we will have been as a species. Not us as individuals. No, that's not even worth commenting on, no, that's just laughable."
an excerpt from Off the Map
by Chellis Glendinning, November 2005
"Impossibly in debt, Mexico gives in to World Bank austerity. Already maquiladora-factories cluster along the Mexican side of the border – taking advantage of wages one-tenth those in the United States, nonexistent environmental laws, and corporate-friendly tax breaks. Under austerity, regulations are loosened even more. A stampede of foreign investments is unleashed. The number of maquiladoras quadruples."
China's Underground Church
by Tom Bradley, October 2005
"I mustn't tell you what city this particular parish is in, for obvious reasons. But I can describe the grotesque neighborhood, 'Little Moscow,' in which I used to associate illicitly with this lovable bunch of interdicted religious oddballs."
The Rumsfeld Solution: Liberating Iraq, One Journalist at a Time
by Mike Whitney, October 2005
"The complexion of the conflict has changed dramatically since the election. The Pentagon no longer expects to win the war, so the strategy has changed to inciting widespread violence with the ultimate goal of destroying Iraqi society and dividing up the nation. Every random act of violence should be analyzed with this in mind."
Levees Made of Lies: Rage, Grief, and the Chimera of the American Dream
by Phil Rockstroh, October 2005
"But an unwashed, unruly mob of sticklers for constitutional process got lucky, that round, and they brought Nixon down. And, for our anti-American sins of self-doubt, we received Jimmy Carter, who delivered cardigan-draped bromides of thrift and Sunday school sermons of self-restraint and personal sacrifice ... and that sort of thing drove people to cocaine and disco."
My 500-Plus-Word Essay on How This Experience Has Effected My Life
by Luis Rivas, September 2005
"I showed up four minutes late for my first AA meeting from trying to find parking on a Saturday night at 10 pm on Ventura Blvd, red-eyed from lack of sleep the night before and with a three-day old beard. I looked as if I belonged. It was the facial uniform for the men."
Stuck in the Middle with You
by Jonathan Penton, September 2005
"The cops clearly felt that we had the right to protest and weren't going to sweat any small breaches of the criminal code, provided we didn't riot or otherwise make asses of ourselves. Having been raised in Atlanta, I wondered if these guys felt about us the same way that many Georgian police departments feel about the Klan."
Creative Commons Licensing: How Much, For How Long, Who, and Why?
by Tim Hadley, August 2005
"The Creative Commons website invites copyright holders to offer their web sites or other creations under Creative Commons licenses by displaying the Creative Commons trademark along with a hyperlink to the specific license the author has chosen. Numerous web site operators have done this, but some have then shown confusion about just what that means."
Medicating the Dead
by Phil Rockstroh, August 2005
"But Christ on a crack pipe, how long do we Americans believe we can go on like this, benumbed to the point of stupefaction, waddling about, cooing at all the shiny consumer goods, here, in our infantilized, corporate dystopia -- The United States of Teletubbies ..."
Narcissism in the Boardroom
by Sam Vaknin, August 2005
"The narcissist cares only about appearances. What matters to him are the facade of wealth and its attendant social status and narcissistic supply. Witness the travestied extravagance of Tyco's Denis Kozlowski. Media attention only exacerbates the narcissist's addiction and makes it incumbent on him to go to ever-wilder extremes to secure uninterrupted supply from this source."
An Abdicated King Recrowned
by Marshall Smith, July 2005
'Having traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, I can say with some assurance that it is a perfectly conventional practice for a man to take a younger man into his bed, in many instances, more natural than even a woman. Middle easterners engaging in such customs will cite various reasons for this, ranging from, "Women are dirty and for breeding only," to "I'm not gay. I don't catch."'
Moloch in the Mirror
by Phil Rockstroh, July 2005
"So we have a habitual need for distraction from the unease and emptiness - that persistent feeling that something is missing - that the garnering of more ... of something - anything ... is needed to fill the void ... that maybe we'll find it in a mall, in a catalog, order it online, find it on a restaurant menu, get a prescription for it, or bomb somebody in some far away place until feelings of safety, satiety, and well-being are bestowed upon us ..."
Free Jazz: The Jazz Revolution of the 60's
by Robert Levin, July 2005
"Four musicians (a saxophonist, trumpeter, bassist and drummer) abruptly began to play—with an apoplectic intensity and at a bone-rattling volume—four simultaneous solos that had no perceptible shared references or point of departure. Even unto themselves the solos, to the extent that they could be isolated as such in the density of sound that was being produced, were without any fixed melodic or rhythmic structure."
On Objectifying the Enemy: An Evolution through American Conflicts
by Marshall Smith, June 2005
"...this piece will only discuss slurring in military engagements of the 20th and 21st century. All readers looking for interesting slang used against the redcoats, the yanks or the confederates may stop reading now. Those wishing to hear me slander the hell out of the Germans, Italians, Japanese, Russians, Vietnamese, Middle Easterners of various creeds, and nearly all other cultured populations of the Earth are encouraged to continue."
The Power of Positive Thinking
by Bitter Pie, June 2005
'The daily activities were bearable, but the seminars were excruciating to sit through. The leader, spouting off about numerous success stories based solely on material possessions, the racially discriminating remarks about how "even black people can grasp this", the denigration of scientific thought and how "theories that try to prove we humans are descendants of apes is blasphemy", that education is "a waste of time because it takes attention away from what really matters: making money", and not to attend any sort of college institution because "all college professors are lesbians and fags".'
