Text based life-form. Wry, Misanthrope, Reading (lots), Long Drives, Baseball, Baking, Hiking. I read multitudes.
Minneapolis MN, Hayward WI
Joined September 2008
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There is a lot to be happy about in last night’s election results, but I am the happiest about Keith Ellison’s reelection. @keithellison
Keith Ellison: "Donald Trump demanded we turn on our Somali neighbors, and we said 'no way, never!' He demanded that we turn on our immigrant and refugee neighbors, and we say, 'no way, never!' He demanded that we turn on our trans neighbors, and we said 'absolutely not' ... tonight, we showed up for each other again."
Doug Armato retweeted
Remember when all the Big Tech, Wall Street, Big Law, media, and universities bent the knee to Trump? That was less than two years ago.
Excited @rnmackenzie_ray’s translation of Barbey d’-Aurevilly’s spooky THE BEWITCHED is out. It centers on a half-dead apostate priest, Abbé de la Croix-Jugan, “a creature formed to overpower the imaginations of others . . . for history has its rhapsodies just as poetry does.”
Reading Le Carré’s THE SECRET PILGRIM in which the effete and traitorous spymaster Bill Hayden makes a languid appearance: “His was furious. I would never have imagined that lethargy could convert to such violent anger. . . . even in passion he conveyed a deadly casualness.”
Last night finished De Quincey’s marvelous MEMOIRS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER. He follows a section on the pleasures of the drug with an account of the struggle to wean himself from its dominion, which he refers to as an “Iliad of woes” — truly a siege upon his own mind and body.
“The dread book of account of which the scriptures speak is, in fact, the mind of each individual,” postulates De Quincey in OPIUM-EATER. “There is no such thing as ultimate forgetting . . . [it] remains forever just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day.”
“I confess it, as a besetting infirmity of mine, that I am too much a Eudaemonist; I hanker too much after a state of happiness, both for myself and others; I cannot face misery, whether my own or not.” Thomas De Quincey, MEMOIRS OF AN OPIUM-EATER
“The druggist (unconscious minister of celestial pleasures),” recalls De Quincey of his first purchase of opium from an unprepossessing Oxford St. shopkeeper, “has ever since figured in my mind as a beatific vision sent down to earth on a special mission to myself.” OPIUM-EATER
In De Quincey’s notorious MEMOIRS OF AN ENGLISH OPIUM-EATER, a solicitous friend suggests opium as remedy for a crippling toothache, but the young Thomas quickly finds it has much wider curative powers: “Here was a panacea for all human woes; here was the secret of happiness.”
The clockwork of vague guilt and anxiety in Simenon’s THE VENICE TRAIN: “He had gotten into the habit of thinking things over. It had become a mania. He did it without realizing it, as though he had a little mechanism in his head that was always ticking, even at night.”