What I Bought
What I bought – 20 March 2013
An old Ukrainian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.”
That is a risk we will have to take. (Tom Robbins, from Jitterbug Perfume)
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What I bought – 13 March 2013
We must harness the revolutionary Poles in the fight against Russia, we must promise the separation of this land from Russia even if it means sacrificing Galicia, so that this giant may be weakened and driven back on Asia, unless the whole earth is not to be sooner or later divided between two powers: the North Americans and the Russians. (Field-Marshal Franz Kuhn von Kuhnenfeld of Austria, 1870)
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What I bought – ECCC edition!
I got a bunch of comics at the Emerald City Comicon (some I actually bought!), and some of them were single issues, so I figured I’d do like last year and review them all at once. That’s fun, right?
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What I bought – 27 February and 6 March 2013
George looked at his granddaughter’s empty suit. He thought of Job. Satan lacked imagination. To crack a man’s faith, one need not resort to burning his flesh, ruining his finances, or any such obvious afflictions. One need only take a man’s species away from him. (James Morrow, This Is The Way The World Ends)
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What I bought – 20 February 2013
There is not much importance in giving an award of importance to someone of no importance. (Joseph Heller, from Picture This)
What I bought – 13 February 2013
Sipping drinks on the porch in the sunset, Farsheed Shomloo, an immigration lawyer, pointed to a book on the patio table and told Jim, “You should read this new book about Iran, it’s really interesting.” Jim replied:
“I don’t want to read it. I know the outcome already. In Iran, there is beautiful poetry and everything turns out a disaster. Here the poetry is not so beautiful, but people are free to discover the best in themselves; that’s why America has happy endings. Here it’s a negative system: there is no entrenched despotism, no will to dominate. We immigrants can remake the whole country if we want to. It’s ours for the taking, as if there is a perpetual clean slate where nobody is ever owed anything. I’ll tell you, the Iranian revolution was a disaster for Iran and a success for America, because it brought a lot of talented, ambitious Iranians here. Every time there is a disaster in the Third World, it’s a good thing for America, since the best of the middle class finds its way here.” (Robert Kaplan, from An Empire Wilderness)
What I bought – 6 February 2013
“Italians have made the family an extremist group. The family is the instrument of revenge.” (Don DeLillo, from The Names)
What I bought – 30 January 2013
At this point one may note that men must be either pampered or annihilated. (Niccolo Machiavelli, from The Prince)
What I bought – 23 January 2013
And now let us believe in the long year that is given to us, new, untouched, full of things that have never been. (Rainier Maria Rilke)
What I bought – 16 January 2013
If so, that impression was in his mind on that last day of 1807 when he was forty and played Surrey to Burr’s Wolsey, exclaiming to the ravening crowd that Burr had “no religious principles, and little, if any sense of reverence to a moral Governor of the Universe.” How could even an Adams purport to know such a thing? John Quincy Adams’s theologically trained father would have been aware that one makes a statement about the state of another person’s soul at great peril to one’s own. (Roger Kennedy, from Burr, Hamilton, and Jefferson)
What I bought – 9 January 2013
She said, “In every age, there must be truths people can’t fight – whether or not they want to, whether or not they will go on being truths in the future. We live in the truth of what Freud discovered. Whether or not we like it. However we’ve modified it. We aren’t really free to suppose – to imagine – he could possibly have been wrong about human nature. In particulars, surely – but not in the large plan –” (A. S. Byatt, from Possession)
What I bought – 2 January 2013
The writer was pacing. “I have never been a violent man. I don’t believe in violence. Violence does not advance the human condition. Ideas do.”
“Ideas don’t perish in prison cells,” Levanter said. “People do.” (Jerzy Kosinski, from Blind Date)
What I bought – 19 December 2012
“And the good thing about feeling really happy, you know, Valentin? … It’s that you think it’s forever, that one’s never ever going to feel unhappy again.” (Manuel Puig, from Kiss of the Spider Woman)
What I bought – 12 December 2012
Indeed, the Republican Right, while it worries plausibly about the loss of traditional values in an era of peace, is an example of the deformities it decries, since historically prosperous societies which perceive no outside threat have been the only ones that have the luxury to preoccupy themselves with discussions about such things as sexual values. The problem, though, is that we have no such luxury. The peace we think we have is only an interregnum before another cycle of conflict. The narcissistic isolationism of the congressional Republicans – who call for enforcing democracy abroad while denying the State Department the tools it requires for our own security interests and who refuse to pay our U.N. dues – comes at a time when the world vaguely resembles what it was before the outbreak of World War I. (Robert Kaplan, from The Coming Anarchy)
What I bought – 5 December 2012
It came to me that he meant something different by “smile” than I did; that the irony, the humourlessness, the ruthlessness I had always noticed in his smiling was a quality he deliberately inserted; that for him the smile was something essentially cruel, because freedom is cruel, because the freedom that makes us at least partly responsible for what we are is cruel. So that the smile was not so much an attitude to be taken to life as the nature of the cruelty of life, a cruelty we cannot even choose to avoid, since it is human existence. (John Fowles, from The Magus)
