Robert Charles Wilson’s The Cronoliths is moderately good scifi. You can see in it much of the author’s style & themes that would later make the masterpiece that is Spin. Mark Cuban, in a lengthy but very worthwhile autobiography, tells how he believes a single new good idea in a book repays its money & time price many times over. These two quotes alone made The Cronoliths worth it for me:
There was joy in her life, but she expressed it in her work—she worked with an enthusiasm that was unmistakably authentic.
Her work, or her capacity to do her work, was the prize life had handed her, and she considered it adequate compensation for whatever else she might lack.
Her pleasures were deep but monkish.
He was lonely, but much of this was sheer intellectual loneliness. His conversation tended to trail off when he realized he had progressed to a level we couldn’t follow. He wasn’t condescending about it—at least, not very often—
only visibly sad that he couldn’t share his thoughts.
Few things are as satisfying as repaying long-forgotten debts to our older selves. Finally reading a book by Richard Rodriguez ELZR (Brown) is such a redress. Meeting again his very own brand of culture self-appropriation I find it more bracing than ever: his paragraphs make my skin tingle.
Despite laws prohibiting black literacy in the nineteenth century,
the African in America took the paper-white English and remade it (as the Irish and the Welsh also took their English), wadded it up, rigmarolled it, rewound it into a llareggub rap,
making English theirs, making it ideosyncratically glamorous (Come on now, you try it),
making it impossible for any American to use English henceforward without remembering them; making English so cool, so jet, so festival, that children want it only that way.
Mabel Mercer
[a black Englishwoman] performed the songs of Porter and Coward and such with a
perfect mid-Atlantic pronunciation, which is to say, without a trace of melanin in her voice. This was not ventriloquism or minstrelsy or parody
—I was disappointed to learn it wasn’t— but the voice was authentic to Mercer because she had been educated by British nuns who insisted upon public-school education. Another cabaret singer of that time, Anita O’Day, quoted in a book I can’t find, described Mabel Mercer thus: “That chick has the weirdest fucking act in show business.”
I would like my act to be as weird.
It is one thing to know your author
—man or woman or gay or black or paraplegic or president. It is another thing
to choose only man or woman or et cetera, as the only quality of voice empowered to address you, as the only class of sensibility or experience able to understand you, or that you are able to understand.
I wanted a desk that could
elegantly handle
(2) computers and its peripherals
(3 displays, 4 external hard drives, tens of cables…). I wanted to see as few things as possible, yet keep everything
accesible and
flexible. Here’s what I ended up with and some of the thinking behind it.
Loved this fragment because it encapsulates what I have been thinking for a few years about power. Unlike Pascal though, I’m not a cynic. Mostly because I have quite a positive appraisal of earthly “Good”/Justice. And because I see myself as powerful.
Justice, force. Il est juste que ce qui est juste soit suivi; il est nécessaire que ce qui est le plus fort soit suivi. La justice sans la force est impuissante ; la force sans la justice est tyrannique. La justice sans force est contredite, parce qu’il y a toujours des méchants. La force sans la justice est accusée. Il faut donc mettre ensemble la justice et la force, et pour cela faire que ce qui est juste soit fort ou que ce qui est fort soit juste. La justice est sujette à dispute. La force est très reconnaissable et sans dispute. Aussi on n’a pu donner la force à la justice, parce que la force a contredit la justice et a dit qu’elle était injuste, et a dit que c’était elle qui était juste. Et ainsi ne pouvant faire que ce qui est juste fût fort, on a fait que ce qui est fort fût juste.
Blaise Pascale, Pensées
Justice, might. It is right that what is just should be obeyed; it is necessary that what is strongest should be obeyed. Justice without might is helpless; might without justice is tyrannical. Justice without might is gainsaid, because there are always offenders; might without justice is condemned. We must then combine justice and might, and for this end make what is just strong, or what is strong just. Justice is subject to dispute; might is easily recognised and is not disputed. So we cannot give might to justice, because might has gainsaid justice, and has declared that it is she herself who is just. And thus being unable to make what is just strong, we have made what is strong just.
Just some simple drawings on what one good day seemed to me to be the main components of education.
Illustrated through capoeira, it should apply to any field: programming, foreign languages, medicine… right?
Perhaps it can be of interest to others, spur interesting conversation?
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