The clearest and most creative thoughts are those that occur during one of three states: the first is at the onset of sorrow, the second in bed just before falling asleep, and the third in the latrine. The last involves the breakdown of concentrated matters exhaled by the bowels and the intestines and this breakdown and exhalation taking place in the lower part has the effect of breaking down, at the same time and place, whatever may have coagulated in the higher folds of the brain. Some of this matter then departs in a downward direction while some of the images formed by the brain rise, like steam rising from the earth to thicken into a raincloud.

Ahmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, Leg over Leg, Volume Three.

Today I learned about…the Bengali Hungry Generation poets (1961-1965), whose approach was to confront and disturb the prospective readers’ preconceived colonial canons.

All unwittingly Mr Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre of the Air have made one of the most fascinating and important demonstrations of all time. They have proved that a few effective voices, accompanied by sound effects, can so convince masses of people of a totally unreasonable, completely fantastic proposition as to create nationwide panic…They have cast a brilliant and cruel light upon the failure of popular education….They have shown up the incredible stupidity, lack of nerve and ignorance of thousands…If people can be frightened out of their wits by mythical men from Mars, they can be frightened into fanaticism by the fears of Reds, or convinced that America is in the hands of 60 families, or aroused to revenge against any minority, or terrorised into subservience to leadership because of any imaginable menace.

Dorothy Thompson, New York Herald Tribune, 1938, an excellent read, really.

via What War of the World Did, also an excellent read, and from which I have taken the title of this post.

Today I learned about…Jerrie Cobb, a female pilot and obvious badass who unofficially underwent the same physical testing as the Mercury astronauts at the time, placing in the top 2% of all astronaut candidates, but was never considered for flight.

There is a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America.

Check out the fascinating usage history of this quote

A society based on artists could be trouble, but a society without artists could be really horrifying.

Ai Weiwei, in this NY Times conversation with Frank Gehry.

We must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian-Darwinian theory, he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living.

Buckminster Fuller, A New Lifestyle, New York Magazine, 1970.

(via kottke)

Today I learned about the Gin Craze

“Traînasse,” from “traîner,” to drag or haul, is a marsh word that typically refers to a pirogue portage or trail, but in this case my neighbor used it to describe the drainage swale we dug, and it seems appropriate. A little path. Words are so great.

Here, on the internet, is a nowhere space, a shallow time. It is a flat and impenetrable surface. But with a book, we dive in; we are sucked in; we are immersed, body and soul.

Reading in the Age of Constant Distraction

It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?

Sun Ra

Today I learned about the Draupner Wave, observed in the North Sea in 1995, confirming the extistence of long-reported “rogue waves.”

The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture…. the writer can only imitate a gesture that is always anterior, never original. His only power is to mix writings, to counter the ones with the others, in such a way as never to rest on any one of them.

Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, 1967.

Madness is the result of the shock produced in man by his own intelligence and we still haven’t recovered from the trauma three million years later.

Josè Saramago, The History of the Siege of Lisbon

A democracy where public life is made up of strife between political parties is incapable of preventing the formation of a party whose avowed aim is the overthrow of that democracy.

Simone Weil, in The Need for Roots (first published in 1949, six years after her death), found in this great Aeon article about her

During WWII, the Maharaja of Nawanagar volunteered to host nearly a thousand Polish refugee children on the grounds of his summer palace. His generosity defines Polish-Indian relations to this day.

Today I learned, somehow for the first time, that The Moon Is Flipped Upside Down in the Southern Hemisphere. Obviously. (yes, of course the title has a bias to it)

Overheard: “Racist jokes? Bah! They’re all the same.”

An invisible web of fiction surrounds us and we struggle as prisoners inside it like those who struggle to free themselves from a spider’s web from which there is no escape.

José Revueltas, quoted in Mexico’s Marxist Prophet

Any day is a good day when you learn about a new cool person: may I present Grandma Gatewood, born today in 1887, the first woman to solo hike the Appalachian Trail

”Pharisaism, stupidity, and despotism reign not in merchants’ houses and prisons alone. I see them in science, literature, in the younger generation...my holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love, and...freedom.”

• Anton Chekhov

“Only the fruits of thought and artistic creation justify man's presence in the world.”

Top notch wisdom in tonight’s baseball telecast: “Don’t play to prove the haters wrong, play to prove the fans right.”

I’ll go and stay a while, and all the folks I meet they’ll say, “You won’t stay long, you got them travellin' feet, you’ll soon be long-gone, ‘cause boy, you got the rest of the world blues.”

• Electric Light Orchestra, “Birmingham Blues”

As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.

• physicist John Archibald Wheeler, in this fascinating article: Do Our Questions Create the World