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

By failing to read or listen to poets, society dooms itself to inferior modes of articulation: those of the politician, the salesman, or the charlatan.

-Joseph Brodsky, in his opening remarks as US Poet Laureate, 1991.

Surprise wisdom from a World Cup TV commentator:

The true history of the world is the history of great conversations.

I was born in the rain on the Pontchartrain, underneath the Louisiana moon. I don’t mind the strain of a Hurricane, they come around here every June. The high black water, the devil’s daughter, she’s hard, she’s cold, and she’s mean, but nobody taught her it takes a lot of water to wash away New Orleans.

• Levon Helm, “Hurricane”

Now, I understand, my privilege means giving up all claims on life as the casual, criminal thing it sometimes is, in favor of a horizon in whose cursive recesses we may sometimes lie concealed because we are part of the pattern.

• John Ashbery, “Try Me! I’m Different”