Screwdriver to the Cheek

масиYe shall keep my statutes. Thou shalt not let thy cattle breed with a diverse kind: thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed: neither shall a garment mingled of linen and woollen come upon thee.
The other night I wrote, “Consider the wisdom of the Old Testament. Do not wear clothing woven of [...]

During Don Quixote’s stay with the Duke and Duchess, the Duchess arranges to have a bag of cats swung into the knight’s bedroom through the window to amuse herself and her court (Part 2, Chapter XLVI). The cats go mad, seriously injuring Don Quixote. Nietzsche says that we, as moderns, are unable to [...]

How serious is Proust when he suggests “Peut-etre l’immobilite des choses autour de nous leur est-elle imposee par notre certitude que ce sont elles et non pas d’autres, par l’immobilite de notre pensee en face d’elles”? (Why does he not write “des nous”? Is “nous” not plural?) He does not appear to [...]

Last night, when Sarah Palin was making beijing 2008 for facebook login from pre-fab tuenti, Heath Ledger said, “You know, you can rub butter on the baking sheet to prevent them from sticking.”

Wordpress has informed me that I have 35 RSS feed subscribers, most of which are probably spammers, the barnacles of the internet. Some of you may be real, but I cannot identify you on my own. If you are real, and not an unreal spammer, I urge you to contact me in some [...]

Hume teaches us that we cannot obtain an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’. In other words, just because we know what is the case, we will not necessarily know what ought to be the case. This puts us in a difficult position. We are required to make moral or ethical decisions (or what [...]

A roll of quarters pressing into my thigh caused me to remember the single kiss I gave to Sarah. Meeting her after class, I briefly pressed against her closed mouth and then embraced her. I did it without thinking, spontaneously, as though it were a habitual and casual greeting between two friends who [...]

The xenon light bulbs we use to project movies are as delicate as snowflakes and as expensive as human eggs. The mere act of opening the box they come in can trigger an explosion, as can a fingerprint or a mote of dust. The actual warning includes the caveat “unexpectedly”, as in “If [...]

I am in my stony rented basement, illuminated by blue christmas lights. I stop reading Locke to read the short fictions from two issues of the New Yorker. One is about young lovers who adore sentences. I am very attracted to this. I happen to see a 1947 black and white [...]

I drink tea from a chipped yellow cereal bowl and I internet internet from the neighbor’s internet.
Internet.
The sugar I use for my tea is Domino’s. It is the worst kind of sugar because the packaging is plain and obsolete, and that I would indulge indicates I am the worst kind of tea drinker.
I wrote the [...]

After reading the translator’s introduction I feel quite overwhelmed. My study of Proust will most likely not be as insightful or exhaustive, and this troubles me because I have already decided that Proust is the way, the truth, and the light (yes, I should not decide so soon) and so I should like to [...]

I am surrounded by trivial deaths. When the seawater recedes from the shore, countless brightly scaled fish are abandoned to rot, caught between indifferent stones. I could die at any time, and I probably will without having consummated my being. There probably is no possibility of consummation anyhow.
I had a dream that [...]

It is tempting to consider Swann’s Way the work of an alien genius. Proust makes observations (such as his assertion that novels are the most lucid and concentrated vision of happinesses and unhappinesses, even if these same experiences were to actually happen to us personally [page 86], or his revelation that we can only [...]

On the beach, witnessing a young girl in flower, I saw her brother and it occurred to me he might be protective, hostile of any romantic or sexual advances made upon his sister. Abruptly, I understood why such a sentiment exists among a daughter’s male relations: they are jealous of her virginity (at least [...]

I adore the whimsically (or else perversely) named Scandinavian band “I’m From Barcelona”. Why would they lie about something so trivial? I don’t know! Of particular interest to me is their song “We’re From Barcelona” in which all thirty-something band members continuously insist that they are all from Barcelona. Maybe they [...]

A wise man once said that the unconscious manifested itself through ‘errors’ in speech, which he called ‘parapraxes’. He was halfway right: when we mean one thing but say another before we can stop ourselves, there is a hidden truth being revealed, but this truth is not limited to the unconscious of the speaker, [...]

In high school, my papers were usually no more than a transcription of my theories on a particular topic, and these theories were usually borrowed from my textooks or teachers. In college, though, I have been unable to really write a single paper in this way, maybe because I am not given any theories. [...]

The Vengaboys’ “Boom boom boom boom” is the type of unmitigated mastery that I can only, and unhesitatingly, describe as magnificent. While I am fascinated by the insistent testimony that ‘this is what I want’, it is the inevitable, cyclical return to the qualification that she wants you ‘in my room’ and that the [...]

#42: Why did I cry? Not only did I cry at all, I cried a lot.
#42: Why?
#42: Did I cry because I was sad? I think a person only ever cries because they are sad, and I think a person only ever is sad for themselves, whether by beholding their own [...]

I’ve been reading in Don Quixote ‘The Too Curious Man Novel’ and have been surprised again by the belief that if you woo, praise, beg, harass, give gifts to, and make demonstrations of your love enough, any woman will begin to love you. This is preposterous to me. I am reminded of ‘Cinema [...]