Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted—? What if the heart, for its own unfathomable reasons, leads one willfully and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections and all the blandly-held common virtues and instead straight towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self-immolation, disaster? Is Kitsey right? If your deepest self is singing and coaxing you straight toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away? Stop your ears with wax? Ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Set yourself on the course that will lead you dutifully towards the norm, reasonable hours and regular medical check-ups, stable relationships and steady career advancement, the New York Times and brunch on Sunday, all with the promise of being somehow a better person? Or—like Boris—is it better to throw yourself head first and laughing into the holy rage calling your name?
It’s not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn’t understand. That first glimpse of pure otherness, in whose presence you bloom out and out and out.
A self one does not want. A heart one cannot help.
—Donna Tartt
—from The Goldfinch
flesh-pot (fleshpot). noun. Literally, a pot in which flesh (a highly desirable foodstuff) is boiled, generally referring to the phrase in Exodus (see below). As an allusion, a place or person of luxury, indulgence and titillation.
“Would to God we had died by the hand of the LORD in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the flesh pots, and when we did eat bread to the full; for ye have brought us forth into this wilderness, to kill this whole assembly with hunger.” (King James Bible)
“At the close of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, New Orleans became North America’s pleasure dome. Out of its fleshpots rose jazz, America’s music.” (Andrei Codrescu)
“On my side, and along with my intellectual attractions, were the fleshpots of Egypt. When you could not find me to be with, the companions whom you chose as substitutes were not flattering.” (Oscar Wilde)
“On dry long fingers, Tarr studiously counted off the reasons: first, he never knew a Soviet delegation that didn’t carry a couple of security gorillas whose job it was to keep the boys out of the fleshpots. So how did Boris slip the leash night after night?” (John le Carré)
Anthony Acevedo, a most amazing man, has passed. As a 20-year-old Army medic, Acevedo kept a diary (of events but also sketches) of his time in a Nazi slave labor camp, part of Buchenwald, which can be seen in its entirety online thanks to the United States Holocaust Memorial museum.
I was skeptical of the host, but World Map: The Literal Translation of Country Names is pretty cool. And they shared their research links and sources || Pairs obliquely with Terrapattern, a “visual search tool for satellite imagery.”
NITCH is compulsively browsable collection of (mostly) portraits and brief, powerful quotes.
Ehrmagerd! The Internet Archive has an online handheld History archive with playable games from the 70s and 80s. I literally wore out the keys on a Speak & Spell when I was a kid. And back to it almost 40 years later…I was transported. || Related retro: will 2018 be the (next) year of HyperCard? See (and submit to) HyperCard Zine.
Let’s whiplash back to the world of very contemporary technology in our lives… → 12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech
On the thriving world of chess as “eSport,” featuring a few of my favorite things (and people) → I Want My ChessTV
Flat-Earther blasts off into California sky in homemade steam-powered rocket
Today in 1957, U.S. Customs confiscates more than 500 copies of Allan Ginsberg’s book Howl and Other Poems. You know the one, the title poem begins, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked” (listen to a 1956 recording of Ginsberg reading the poem || view the complete original manuscript and typescript). Two months later, the U.S. Attorney’s office chose not to prosecute. Then, on June 3 of the same year, undercover police with the San Francisco Police bought a copy from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s now famed City Lights bookstore and then arrested Ferlinghetti for publication of obscene materials. Heard before a judge who had recently achieved notoriety by sentencing five women convicted of shoplifting to watching the film The Ten Commandments, Felinghetti (and his business partner Shigeyosi Murao) was supported by a cadre of poets and critics. In the end the judge, Clayton Horn, ruled in Felinghetti’s favor, noting that the book was of “redeeming social importance” and was unlikely to “deprave or corrupt readers by exciting lascivious thoughts or arousing lustful desire.”
Hunting from the Cheetah’s perspective. Amazing.
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