I Found a Penny Today, So Here's a Thought

"Writing is just a version of reading."
—Geof Huth

. . . which reminds us of Hemingway's description of "eyes like inkwells."

There's something beautiful that children don't learn in books of fairy tales.  In surrealist novels for grownups, the illustrations don't necessarily correspond to the text.  For example, in the dreamily Gothic Czech masterpiece Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, the illustration of a headless woman for page 149 appears next to page 106.  Prof. Oddfellow explains the phenomenon by way of Philip G. Zimbardo's Discontinuity Theory, which suggests that cognitive searches for rationality and normality may lead to madness.

Here's an insightful review of an unusual, gutted book that cannot exist digitally.

"The [computer] link will turn out to be the most important new punctuation mark since the comma."
—software architect Mark Bernstein

(Thanks, Gordon!)

"The act of reading impedes looking at words."
—Enrique Enriquez

"I want more than what I want."
—Salman Rushdie

"Does history record any case in which the majority was right?"
—Robert Heinlein

"Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect."
—Mark Twain

"When the majority is buying, you should consider selling."
—Greg Tanghe

"How delightful it would be to find a few people, or even one person, unconditionally thrilled by what one had to say."
—Leonora Carrington, The Hearing Trumpet

The problem with people is:

• inherent shortsightedness
• fickleness
• inability to communicate
• they're not all the same
• self-centeredness
• a lack of foresight
• overspending
• an unwillingness to pay their dues
• focusing on the destination instead of the journey
• taking themselves too seriously
• apathy
• inefficiency
• inattentiveness
• prioritization
• fear and confusion
• they make poor gods
• bargain hunting
• giving up too easily
• taking shortcuts
• an infinite supply of wants
• making small talk
• being only human

(we culled this list from popular books)

"Whenever someone who knows you disappears, you lose one version of yourself.  Yourself as you were seen, as you were judged to be.  Lover or enemy, mother or friend, those who know us construct us, and their several knowings slant the different facets of our characters like diamond-cutter's tools.  Each such loss is a step leading to the grave, where all versions blend and end."
—Salman Rushdie

"We carry within us the wonders we seek without us.  There is all Africa and her prodigies in us." —Sir Thomas Browne, qtd. in The Dictionary of Imaginary Places

All kidding aside, there's a book entitled What Shall I Read Next?  We can just see this title scrawled (without irony) on someone's list of to-be-read books.  (Even more deliciously, as we type this post, the book has not yet been released but is pre-orderable.)  It's like something out of a procrastinator's Calvinoesque dream.

Two birds fly past.  They are needed somewhere.
—Robert Bly

via A Murder of Crows, An Unkindness of Ravens

"There are two kinds of truth:  trivialities, where the opposite is obviously impossible, and deep truths, which are characterized by their opposite also being a deep truth." —Niels Bohr

We were chatting with a Hollywood screenwriter the other day about the great dramatic pitfall of the wizard genre — problems can be solved with the wave of a hand.  We're reminded of thrillers in which logician savants battle wits (it's fun when the two masterminds form a Yin/Yang connection, each respecting his rival's intellect).  It's a stalemate ... until one of them fails to predict a tiny repercussion that tips the balance.  Every wave of the magic wand initiates an action, but the ripple effects are for the machinations of Chaos to sort out.  Consider the murderer who, with a wave of the hand, throws the incriminating evidence in the river, unable to predict where the material might wash up.  (Or consider the classic Bewitched series, in which a vexing and hexing mother-in-law's action invariably triggers a chain of unforeseen consequences.)  Perhaps a magician's foremost powers need to be of logic and of foresight.

"Writing is just the process of reading backwards, of unpacking from the skull what watching has filled the head with."
—Geof Huth

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Daryl Griffiths writes:

"Literature is a false representation of life that nevertheless helps us to understand life better, to orient ourselves in the labyrinth where we are born, pass by, and die. It compensates for the reverses and frustrations real life inflicts on us, and because of it we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings, principally those of us who generate more doubts than certainties and confess our perplexity before subjects like transcendence, individual and collective destiny, the soul, the sense or senselessness of history, the to and fro of rational knowledge." —Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel lecture, "In Praise of Reading and Fiction," Dec. 7, 2010