quotes at random no. 51 - legacy
Jul. 20th, 2015 12:19 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fiefoeEmpiricism, because it takes its evidence from the existing order of things, is inherently prone to accepting as realities things that are merely evidence of underlying biases and ideological pressures. Empiricism, for Marx, will always confirm the status quo.
Every time you deal with a phone menu or interactive voicemail service, you’re donating your surplus value to the people you’re dealing with. Marx’s model is constantly asking us to see the labour encoded in the things and transactions all around us.
This is the kind of thing which is sometimes called ironic, but is closer to tragedy, and at its heart is the fact that the productive, expansionist, resource-consuming power of capitalism is so great that it is not sustainable at a planetary level.
the American average consumption of water is one hundred gallons per person per day.
This was quintessentially sophomoric thinking, but nowadays most educated people hold quintessentially sophomoric opinions well into their thirties and so this stuck with me for a long time.
On the other hand, when we went away for an anniversary trip to London, getting around in black taxis, staying in a nice hotel, and eating in good restaurants, we spent a whole week moving in a world that was perfectly adapted to stockings. It just went to show us how radically we would have to change our circumstances in order for her to dress that way routinely.
There must be a source for new granny-grade furniture, ..The answer is Gomer Bolstrood, and the price is high.
There you go.
Mother/Maiden/Crone has been reconfigured as Mistress/Maid/Executive – and in this story, they’re all seen as whores by the men around them.
minims do not connect to each other at all and it is nearly impossible to tell what letter is meant. A 14th-century example of this is:
mimi numinum niuium minimi munium nimium uini muniminum imminui uiui minimum uolunt ("the smallest mimes of the gods of snow do not wish at all in their life that the great duty of the defences of the wine be diminished"). In Gothic script this would look like a series of single strokes
cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons
"When you get older you hope that things slow down a bit but continue the same," (Pepin) said. "If things continue the same, it is a great miracle."
In the same interview, she asserted “When I die, my epitaph should read: ‘She paid all the bills.’” For Swanson was, first and foremost, a businesswoman,
You might laugh, but the sort of immaculate movement control required of a vaudevillian is the same sort of control necessary for intricate flirtation. This is why football players are such bad flirts and ballet dancers and unicyclists, however weird, are such good ones.
It’s a balm for the terrible isolation that arrives around age 2, along with language and self-consciousness—the knowledge that one’s experience is inescapably private. And so the time I spend reading to her can feel, for both of us, like communion.
And once again I begin to feel my finite remaining hours on this earth slipping inexorably away while my daughter sits next to me, mesmerized. Which is what parenting is sometimes: the pouring of one’s ever-diminishing stock of time into this other being, her own supply seeming, for now, inexhaustible.
A large part of parental authority is invested in the maintenance and upkeep of this story, its repetition, its continued iterations and adaptations. And it feels right to tell it, for what we are offering our children is a story of life in which they have been given a role. How true is it? It’s hard to tell. In a story there’s always someone who owns the truth: What matters is that character’s ability to serve it. But it is perhaps unwise to treasure this story too closely or believe in it too much, for at some point the growing child will pick it up and turn it over in his hands like some dispassionate reviewer composing a coldhearted analysis of an overhyped novel.
These foetal cells are so invasive that colonies of them often persist in the mother for the rest of her life, having migrated to her liver, brain and other organs. There’s something they rarely tell you about motherhood: it turns women into genetic chimeras.
Mammals whose placentae don’t breach the walls of the womb can simply abort or reabsorb unwanted foetuses at any stage of pregnancy. For primates, any such manoeuvre runs the risk of haemorrhage, as the placenta rips away from the mother’s enlarged and paralysed arterial system. And that, in a sentence, is why miscarriages are so dangerous.
menstruation. We have it for the simple reason that it’s not such an easy matter to dispose of an embryo that is battling to survive.
By eight months, the foetus spends an estimated 25 per cent of its daily protein intake on manufacturing these hormonal messages to its mother.
But whatever the outcome, it’s not thanks to the power of hope and faith. The world turns inexorably, no matter our most tightly held desires, and what change we do manage to effect is the product, most often, of grinding hard work. Fairy tales, in short, don’t come true – and the ability to envision realistic, sustainable fantasies – and execute them — is a hard-won key to adulthood.
Make a choice and you confront the closed mystery of the choice not chosen. If ambivalence is a hallmark of denial, choice is an acceptance of time, mortality, limits.
<<
Every time you deal with a phone menu or interactive voicemail service, you’re donating your surplus value to the people you’re dealing with. Marx’s model is constantly asking us to see the labour encoded in the things and transactions all around us.
This is the kind of thing which is sometimes called ironic, but is closer to tragedy, and at its heart is the fact that the productive, expansionist, resource-consuming power of capitalism is so great that it is not sustainable at a planetary level.
the American average consumption of water is one hundred gallons per person per day.
This was quintessentially sophomoric thinking, but nowadays most educated people hold quintessentially sophomoric opinions well into their thirties and so this stuck with me for a long time.
On the other hand, when we went away for an anniversary trip to London, getting around in black taxis, staying in a nice hotel, and eating in good restaurants, we spent a whole week moving in a world that was perfectly adapted to stockings. It just went to show us how radically we would have to change our circumstances in order for her to dress that way routinely.
There must be a source for new granny-grade furniture, ..The answer is Gomer Bolstrood, and the price is high.
There you go.
Mother/Maiden/Crone has been reconfigured as Mistress/Maid/Executive – and in this story, they’re all seen as whores by the men around them.
minims do not connect to each other at all and it is nearly impossible to tell what letter is meant. A 14th-century example of this is:
mimi numinum niuium minimi munium nimium uini muniminum imminui uiui minimum uolunt ("the smallest mimes of the gods of snow do not wish at all in their life that the great duty of the defences of the wine be diminished"). In Gothic script this would look like a series of single strokes
cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons
"When you get older you hope that things slow down a bit but continue the same," (Pepin) said. "If things continue the same, it is a great miracle."
In the same interview, she asserted “When I die, my epitaph should read: ‘She paid all the bills.’” For Swanson was, first and foremost, a businesswoman,
You might laugh, but the sort of immaculate movement control required of a vaudevillian is the same sort of control necessary for intricate flirtation. This is why football players are such bad flirts and ballet dancers and unicyclists, however weird, are such good ones.
It’s a balm for the terrible isolation that arrives around age 2, along with language and self-consciousness—the knowledge that one’s experience is inescapably private. And so the time I spend reading to her can feel, for both of us, like communion.
And once again I begin to feel my finite remaining hours on this earth slipping inexorably away while my daughter sits next to me, mesmerized. Which is what parenting is sometimes: the pouring of one’s ever-diminishing stock of time into this other being, her own supply seeming, for now, inexhaustible.
A large part of parental authority is invested in the maintenance and upkeep of this story, its repetition, its continued iterations and adaptations. And it feels right to tell it, for what we are offering our children is a story of life in which they have been given a role. How true is it? It’s hard to tell. In a story there’s always someone who owns the truth: What matters is that character’s ability to serve it. But it is perhaps unwise to treasure this story too closely or believe in it too much, for at some point the growing child will pick it up and turn it over in his hands like some dispassionate reviewer composing a coldhearted analysis of an overhyped novel.
These foetal cells are so invasive that colonies of them often persist in the mother for the rest of her life, having migrated to her liver, brain and other organs. There’s something they rarely tell you about motherhood: it turns women into genetic chimeras.
Mammals whose placentae don’t breach the walls of the womb can simply abort or reabsorb unwanted foetuses at any stage of pregnancy. For primates, any such manoeuvre runs the risk of haemorrhage, as the placenta rips away from the mother’s enlarged and paralysed arterial system. And that, in a sentence, is why miscarriages are so dangerous.
menstruation. We have it for the simple reason that it’s not such an easy matter to dispose of an embryo that is battling to survive.
By eight months, the foetus spends an estimated 25 per cent of its daily protein intake on manufacturing these hormonal messages to its mother.
But whatever the outcome, it’s not thanks to the power of hope and faith. The world turns inexorably, no matter our most tightly held desires, and what change we do manage to effect is the product, most often, of grinding hard work. Fairy tales, in short, don’t come true – and the ability to envision realistic, sustainable fantasies – and execute them — is a hard-won key to adulthood.
Make a choice and you confront the closed mystery of the choice not chosen. If ambivalence is a hallmark of denial, choice is an acceptance of time, mortality, limits.
<<
