I once heard a philosopher tell a story about a student who asked him what he ought to do with his life. “Do what you want,” the philosopher said. “But I don’t want to do what I want to do,” the student protested. “I want to do what I ought to do.”

My vision of retirement has always been to move someplace hot, and sit out on a patio reading (or re-reading) 19th century Anglo-American books (Stevenson, Melville, Conrad, Hawthorne, Kipling, Chesterton, etc.) That’s all I want to do.

The two saddest words in the English language: “What party?”

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magictransistor:

Salvador Dalí, Reina de Corazones (Queen of Hearts) y Rey de Corazones (King of Hearts), 1972.

A good life is not a life without problems. A good life is a life with good problems.

Green Eggs and Ham
by Dr. Seuss

Tom has finally made his peace with this book, but it took a while.  He used to enjoy having it read to him right up to the point where our hero is finally forced, by ‘Sam I Am’, to try the titular dish.  Then Tom would grab the book and throw it across the room.  He had heard what happened after that, and didn’t like the message the book was trying to impart.  So, for Tom, this was for a while the tale of a proud individualist who even having been forced into a train wreck by a pseudonymous terrorist, possibly working for Big Ham, then lost at sea, would still not give in and submit to the ham agenda.  

As someone who finds that part of ‘Cars’ where Lightning McQueen is forced to stay in a small town and learn about values to be a paranoid nightmare in the tradition of 'The Prisoner’, I must say I rather supported Tom’s stance.  However, it’s probably for the best that he’s now started to let us read the book to the end.  Like Winston Smith in '1984’, he now loves 'Green Eggs and Ham’.

1. The Best Book on American Poetry Ever
2. From the Public Domain Review, a quaint and curious trip down ephemera lane: Christmas Festive Bonanza Digest
3. How to write a Verbatim poem
4. The Lost Art of Memorizing Poetry | The American Reader
5. Maybe this is why I’m finding NPR’s news hosts’ attempts to emulate chirpy chatter ever more annoying: NPR is graying, and public radio is worried about it - The Washington Post

What their return to health will look like: As the INTJ returns to health, they will shift their focus away from petty details and regain their big-picture mindset. They will develop an increased concentration on goals and long-term projects, which will bring them steadily closer to what they want out of the future. A healthy INTJ is an INTJ who can synthesize and carry out long-term projects – in as efficient a manner as possible.

No, in common with my father, my friends and people I know professionally, the desperate desire to find something to say and not sound like an idiot just makes you do jokes all the time. Jokes are a nervous reflex. Sometimes you can end up being irritating or seeming facetious or like you’re showing off, and all you’re trying to do is justify the fact that you spoke at all. I’ve come to understand that charm isn’t being funny. Charm is finding other people funny.

(via The Dialectic of Love and Authority - The Baffler)

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(via Geoff Ryman’s Wizard of Oz novel Was, reviewed.)

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(via Harry Kellar’s Show Posters | The Public Domain Review)

There’s this book club phenomenon — my mother-in-law is in a book club and now my wife is in a book club — and so I’ve heard any number of people say they get the “gist” of books. They haven’t read the book. They say, “I read enough to get the gist.” Just, no. Don’t. I can’t engage in that conversation. You don’t get the gist of Jane Austen. You either read Jane Austen or you don’t.

What appears at first to be an absence of emotion then appears to be a need to control overwhelming emotion that is apt to surface without warning.

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

1. Man binge-watches The Simpsons for over two days while taking LSD 
2. Lizzie Borden, Girl Detective
3. The Raven writing gloves
4. Zap your bad habits with Pavlok
5. The Works of William Hazlitt
6. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” in three paintings
7. Stevereads on his favorite SF mass-market paperback covers from the early '80s

(via A Penny for Your Books - The New York Times)

I was having lunch with a friend who’d survived a heart attack a couple of years ago. When I asked him if he had any dietary restrictions, he shared the story of going to his doctor post-coronary with a written list of questions about what he should or shouldn’t eat going forward.

The doctor took a look at the list, then ripped up the paper and threw it in the bin.

“Here’s my dietary advice,” said the doctor. “Don’t be a moron.”

“What do you mean?” asked my friend.

“I mean,” replied the doctor, “use your common sense. Eat heart-healthy food most of the time, and if you really fancy the odd bowl of macaroni and cheese, enjoy it.”

While I was a little taken aback at the bluntness of the advice when I first heard the story, I’ve come to realize that it’s a fantastic response for pretty much any kind of question people have about how to live their lives.

(via May 30 Memorial Day Event at Fitzgerald Family Cemetery | Pauli Murray Project)

(via We Have a Copy of Patricia Highsmith’s Unpublished Essay on Green-Wood Cemetery | Atlas Obscura)

The next time you meet some person who is utterly captivated by some undertaking that completely mystifies you, give him the benefit of the doubt. Hold back on your instinctive imputing of excess spare time and hang the obsession in a tickler-file in the back of your brain to pull out and think about in the shower or the post-office line. If you’re very lucky, a little of that delight may rub off on you, too.

I noticed that touring — which is wonderful in some ways — is absolutely confining in other ways. It’s so difficult… you just can’t think about anything else. You try your hardest: You take books with you and word processors, and you’re definitely going to do something with the time. And you never do. It’s so easy for it to become your exclusive life, this one and a half hours every evening that you play. And I just thought, “I’m losing touch with what I really like doing.” What I really like doing is what I call Import and Export. I like taking ideas from one place and putting them into another place and seeing what happens when you do that. I think you could probably sum up nearly everything I’ve done under that umbrella. Understanding something that’s happening in painting, say, and then seeing how that applies to music. Or understanding something that’s happening in experimental music and seeing what that could be like if you used it as a base for popular music. It’s a research job, a lot of it. You spend a lot of time sitting around, fiddling around with things, quite undramatically, and finally something clicks into place and you think, ”Oh, thats really worth doing.” The time spent researching is a big part of it. I never imagined a pop star life that would’ve permitted that.

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(via The Frustrating, Dizzying Career of Stanley Fish | The New Republic)

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(via A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000 | The Public Domain Review)

When Procrastination doesn’t keep me from doing what I should be doing, I fall back on creating a links post.

1. Digitized K-mart in-store background music (1989-1993). As Susie Bright said in her Facebook post, “This is a soundtrack waiting for its porn film.”
2. Pick your guru carefully.
3. 19th-century views of the Year 2000.
4. Alternate Histories has released its 2015 Holiday Pack!
5. The James Randi documentary, An Honest Liar, which I saw via Netflix. Randi fought the good fight, but as his nemesis Uri Gellar says near the end, “We won.” And as the movie shows, Randi’s own need to believe is great. The most bizarre scene is an old television clip of him hanging upside-down, escaping from a straitjacket, while a woman in elegant poofy dress sings “You’ve Got the Magic Touch.”
6. We suffered a break-in earlier this year. Nevertheless, I draw the line at this.