Then Scrooge has some bad gravy, a nightmare about three ghosts, and he spends Christmas Day in a hysterical fit sending turkeys all about the city and giving everyone raises. He’s so happy not to be dead (as the third ghost suggested he soon would be) that he has a chuckling fit and bursts into tears, perhaps having gone insane. An unbelievable asshole but a day ago, Scrooge is now the picture of human kindness.
I, for one, don’t buy it. Despite Dickens’ assurance to the contrary, I think Scrooge came to his senses a few days later and started busting balls again. Tiny Tim died. No way he could have survived.
Later in life [Anthony Burgess] asked an American conductor to explain what makes English music English. The American answered, “Too much organ voluntary in Lincoln Cathedral, too much coronation in Westminster Abbey, too much lark ascending, too much clodhopping on the fucking village green.”
We Humans Can Never be Satisfied - Art De Vany on Line
We humans can never be satisfied. Nor could satisfaction rest on a specific accomplishment or object. I think that it comes from the fact that we humans must be supremely adaptive. That means we must have a kind of generalized, non-specific attraction or yearning for more that can be applied to novel situations. If we were attracted to a few things only, how would we deal with choice and adaptation when we are confronted with something completely new?
Humans must always have a kind of unfulfilled need or yearning for “something more.” Nothing can fully satisfy us or we would not be prepared to make choices in the next novel situation. It is the unpredictable that we must be prepared for and this requires an open-ended attraction or yearning for “something more”. The general feeling that there must be something more to life keeps us open to the next situation. For that reason, we can never be fulfilled.
To be fulfilled means the journey is over. We have to love the journey, not where it ends.
We Humans Can Never be Satisfied - Art De Vany on Line
Source: http://sharpsuits.net/Home
One of the great strengths of the English language is the number of ways it provides to describe people who annoy us. True, German has the word “Backpfeifengesicht” – “a face in need of a punch” – but English overwhelms us with options, thanks partly to its abundance of vulgarisms. If I call you a “wanker” I mean something subtly different from a “dickhead”. (It can be hard to pinpoint these nuances without resort to further swearing, as demonstrated by users of urbandictionary.com, as they struggle to define a “prick”: “An all around fucktard, dickweed, assrat bastard.”) These differences aren’t just a matter of intensity. We can presumably all agree that Simon Cowell is a bit of a tosser. But his success makes it hard to dismiss him as a fuckwit, while it’s not clear he’s guilty of the malice that would condemn him as a shit.
I think an awful lot of what passes for political discourse in this country these days works off that principle: There’s money in making stupid people mad.
Pedagogy
When Julia was in 2nd grade, I taught poetry to her class, using Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams, and Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?. The kids wrote really great poems for me. I would come in every other day for two weeks. That was actually one of my triumphs of teaching. Kids would come up to me years later and say, “Mr. Mayhew, how about a poem?”
