Ambition & Betrayal = Greek Tragedy

He hears foreigners process anxieties, fears, strengths (in limited proportions) and listening skills. After dark.

Famous Cambodian cultural saying: I am sorry. Goodbye and good luck to you and your family. Genetic engineering.

Courage.

I am the walrus.

I am a solitary clairvoyant.

Compassionate detachment.

Tai chi watermelon. Slow movement. Circle. Move.

Erupting like a volcano, everything I do is an experiment.

A writer has homework everyday. A writer is a word terrorist. They say what others are afraid to say.

Memory is desire satisfied.

Today your life and destiny are the same.

David Foster Wallace : Fear of fame. Fear of failure. Fear of being ordinary.

What was your original face before your parents were born?

I was born dead and slowly came to life.

I don't seek. I discover.

Mind movies.

The Madman - Kahlil Gibran

You ask me how I became a madman. It happened thus: One day, long before many gods were born, I woke from a deep sleep and found all my masks were stolen, — the seven masks I have fashioned and worn in seven lives, — I ran maskless through the crowded streets shouting, “Thieves, thieves, the cursed thieves.”

Men and women laughed at me and some ran to their houses in fear of me.

And when I reached the market place, a youth standing on a house-top cried, “He is a madman.” I looked up to behold him; the sun kissed my own naked face for the first time. For the first time the sun kissed my own naked face and my soul was inflamed with love for the sun, and I wanted my masks no more. And as if in a trance I cried, “Blessed, blessed are the thieves who stole my masks.”

Thus I became a madman.

And I have found both freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.

But let me not be too proud of my safety. Even a thief in a jail is safe from another thief.

- Kahlil Gibran

Octavio Paz

At times poetry is the vertigo of bodies and the vertigo of speech and the vertigo of death;
the walk with eyes closed along the edge of the cliff, and the verbena in submarine gardens;
the laughter that sets on fire the rules and the holy commandments;
the descent of parachuting words onto the sands of the page;
the despair that boards a paper boat and crosses,
for forty nights and forty days, the night-sorrow sea and the day-sorrow desert;
the idolatry of the self and the desecration of the self and the dissipation of the self;
the beheading of epithets, the burial of mirrors;
the recollection of pronouns freshly cut in the garden of Epicurus, and the garden of Netzahualcoyotl;
the flute solo on the terrace of memory and the dance of flames in the cave of thought;
the migrations of millions of verbs, wings and claws, seeds and hands;
the nouns, bony and full of roots, planted on the waves of language;
the love unseen and the love unheard and the love unsaid: the love in love.
Syllables seeds.

 - Octavio Paz
translated by Eliot Weinberger  Read more…

Robert Walser

I am a kind of artisan novelist. A writer of novellas I certainly am not. 

If I am well-disposed, that’s to say, feeling good, I tailor, cobble, weld, plane, knock, hammer, or nail together lines the content of which people understand at once. 

If you liked, you could call me a writer who goes to work with a lathe. My writing is wallpapering. One or two kindly people venture to think of me as a poet, which indulgence and manners allow me to concede. My prose pieces are, to my mind, nothing more nor less than parts of a long, plotless, realistic story.

For me, the sketches I produce now and then are shortish or longish chapters of a novel. The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself. 

Murakami Video by Ilana Simons

A rough edit, part one video about Haruki Murakami by Ilana Simons.

Murakami