Author: tom

I could have done a lot worst than sit
In Skid Row drinkin wine

To know that nothing really matters after all
To know there’s no real difference
Between the rich and the poor
To know that eternity is neither drunk
nor sober, to know it young
and to be a poet

Coulda gone into business and ranted
And believed that God was concerned

Instead I squatted in lonesome alleys
And nobody saw me, just my bottle
And what they saw of it was empty

And I did it in cornfields & graveyards

To know that the dead don’t make noise
To know that the cornstalks talk (among
One another with raspy old arms)

Sitting in alleys diggin the neons
And watching cathedral custodians
Wring out their rags neath the church steps

Sitting and drinking wine
And in railyards being divine

To be a millionaire & yet prefer
Curlin up with a poorboy of tokay
In a warehouse door, facing long sunsets
On railroad fields of grass

To know that the sleepers in the river
Are dreaming vain dreams, to squat
In the night and know it well

To be dark solitary eye-nerve watcher
Of the world’s whirling diamond

Jack Kerouac

Every one understands how praiseworthy it is in a Prince to keep faith, and to live uprightly and not craftily. Nevertheless, we see from what has taken place in our own days that Princes who have set little store by their word, but have known how to overreach men by their cunning, have accomplished great things, and in the end got the better of those who trusted to honest dealing.

Be it known, then, that there are two ways of contending, one in accordance with the laws, the other by force; the first of which is proper to men, the second to beasts. But since the first method is often ineffectual, it becomes necessary to resort to the second. A Prince should, therefore, understand how to use well both the man and the beast. And this lesson has been covertly taught by the ancient writers, who relate how Achilles and many others of these old Princes were given over to be brought up and trained by Chiron the Centaur; since the only meaning of their having for instructor one who was half man and half beast is, that it is necessary for a Prince to know how to use both natures, and that the one without the other has no stability.

Nicolo Machiavelli, The Prince, Chapter XVIII

To unfairly pick on a casual remark from the Guardian comment pages

These weren’t just people who were the right age to be South Park fans, but people who were liberal about social matters and in favour of things like Fair Trade and whatnot, and who approached the excesses of both the left and the right with a healthy degree of cynicism

Also known as:

If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything

Two old-guard revolutionaries, old comrades in the war too, sit either sit of a desk. It is an interrogation, and their positions could easy have been reversed. Rubashov is the prisoner, Ivanov the warden of the prison. Rubashov is accused of conspiracy, of failing to maintain the strict ideological discipline demanded of party members.

“Apage Satanas!” repeated Ivanov and poured himself out another glass. “In old days, temptation was of carnal nature. Now it takes the form of pure reason. The values change. I would like to write a Passion play in which God and the Devil dispute for the soul of Saint Rubashov. After a life of sin, he has turned to God—to a God with the double chin of industrial liberalism and the charity of the Salvation Army soups. Satan, on the contrary, is thin, ascetic and a fanatical devotee of logic. He reads Machiavelli, Ignatius of Loyola, Marx and Hegel; he is cold and unmerciful to mankind, out of a kind of mathematical mercifulness. He is damned always to do that which is most repugnant to him: to become a slaughterer, in order to abolish slaughtering, to sacrifice lambs so that no more lambs may be slaughtered, to whip people with knouts so that they may learn not to let themselves be whipped, to strip himself of every scruple in the name of a higher scrupulousness, and to challenge the hatred of mankind because of his love for it—an abstract and geometric love. Apage Satanas! Comrade Rubashov prefers to become a martyr. The columnists of the liberal Press, who hated him during his lifetime, will sanctify him after his death. He has discovered a conscience, and a conscience renders one as unfit for the revolution as a double chin. Conscience eats through the brain like a cancer, until the whole of the grey matter is devoured. Satan is beaten and withdraws—but don’t imagine that he grinds his teeth and spits fire in his fury. He shrugs his shoulders; he is thin and ascetic; he has seen many weaken and creep out of his ranks with pompous pretexts …”

Arthur Koestler, ‘Darkness at Noon‘ (1940, tr. Daphne Hardy)

In Britain people are often told to ‘stop talking about politics, it only causes arguments’. But you can only have that attitude if politics doesn’t appear to affect your life. If the house was burning down, and one group was urging everyone to ‘run through the flames’ while someone else shouted that the only chance was to jump, even my Mum wouldn’t say ‘Stop talking about fires, it will only cause a row. Now let’s have a nice cup of tea and burn to death.’

Mark Steel, ‘Reasons to be Cheerful’ (2001)

I am not a writer, a philosopher, a great figure of intellectual life: I am a teacher. There is a social phenomenon that troubles me a great deal: Since the 1960s, some teachers are becoming public men with the same obligations. I don’t want to become a prophet and say, “Please sit down, what I have to say is very important.” I have come to discuss our common work.

I don’t feel that it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life and work is to become someone else that you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think that you would have the courage to write it? What is true for writing and for a love relationship is true also for life. The game is worthwhile insofar as we don’t know what will be the end.

Michel Foucault (via andy)

Jim Hacker: Don’t tell me about the press. I know exactly who reads the papers:

The Daily Mirror is read by people who think they run the country;

The Guardian is read by people who think they ought to run the country;

The Times is read by people who actually do run the country;

The Daily Mail is read by the wives of the people who run the country;

The Financial Times is read by people who own the country;

The Morning Star is read by people who think the country ought to be run by another country;

And the Daily Telegraph is read by people who think it is.

Sir Humphrey: Prime Minister, what about the people who read the Sun?
Bernard Woolley: Sun readers don’t care who runs the country, as long as she’s got big tits.

Yes, Prime Minister

Discussing philosophical skepticism in his new book, Freedom & Neurobiology, John Searle:

Go to any university bookstore and look at the section on, for example, molecular biology or mechanical engineering, and you will find an accumulation of knowledge, the sheer volume of which would have taken Descartes� breath away. It is hard to send men to the moon and bring them back and then take seriously the problem, for example, whether the external world really exists. This is not to say that there is no room for skeptical epistemology in philosophy, but I regard the epistemic puzzles as I regard Zeno’s paradoxes about space and time. It is an interesting paradox how it is possible for me to move across the room. First I have to go half way, and then prior to that, half of that half, and prior to that half of that half, and so on. And similarly, it is an interesting puzzle how I can have certain, objective, and universal knowledge given the various skeptical possibilities that one can raise. But, all the same, we do not seriously think that Zeno’s paradoxes show that space and time do not exist, nor do most of us suppose that the skeptical paradoxes cast any doubt on the existence of knowledge.

London is not a battlefield. Those innocents who were murdered on July 7 2005 were not victims of war. And the men who killed them were not, as in their vanity they claimed on their ludicrous videos, ‘soldiers’. They were deluded, narcissistic inadequates. They were criminals. They were fantasists. We need to be very clear about this. On the streets of London, there is no such thing as a ‘war on terror’, just as there can be no such thing as a ‘war on drugs’.

Director of public prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, as quoted in the Guardian

real virtue lies not in heroically saving poor orphans from burning buildings but in steadfastly working for a world where orphans are not poor and buildings have decent fire codes.

Randy Cohen

Leonard Cohen’s introduction to the Chinese translation of Beautiful Losers:

Dear Reader,

Thank you for coming to this book. It is an honour, and a surprise, to have the frenzied thoughts of my youth expressed in Chinese characters. I sincerely appreciate the efforts of the translator and the publishers in bringing this curious work to your attention. I hope you will find it useful or amusing.

When I was young, my friends and I read and admired the old Chinese poets. Our ideas of love and friendship, of wine and distance, of poetry itself, were much affected by those ancient songs. Much later, during the years when I practiced as a Zen monk under the guidance of my teacher Kyozan Joshu Roshi, the thrilling sermons of Lin Chi (Rinzai) were studied every day. So you can understand, Dear Reader, how privileged I feel to be able to graze, even for a moment, and with such meager credentials, on the outskirts of your tradition.

This is a difficult book, even in English, if it is taken too seriously. May I suggest that you skip over the parts you don’t like? Dip into it here and there. Perhaps there will be a passage, or even a page, that resonates with your curiosity. After a while, if you are sufficiently bored or unemployed, you may want to read it from cover to cover. In any case, I thank you for your interest in this odd collection of jazz riffs, pop-art jokes, religious kitsch and muffled prayer æ an interest which indicates, to my thinking, a rather reckless, though very touching, generosity on your part.

Beautiful Losers was written outside, on a table set among the rocks, weeds and daisies, behind my house on Hydra, an island in the Aegean Sea. I lived there many years ago. It was a blazing hot summer. I never covered my head. What you have in your hands is more of a sunstroke than a book.

Dear Reader, please forgive me if I have wasted your time.

Los Angeles, February 27, 2000

Leonard Cohen

It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainty on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew oneself at the foundation of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone the elucidation, of any conundrum-that is, any reality-so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality-this touchstone can only be oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

and later

Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, which is the only fact we have. It seems to me that we ought to rejoice in the fact of death – ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us. But white Americans do not believe in death, and this is why the darkness of my skin so intimidates them. And this is also why the prsence of the Negro in this country can bring about its destruction. It is the responsibility of free men to trust and to celebrate what is constant – birth, struggle, and death are constant, and so is love, though we may not always think so – and to apprehend the nature of change, to be able and willing to change. I speak of change not on the surface but in the depths -change in the sense of renewal. But renewal becomes impossible if one supposes things to be constant that are not – safety, for example, or money, or power. One clings then to chimeras, by which one can only be betrayed, and the entire hope – the entire possibility – of freedom disappears.

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)

James Baldwin, My Dungeon Shoook – Letter to my Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation (1963):

And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it. One can be, indeed one must strive to become, tough and philosophical concerning destruction and death, for this is what most of mankind has been best at since we have heard of man. (But remember: most of mankind is not all of mankind.) But it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. It is the innocence which constitutes the crime.

and the essay ends

You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.