Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Orson Scott Card's Enchantment. Page 134.
That's what Ivan had to face about himself. The life he had chosen was a cocoon. Surrounded by a web of old manuscripts and scholarly papers, he would achieve tenure, publish frequently, teach a group of carefully selected graduate students, be treated like a celebrity by the handful of people who had the faintest idea who he was, and go to his grave deluded into thinking he had achieved greatness while in fact he had stayed in school all his life.
I smell bias, Orson Scott Card -- I smell bias. Card spent a year as a graduate student at Notre Dame after his mission in Brazil and subsequent graduation from Brigham Young University.

Still, the man has a point.

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Monday, June 9, 2008

Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Page 137.
The American police are involved in psychological warfare against those Americans who don't frighten them with imposing papers and threats. It's a Victorian police force; it peers out of musty windows and wants to inquire about everything, and can make crimes if the crimes don't exist to its satisfaction.
It's disheartening that this is even more true now than it was fifty years ago. It's hardly considered out of the ordinary to keep video and audio surveillance in a vehicle, for use in the event of a run-in with the so-called law.

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Jack Kerouac's On The Road. Page 127.
He had more books than I've ever seen in all my life -- two libraries, two rooms loaded from floor to ceiling around all four walls, and such books as the Apocryphal Something-or-Other in ten volumes. He played Verdi operas and pantomimed them in his pajamas with a great rip down the back. He didn't give a damn about anything. He is a great scholar who goes reeling down the New York waterfront with original seventeenth-century musical manuscripts under his arm, shouting. He crawls like a big spider through the streets. His excitement blew out of his eyes in stabs of fiendish light. He rolled his neck in spastic ecstasy. He lisped, he writhed, he flopped, he moaned, he howled, he fell back in despair. He could hardly get a word out, he was so excited with life.
Jack Kerouac's amazement with life bleeds through the page in every description of every character - and there are many of these - in this stream of consciousness chronicle of a few years of his life.

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Thursday, June 5, 2008

St. Thomas More's Utopia, translated by Paul Turner. Page 81.
And, as they see it, the scientific investigation of nature is not only a most enjoyable process, but also the best possible method of pleasing the Creator.
For they assume that He has the normal reactions of an artist. Having put the marvelous system of the universe on show for human beings to look at - since no other species is capable of taking it in - He must prefer the type of person who examines it carefully, and really admires His work, to the type that just ignores it and like the lower animals remains quite unimpressed by the whole astonishing spectacle.
In the immortal words of Bill Nye the Science Guy -- Science Rules! In a time when the Church and Crown were at odds with the scientific community (this, obviously, is no longer the case . . .), Thomas More's fictional friend gives a simple, yet easily palatable argument as to why we should indulge our natural curiosity.

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Wednesday, June 4, 2008

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch.
Now white and brown sculptures of foam and sludge drifted serenely down the river, often covering it for yards at a stretch. And where the surface of the water was visible it was covered with a molecules-thin petrochemical sheen.
There was a loud whirring as a couple of geese, thankful to be back in England again after the long, exhausting flight across the Northern Atlantic, landed on the rainbow-slicked water, and sank without a trace.
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse -- War, Famine, Pollution (Pestilence retired in the 1930s post-discovery of penicillin), and Death -- are preparing to ride per the Book of Revelation. Pollution's introduction occurs on the banks of the river mentioned above, while the quotation refers to his nearly romantic view of contamination and waste.

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Tuesday, June 3, 2008

St. Thomas More's Utopia, translated by Paul Turner. Page 86.
But anyone who deliberately tries to get himself elected to public office is permanently disqualified from holding one.
Sure, the book's either an advertisement for Catholicism or thinly veiled communist propaganda (St. More is the only Christian to be honored with a statue at the Kremlin, courtesy Lenin), but I can't help but feel that this statement -- one of the core rules of his fictional Utopia -- holds some bearing in our current times.

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