how we lost the revolution

"There [at Corpus Christi] Grant appeared as an actor for the first and only time in his career. He took a part in Shakespeare's Othello--not as the dusky Moor or Iago or a Venetian Gentleman, but in the sweetly feminine rôle of Desdemona." --Meet General Grant (1928)

The Gesualdo Hex.

"...a joke can be so big that it breaks the roof of the stars." --GKC

Highsmith & snails.

"...the proportion of dogs who will bite a man under any circumstance is rather less than the proportion of men who will murder you in a railway carriage..." --Chesterton

Beckett & Duchamp.

"This generation would have licked Hitler's boots." --Theodore Wilder, 1981

Ancient poets thread.

"Notwithstanding Jean-Francois Lyotard's identification of the postmodern with 'incredulity toward metanarratives,' postmodernism has its own grand narrative." --Lawrence E Klein, in: What's Left of Enlightenment? (2002)

Turtles All the Way Down.

"There is no room for the idea that Kyle might have been a good soldier but a bad guy; or a mediocre guy doing a difficult job badly; or a complex guy in a bad war who convinced himself he loved killing to cope with an impossible situation; or a straight-up serial killer exploiting an oppressive system that, yes, also employs lots of well-meaning, often impoverished, non-serial-killer people to do oppressive things over which they have no control. Or that Iraqis might be fully realised human beings with complex inner lives who find joy in food and sunshine and family, and anguish in the murders of their children. Or that you can support your country while thinking critically about its actions and its citizenry. Or that many truths can be true at once." --Lindy West at The Guardian