I want to learn more and more to see as beautiful what is necessary in things; then I shall be one of those who make things beautiful. Amor fati: let that be my love henceforth! I do not want to wage war against what is ugly. I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse. Looking away shall be my only negation. And all in all and on the whole: some day I wish to be only a Yes-sayer.
Friedrich Nietzsche
I’ve been wanting to do something like this locally with A-OK, I love the concept an execution on this video by Sumit Paul.
Excerpt from iamthisland.org:
I AM THIS LAND is a response to a year of divisive rhetoric; it is Breakthrough’s call for a more positive and open-minded future for our country. The new year provides the opportunity to celebrate our diversity and recommit to building a society that values dignity, equality and justice.
If you’re familiar with me you probably already know I manage another blog called AwesomeOkangan.com. We hope to raise awareness, foster a community of creative people, and share everything we think is totally awesome about where we live. And to everything un-awesome, we find a way to instill all that sense of wonderment and elation. It allows me exciting opportunities like last Thursday night when I (finally) saw that talented Calgary native, Michael Bernard Fitzgerald, at Habitat. We sat down after the show for a quick chat and fondly reminisce about the time I assaulted him during BreakOut West last year. This interview could be especially awkward because 1) the mic wasn’t recording the first time around and we found out nearly halfway through it, and 2) we’re totally wearing the same hair even though we specifically decided on each wearing two different styles beforehand. That last part was a lie, but this interview isn’t, so give it a chance.
A perfect martini should be made by “filling a glass with gin then waving it in the general direction of Italy.
Noel Coward
All I want to be is someone that makes new things and thinks about them.
Carol Padberg, Verlag 3
A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail …all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible.
George Orwell (Politics and the English Language. 1946)
Extraordinary efforts are being made
To hide things from us, my friend.
Some stay up into the wee hours
To search their souls.
Others undress each other in darkened rooms.
The creaky old elevator
Took us down to the icy cellar first
To show us a mop and a bucket
Before it deigned to ascend again
With a sigh of exasperation.
Under the vast, early-dawn sky
The city lay silent before us.
Everything on hold:
Rooftops and water towers,
Clouds and wisps of white smoke.
We must be patient, we told ourselves,
See if the pigeons will coo now
For the one who comes to her window
To feed them angel cake,
All but invisible, but for her slender arm.
Charles Simic, Pigeons at Dawn
By the way, what have you done that’s so great? Do you create anything, or just criticize others work and belittle their motivations?
Steve Jobs
In character, in manner, in style, in all things, the supreme excellence is simplicity.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
The unreal is more powerful than the real, because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it. Because it’s only intangible ideas, concepts, beliefs, fantasies that last. Stone crumbles. Wood rots. People, well, they die. But things as fragile as a thought, a dream, a legend, they can go on and on.
Chuck Palahniuk
Hauntology is an idea within the philosophy of history introduced by Jacques Derrida in his 1993 work Spectres of Marx. The word, a portmanteau of haunt and ology, and a near-homophone to ontology in Derrida’s native French, deals with “the paradoxical state of the spectre, which is neither being nor non-being”, according to a professor at RMIT University.
The idea suggests that the present exists only with respect to the past, and that society after the end of history will begin to orient itself towards ideas and aesthetics that are thought of as rustic, bizarre or “old-timey”; that is, towards the “ghost” of the past. In this, it is has some similarity with the cyberpunk literary movement. Derrida holds that because of this intellectual realignment, the end of history will be unsatisfactory and untenable.
The name and concept fundamentally come from Marx’s assertion that a “spectre is haunting Europe, the spectre of communism.” Derrida holds that the spirit of Karl Marx is even more relevant after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the demise of communism, that the West’s separation from the ignorance of the suffering still present in the world will “haunt” it and provide the impetus for a fresh interest in communism.
The idea of hauntology has been criticised by a number of philosophers including Jürgen Habermas and Richard Rorty.
I know I’m a bit behind, I’ve been terrifically busy. A bunch of projects are all being wrapped up here going into summer and I will be able to post them soon!
PLAYBOY: If life is so purposeless, do you feel that it’s worth living?
STANLEY KUBRIK: Yes, for those of us who somehow manage to cope with our own mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre, their idealism—and their assumption of immortality. As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong—and lucky—he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s élan. Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining. The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death—however mutable man may be able to make them—our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.
