josh blog

Ordinary language is all right.

One could divide humanity into two classes:
those who master a metaphor, and those who hold by a formula.
Those with a bent for both are too few, they do not comprise a class.

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10 Oct '12 05:43:46 AM

'… they should at least experience that there is this life, in our time, close beside us.'

9 Oct '12 05:22:50 AM

Sophisticated people and their rectangular plates.

6 Oct '12 02:09:02 AM

'White people get nervous and speed things up.'

5 Oct '12 11:47:18 AM

Oh hey Jadakiss.

5 Oct '12 04:34:13 AM

'I stole that beat… from listening to two records.'

5 Oct '12 04:21:22 AM

'If countries were named after the words you first hear when you go there, England would have to be called Damn It.'

5 Oct '12 03:15:48 AM

People will say that there are things it's their job to know, or not their job to know.

5 Oct '12 02:47:05 AM

'Yet what is my softness good for even to tears— It is not I but nature in me.'

'"It is not I but nature," the speaker claims, dissociating himself from sympathy. But the repudiation is complicated because the prepositional phrase "nature in me" acknowledges that sympathy issues from the self, and therefore is internal to it. Maybe what is being suggested is that how the self defines itself is not dependent upon complete association with the impulses that inhabit it, but rather that the self can be defined in defiance of those impulses, at least of their totality. Definition does not specify that all that is interior is integral to the self, nor that all is exterior is alien to the self. It predicates a different notion of identity, contingent not upon bodily inclusion or exclusion, but rather upon that confluence of impulses and experiences imagined ideally to be one. The confluence of impulses has nothing to do with actual experience, nor with total experience, nor with inner experience. And as interiority or actuality fails to identify the self, so the attribution of sympathy to (one's own) nature is a statement about the origin of sympathy, not about its essence, about where it comes from, not what it is. In fact to specify that sympathy arises from human nature separates it from myself. This way of putting it suggests that between myself and my nature there is a disjunction.'

3 Oct '12 05:47:24 PM

'Dylan made no statement in her defense.'