January 2010
30 posts
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It's always the end of the world as we know it →
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'A Fox in a Dug-Out Canoe or Why Reading the Web... →
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Derrida: mounteback or master dialectician? →
"The best thing for being sad"
“The best thing for being sad,” replied Merlyn, beginning to puff and blow, “is to learn something. That is the only thing that never fails. You may grow old and trembling in your anatomies, you may lie awake at night listening to the disorder in your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewer of baser...
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Sayings on hermits, eremitism, solitude,... →
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Poe Ballantine on time
“And anyway, no matter how you look at it, good or bad, magic or drab, futile or purposeful, the time passes, everything passes, and the bus comes and it’s dark and still raining and you get on, not too many people, and it scoots up on the road, the heater on, the wipers banging, the poor people dozing off or eating their Doritos or listening to one another’s stories on this long...
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One drawing
‘Soft Targets’ (2007-8)
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Atlas Obscuras →
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The million dollar myth
Interesting piece in the The Times today about bonus culture. I feel as most others do on this issue. When RBS boss Stpehen Hester said he was giving out £15 billion in rewards last week it felt like the most deplorable affront to democracy. I would stop paying my tax, If I had any tax to pay, which I don’t because I can’t even get a job . Without going all Michael Moore on you,...
Je ne perv pas
Emma: I'm taking myself off to Blackpool on Saturday - again. I miss the sea
The Mount: You can buy audiotapes
Emma: Pffffft
The Mount: Sit in the bath
Emma: With fish and chips? Great plan
The Mount: Throw a shrimping net over your body, make anguished moans as a man dressed as a sailor trawls you onto the floor
Emma: Pervert
The Mount: I didn't say I wanted to watch
Emma: Yeah yeah
The Mount: Besides web cams don't mix with baths. Or showers (it just gets too steamy)
Emma: ?
The Mount: I have said too much
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A Medicine Against The Plague
Today has been tidy day. First I unburdened my bedroom floor of several months worth of newspaper build-up. Then I attacked a stack of unopened bank statements and national insurance contributions bills, regardfully placing them in pretty coloured folders. The back room was last. I’ve neglected it for weeks. Months, actually. Almost a year, possibly. The gap in skirting board still needs...
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Reading your way out of depression →
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Apocalypse Then And Now →
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“As a journalist he was a disgrace to his profession, which is to say he was a...”
– Don Paterson
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All the Balkan folk music a man could want →
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Psalmody: medieval monastic chants →
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David Galenson on genius
I’m reading up on Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers’ project for a piece of online content I’m trying to hurriedly re-write and expel from my life as quickly as possible. I came across another Gladwellian figure called David Galeson who wrote an interesting book on ‘Old Masters and Young Artists’. He makes a nice distinction between two distinct kinds of...
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Steven Pinker on why thinking is feeling
“The emotional limbic system, sometimes referred to as the ‘lizard brain’, evolved to ensure our survival. Emotions influence what we pay attention to and what we remember. ‘The emotions are mechanisms that set the brain’s highest-level goals,’ writes Steven pinker, author of How the Mind Works. Emotions make decisions. In the Romantic view of the brain, reason and emotion are separate –...
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There's a whole world out there: The New Yorker... →
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Diary: Monday 11th January 2010
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Six drawings
‘The Tallest Of The Boys’ (2004)
‘Windfall’ (2004)
‘Sound Sullen Bones’ (2004)
‘Moving’ (2007)
‘Song Of The South’ (2007)
‘Untitled’ (2007)
Dancing bears, flea circuses and dog lingerie
The Mount: I should really share this with you - http://eternal-earthbound-pets.com/Home_Page.html
James: ?
The Mount: The link
James: To be fair - these people should be exploited for far more than $110 dollars. Do they not love their pets? Do they not believe in Christ and all his works?
The Mount: I don't know why, it's the sort of thing I assumed you might set-up
James: I might have, if I'd thought of it.
The Mount: How's work?
James: 'k - y'know. Bearable
The Mount: As in full of bears?
James: Yup. We have four now.
The Mount: That's enough for a pit. Or a circus
James: Only if they dance
The Mount: Your workplace does have that vibe - not quite bear pit, not quite travelling circus
James: We could pull off flea circus.
The Mount: Never seen one. Sounds a bit shit. I think you'd have more fun dressing dogs in lingerie and racing them
James: More fun than this? - http://www.noonco.com/flea/gallery_red.htm. Lies
The Mount: Top marks for set design. Ok - the portability is a plus. But fleas are limited in their circus skills
James: Not if you train them right - and they look adorable in large shoes getting out of the clown car. You can fit so many more in.
The Mount: In a real size car? That sounds awful. Like a swimming pool full to brim with cockroaches.
James: Even in a dinky car it works well.
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Slavoj Zizek on love
“What would be my, how should I call it, spontaneous attitude towards the universe? It’s a very dark one. The first one, the first thesis would have been: a kind of total vanity. There is nothing, basically. I mean it quite literally. Like, ultimately there are just some fragments, some vanishing things, if you look at the universe it’s one big void. But then how do things...
Dirty talk for nihilists
The Mount: Back in 5 - I need to get more tissues. For my nose. Don't worry, I haven't secretly lured you into chat sex
Nick: Thank God
The Mount: Or some sort of trick mirror chat sex.
Nick: Your bedside chat is very restrained
The Mount: I have no bedside manner. Other than "Why are you still wearing your socks?" and "Well I supposed I've started so I'll finish". Those are my main dirty talk starters
Nick: Magnus Magnusson. A good, sexy place to take the mind. You are wise.
The Mount: Oh and "Ooh baby give me what we're biologically pre-determined to do"
Nick: Hyper-charged with erotic power, that
The Mount: "You've been a naughty girl, but that's okay because good and evil are dispassionate models of human reasoning that have no constant in the complex laws of the physical universe." OH YEAH.
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Ed Ruscha
This guy slipped me by. I’ve seen Ruscha’s work before - fleetingly - in a few generic monographs on post-war 20th century art. I’ve seen the mountain pictures, and the Hopper-esque petrol stations and Pop Art comic book lettering. It always struck me as very 70s US art school - low culture not high culture, spray guns not paintbrushes, Stan Lee not Vasari, deliberate boyish...
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Sylvia Plath on free will
“As for free will, there is such a narrow crack of it for man to move in, crushed as he is from birth by environment, heredity, time and event and local convention. If I had been born of Italian parent in one of the caves in the hills I would be a prostitue at the age of 12 or so because I had to live (why?) and that was the only way open. If I was born into a wealthy New York family with...
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Diary: Friday 1st Janurary 2010, New Year's Day