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Politics is the waste product of the ferment of civilization, unavoidable but dangerous if not properly contained.

That's when I learned about knowing nothing will get you humiliated and knowing a little bit can get you killed, but knowing all of it will bring you power.

Some things you can feel coming. You don't fall in love because you fall in love; you fall in love because of the need, desperate, to fall in love. When you feel that need, you have to watch your step: like having drunk a philter, the kind that makes you fall in love with the first things you meet. It could be a duck-billed platypus.

Each time I mentioned Arthur's name I heard him saying, "Don't bother," and felt dizzy; it was like peering over a cliff, and now, as Phlox walked off, the ground on the other side of me split and began to give way. I thought, I fanced, that in a moment, I would be standing on nothing at all, and for the first time in my life, I needed the wings none of us has.

English orthography satisfies all the repquirements of the canons of reputability under the law of conspicuous waste. It is archaic, cumbrous, and ineffective; its acquisition consumes much time and effort; failure to acquire it is easy of detection. Therefore, it is the first and readiest test of reputability in learning, and conformity to its ritual is indispensible to a blameless scholastic life.

The lawyer is exclusively occupied with the details of predatory fraud, either in achieving or in checkmating chicane, and success in the profession is therefore accepted as marking a large endowment of that barbarian astuteness which has always commanded men's respect and fear.

In history and in life one sometimes seems to glimpse a ferocious law which states: "to he that has, will be given; from he that has not, will be taken away."

Surrealists, who aspire to be cultural radicals, even revolutionaries, have often been under the well-intentioned illusion that they could be, indeed should be, Marxists. But Surrealist aestheticism is too suffused with irony to be compatible with the twentieth century's most seductive form of moralism. Marx reproached philosophy for only trying to understand the world, rather than trying to change it. Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world, and instead propose that we collect it.

So just was the cause of Austria held to be, that it seemed to her people inconceivable that any country should place itself in her path, or that questions of mere policy or prestige should be regarded anywhere as superceding the necessity which had arisen to exact summary vengeance for the crime of Serajevo.

Surrealists, who aspire to be cultural radicals, even revolutionaries, have often been under the well-intentioned illusion that they could be, indeed should be, Marxists. But Surrealist aestheticism is too suffused with irony to be compatible with the twentieth century's most seductive form of moralism. Marx reproached philosophy for only trying to understand the world, rather than trying to change it. Photographers, operating within the terms of the Surrealist sensibility, suggest the vanity of even trying to understand the world, and instead propose that we collect it.

Once Sheryl Crow was an established hit, the music business was compelled to offer up an endless number of Sheryl Crow imitators. Then when the Sheryl Crow imitators became a reliable radio genre, Sheryl Crow was compelled to imitate them. (_Entertainment Weekly_, without irony, recently praised the new Moby album for sounding like his last.)

In this sense, the third rule of cool fits perfectly into the second: the second rule says that cool cannot be manufactured, only observed, and the third says that it can only be observed by those who are themselves cool. And, of course, the first rule says that it cannot accurately be observed at all, because the act of discovering cool causes it to take flight, so if you add all three together they describe a closed loop, the hermenuetic circle of coolhunting, a phenomenon whereby not only can the uncool not see cool but cool cannot be even adequately described to them.

He gets back to the Casino just as big globular raindrops, thick as honey, begin to splat into giant asterisks on the pavement, inviting him to look down at the bottom of the text of the day, where footnotes will explain all. He isn't about to look. Nobody ever said a day has to be juggled into any kind of sense at day's end."

Lust is a great and inexhaustible literary subject, but writing graphically about what excites one isn't literature. The same stupid things excite everybody. Pornography is a form of pidgin -- a trading tongue without the deep wellspring of nuance that produces clarity.

. . . we _regard_ the photograph, the picture on our wall, as the object itself (the man, landscape, and so on) depicted there. This need not have been so. We could easily imagine people who did not have this relation to such pictures. Who, for example, would be repelled by photographs, because a face without colour and even perhaps a face in reduced proportions struck them as inhuman.

On the Take is the book that groks corruption. That is, it develops a series of interrelated observations until the reader realizes that they are all merely facets of a single subtle, deep, and highly depressing statement about corruption, one that defies reduction to a single sentence.

Legal and illegal businesses are interdependent parts of the same ecology, linked both economically and politically. Self-dealing by governmental officials is a fundamental and intractable problem. Crime afflicts poor communities disproportionately not because they are home to more criminals but because they lack the power to force the crime elsewhere. The exposure of corruption is just as political as the concealing of it: prosecutions for graft are a tool used by a political machine to wrest power from another.

Melancholy isn't about anything. Melancholy has a style or manner but no subject. Melancholy is a way of thinking, a way of thinking _about thinking_, and it needs to consume the sufferer and thus needs layers and strata and veneers in perpetuity in which to cloak and conceal itself. Melancholy is not a preocupation with death, nor a recoiling from shop interiors or human fellowship, nor is it a lack of interest in things of the world, though these may be characteristics of melancholy. It's more a particular complexion to thinking, a tightening, a spiraling, a funneling, a drilling, an incising, a helixing, the direction of this cogitation being always _down and in_, as when an oral surgeon begins screwing into your molar during root canal. A preocupation with death, a recoiling from society, an anhedonia, an obsession with conscience, these follow with melancholy, but any transient theme will soon give way to something worse, something darker and meaner, something less lucid, because the goal of melancholy is its direction and force and shape. Continuity of the illness. Any meaning of melancholy is vehicular, decorative, like a viny overgrowth on the gates of the crypt where the sufferer is cast down for his or her imprisonment. _All the world is melancholy_, Burton says, _every member of it_.

http://www.laboratorium.net/bushpope.jpg

I clipped this MSNBC graphic a while back, just because the facial expressions and hand gesture are priceless. "Someday son, this will all be yours." Or, maybe, "Do you think the subhead should be a little lower down? Let me adjust it." But that background! That's Lake Como, where the strangely tedious love scenes for Episode II were filmed. Sure, Lucas turned the color saturation all the way up, but that ain't no alien planet.

When you think about it, actually, the Dubya/Pope meeting has some eerie resonances with the Star Wars backstory. A wizened spiritual elder working on an arrogant but easily-influenced youth, passing along his twisted ideology? It strikes me as no more implausible than most of the baloney spouted about the Star Wars movies.

The book, more than any other, that radicalized me, One Market Under God is an impassioned and absurdly well-written all-out indictment of the off-kilter culture of business and how that culture has coopted legitimate political and economic discourse in this country. One Market Under God is a filter, a lexicon, an antidote: it tells you which curtain to look behind.

Nobody dast blame this man. You don't understand. Willy was a salesman; and for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life. He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law, or give you medicine. He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine; and when they start not smiling back -- boy, that's an earthquake. And then you get yourself a couple of spots on your hat, and you're finished. Nobody dast blame this man. A salesman is got to dream, boy; it comes with the territory."

This is some content.

_For though consciences are unlike as foreheads, every intelligence has one_, upon every forehead the burdensome ornament of the black conscience, and a recognition that the civilization we founded, the civilization of the strip mall and the subdivision and the online cosmetic surgeon, _all built upon the color black_; when I wore the lonely, annihilating veil I felt the blackness of it, as above, but _mostly insinuated_, a howling inside me about history and remorse and loneliness and madness and the need to capture these somehow, and I feel it still; my roots, which are _your roots_, go back to the first syllable of language, my roots are in cave painting, my roots precede the first guilty confessor who attempted to be shriven by a guilty priest, my roots precede the light upon the world, dwelling equally in its darkness; it's a history of honesty, dignity, and courage on the one hand, and _brutality, bloodthirstiness, and murder_ on the other. To be an American, to be a citizen of the West, is to be a murderer. Don't kid yourself. Cover your face.

There are marigolds six feet
under. They eat the names of the dead.

Keep talking about brands and you know what you'll get? Bad clothes. Bad hair. Bad books. Bad movies. And bad records. And bankrupt businesses. Rides that were fun for a year with no employee loyalty but everyone got rich fucking you. Who wants that? The answer is purity. We can afford it. Let's go find it again while we can."

Since the light of the star which was daguerreotyped took twenty years to traverse the space separating it from the earth, the ray which was fixed on the plate had consequently left the celestial sphere a long time before Daguerre had discovered the process by means of which we have just gained control of that light.

I was talking to you, I was asking you. Lapidifying juice, petrific seed, volcanic spume, the tears of the moon -- somewhere, wherever you are, do you too look at the world and ask question after question?

Every hipster who goes to Tokyo comes back learning two words: kawii, which means 'cute' and otaku, which means 'obsessive.' The thing that's interesting is when you combine those two things. That's what Hello Kitty is.

What it once took a very intelligent eye to see, anyone can see now. Instructed by photographs, everyone is able to visualize that once purely literary conceit, the geography of the body: for example, photographing a pregnant woman so that her body looks like a hillock, a hillock so that it looks like the body of a pregnant woman.

Whatever the moral claims made on behalf of photography, its main effect is to convert the world into a department store or museum-without-walls in which every subject is depreciated into an article of consumption, promoted into an item for aesthetic appreciation. Through the camera, people become customers or tourists of reality -- or _Realites_, as the name of the French photo-magazine suggests, for reality is understood as plural, fascinating, and up for grabs. Bringing the exotic near, rendering the familiar and homely exotic, photographs make the entire world available as an object of appraisal. For photographers who are not confined to projecting their own obsessions, there are arresting moments, there are beautiful subjects everywhere. The most heterogenous subjects are then brought together in the fictive unity offered by the ideology of humanism. Thus, according to one critic, the greatness of Paul Strand's pictures from the last period of his life -- when he turned from the brilliant discoveries of the abstracting eye to the touristic world-anthologizing tasks of photography -- consists in the fact that "his people, whether Bowery derilect, Mexican peon, New England farmer, Italian peasant, French artisan, Breton or Hebrides fisherman, Egyptian fellahin, the village idiot or the great Picasso, are all touched by the same heroic quality -- humanity." What is this humanity? It is a quality things have in common when they are viewed as photographs.

"_The heart_ is an invention of the heartsick, the land is an invention of nationalists, New England is a slogan of commisions on tourism, and family is a commonplace for politicians and religious fundamentalists. Yet, when you are cradled in the lap of these institutions, in the perception of those who came before you, ten or eleven times before you, the length of your earthly insignificance made further insignificant like the heavens hurtling away, you are glutted with sentiment."

"It's not really a card game," Soto said to me from out of this embrace. "It's a social program, a way to redistribute the wealth. I don't understand the rules. Chaco doesn't understand the rules. I'm not sure there are rules. Every so often this fellow here hugs me like a brother and says 'I'm sorry sir, but you lose. My six makes what we call a happy set.' Then he takes as much of our money as he wants." The other man handed me the bottle and I took another drink to celebrate their happy sets.

Commonly, if not invariably, the honorific marks of hand labour are certain imperfections and irregularities in the lines of the hand-wrought article, showing where the workman has fallen short in the execution of the design. The ground of the superiority of hand-wrought goods, therefore, is a certain margin of crudeness. This margin must never be so wide as to show bungling workmanship, since that would be evidence of low cost, nor so narrow as to suggest the ideal precision attained only by the machine, for that would be evidence of low cost.

My thinking about faith -- in every sense -- is informed by Fear and Trembling; its conceptual progression from stoicism to faith is as applicable to art and to daily life as it is to religion proper. The three pages of the Epilogue are perhaps the most perfect reflection on the nature of "progress" I know.

It was there that I seemed to hear some mysterious call to go somewhere, and I could not help feeling that if I went straight on and on, and kept going for a long time, I should reach the line where sky and earth met and find the key to the whole mystery there and at once discover a new life, a life a thousand times more tumultuous than ours. I dreamed of a great city as big as Naples, full of palaces, noise, uproar, life. . . . But then, what didn't I dream of? And afterwards I could not help feeling that one might find an immense life in prison too."

She's great, in part, because, in conversation, she is maddeningly precise about all the things that one should aspire to be precise about. Like modernism. And culture and politics. And what it is to be a writer vs. an intellectual. She shows that most supposed intellectual writers (like that guy who wrote about intellectuals) are actually hand-waving cream puffs.

She is apparently contradictory and yet entirely consistent. She is relativistically concrete. Even if you don't agree with her, you've got to admire her rigor.

Maybe it's simply the case that _concealment is essential to identity_, that, notwithstanding the cultural trends towards reality-based programming, notwithstanding talk shows and talk radio and their confessional opportunities, we need a part of us that will never be known, so that the more we reveal, the more we are enveloped in veils, layers that refuse to be known, additional integuments of guilt and concealment, such that _any memoir is a fiction_, an arranged narrative, a _bildungsroman_, just as many fictions are veiled memoirs; the two identities, the two narrative strategies, concealing and revealing, depending on and excluding each other by turns.

• The importance -- and mutability -- of physical architecture in shaping what is considered possible or reasonable.
• The obvious-in-hindsight observation that cyberspace and meatspace are effectively coextensive: one is "in" both simultaneously.
• The possibility of "latent ambiguity:" as society and technology change, we shouldn't expect old ideas and metaphors to remain applicable.

In this city of the Ruin, an entire manufacturing run of human beings was completed, Jorge said, and then the molds were all used two, three, maybe four times, to save money on newer molds, and if you are lukcy you never meet your own double. If you're lucky.

HELP! (Readers living by the sea are requested to cut out this note, translate it into English, fold it nicely, put it inside a sealed bottle, throw it into the sea -- and hope for the best.) TO ALL GOOD PEOPLE WHO FIND THIS NOTE: This message reaches you from men, women, and children stranded on an isolated piece of land in the Middle East. We are a decent people, but as a result of a severe voting accident, we are now at the mercy of a particularly stupid group of leaders: mostly generals, colonels, clergy, and other thugs. These bad people insist that God himself directed them to fight endlessly for a few useless pieces of real estate and sacred totem poles. They are forcing us to participate in their war games, finance, and sometimes take active part in them. If you find this note, please take it to your leaders. This is our last means of communication. TV and radio channels we could have used until recenly are now controlled by the government and its agents. We still have food and water, but only a few drops are left in the supplies of sanity.

A few choice excerpts:

The Declaration is stirring stuff, and it's little surprise that those who would shake things up, online and offline both, have taken up its demands as rallying cries. The distance from "There is No Matter Here" to "Another World is Possible" is not so great; in fact, Barlow's cyberpsace proclaims itself to be that other world of freedom and fairness, proof by example. An awful lot of the Declaration could have come -- or has since been adopted -- by the folks who march in protests outside of WEF meetings.

Which raises an obvious question: what were they thinking when they invited Barlow to Davos?

Let's start with one of the great shining examples of self-organizing bottom-up online collaboration: The great honking TCP/IP routers and SMTP relays that keep the packets flowing. It's a remarkable form of cooperation, really. I'll carry your packets if you'll carry mine, and we collaborate to get them where they need to go. Multiply this basic agreement by the millions of hosts on the Internet, and you have the dense web of mutual aid that lets users communicate freely and openly worldwide.

Madison said that "if men were angels, no government would be necessary;" but not even cyberspace is populated exclusively by six-winged seraphim. The first real test of the share-and-enjoy philosophy of the Internet Way was its ability to handle the bad seeds. Remember Canter and Siegal's green card lottery? These Arizona lawyers spammed thousands of newsgroups in with an ad for their services.

This was back in 1994, before such things were commonplace, and a couple of vigilantes could take care of any problems that came up. Actually, it was more like 30,000 vigilantes, mailbombing Canter and Siegal and crashing their ISP's server. Each time they switched ISPs and tried again, the irate response drove them off the Internet. Score one for social norms.

The next few years weren't so good for social norms alone, though. It's relatively easy to hunt down a few miscreants, but individualized rough justice only works when it's being meted out to a few individuals. Further, as soon as the bad guys realized the awesome power of mailbombing, they turned to it themselves, unleashing atomic mailbombs on unsuspecting victims. Fake the "From:" header and the crowd with pitchforks will go burn down someone else's castle, but burn down a few too many wrong castles and you get a little shy about picking up your pitchfork.

The next few years were the first golden age of spam, when legends like the great Spamford Wallace bestrode the narrow 'Net like mass-produced collectible Colussus statuettes. Unable to gag the spammers, John Perry's enlightened community stopped listening to them. Figure out who's sending spam and then just refuse connections from their servers. It's a classically anarchist solution: everyone is free to say what they want, and to listen to what they want.

Politically speaking, it gets more remarkable, though. Once the "black-hole lists" started blocking most known spam senders, the spammers started preying on the weak and the infirm. If you had a mail server and you didn't bother to secure it properly, Katie bar the door, because you could -- and typically would -- wake up one morning to find millions of ads for porn flooding through your server. The good folks of the Internet solved this one by blocking email from these "open relays," too. If you weren't with the anti-spam brigade, you were against it, and your own, legitimate, non-spam email would start getting dropped.

Again, no government in sight, but the code of responsible sysadminning starts to look an awful lot like a social contract. Lawful people must uphold the community's standards and help enforce its judgments, on penalty of being excluded from the contract. Not bad for a purely virtual society.

If real governments were seriously to get into the act, they'd probably be pretty upset at the terms of this convention, or at least at some of its consequences. It's a crime to interfere with postal mail; even if it's just mail-order catalogs. There are free-speech issues involved in throwing away Internet datagrams (especially other people's datagrams, as the extended social norms of cyberspace are starting to require).

In fact, meatspace governments, those "weary giants of flesh and steel," might also look askance at the enormous powers the keepers of the canonical lists of spammers enjoy. What if SpamCop decides that Laboratorium.net is hosted on an insecure server and starts rejecting my email? What if the Mail Abuse Prevention System decides it'd also like to prevent Mr. Todd Chalmers of Lincoln. Nebraska from sending email to its subscribers? What if AOL Time Warner decides it won't deliver packets through its cables if those packets originated from disney.go.com?

Well, say the Barlows of the world, that's okay, too. If people are upset with their spam-filtering service -- if they really value Todd Chalmers' thoughts, that is -- they're always free to renegotiate the social contract and take their electrons somewhere else. If enough people care enough, they can reshape the very "constitution" of cyberspace just by voting with their feet; the natural marketplaces of the online world will rapidly converge to their desired solution.

That is, John Perry Barlow stands not so much for cyber-anarchy as for cyber-libertarianism. On his account, everything online is going to be just jolly not because of the purity of cyberspace's social interactions, but because of the purity of its markets. In this view, markets may be no place for governments, but corporations should just stroll right in. Government should just stand back, let the companies and individuals beat each other loody, declare the result to be the best of all possible worlds, and if it turns out that the online social contract is drawn up by those with the most cash, well, that's just the wisdom of the market asserting itself.

Which is probably why the tycoons of the World Economic Forum let Barlow crash their party. The future he claims to represent looks an awful lot like the future they'd like to see.

A French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself King of England against the consent of the natives, is in plain terms a very paltry rascally original.

This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.

While Aunt Jane slept, I leaned out the window, looking up at the cloudless sky and the ring around the moon. All that is there, all that hangs suspended in air, suspended above the air, rain and hail and fire and stone, the mind of God, if there is a God; the stars and planets and comets and our fates. Sleep well, my dear. Wherever you are.

Alexander the Great either could or could not swim; in this he was typical of the Greeks.

1) For purposes of this question only, you may assume the existence of life on other planets. a) Using words of two syllables or less, give a precise medical definition of "explosive nosebleed." b) Induce one in yourself. c) Take appropriate measures to deal with the situation.

2) Examine your conscience and represent the contents using the tropical hardwood you have been given. Plan ahead: if you run out, you will not be supplied with more.

3) In what senses can Julius Caesar be said not to have existed? List four.

4) You have been provided with the mangled carcass of a lion. a) Locate the head. Count the whiskers. b) Embrace, cuddle, or comfort your lion. Take a picture. c) Determine the sex of your lion. d) Using the tools provided, embalm it. e) Construct a suitable sarcophagus for your lion.

5) You will find before you several pieces from paintings by Rene Magritte. You know what to do.

6) Sketch a design for an escalator or elevator (your choice) for the use of a species lacking opposable thumbs.

7) Trace your hand on the provided piece of paper and carve the provided ham hock to match. Do not forget the blue dye.

8) You will find a box in front of you. a) Open it. b) Describe what you see. c) Close the box. d) (optional, only if you have time) Open the box again.

9) Translate the supplied passage into a language of your choice, with the exception of French, Korean, or Hungarian.

10) Describe how to destroy an ordinary armchair beyond all recognition. Show your work. Do not exceed the space provided.