read a single mom's guide to whiter teeth

once you've got the blues, you got to keep moving, you can't stay in one place - Brownie McGee

“We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind—mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.”

- J.G. Ballard in the introduction to the french edition of Crash

surfing: people transcend the frontier on the coast, but the surf brings them back into it. The have to fight against the land and at the same time embrace going towards it

It is not the least bit coincidental that adults who commit suicide with firearms almost always shoot themselves in: the head. They shoot the terrible master. - dfw

And then he danced with this girl. He’d never seen her before and he never saw her again. But her name was Petulia, Pet for short, and she was all right, nice hair, a good mover. And she kept staring right into his eyes. Staring and staring, as though she were hypnotized. He asked her why. “Kiss me,” said the girl. So he kissed her, and she went limp in his arms. “Oooh,” said the girl, sighing, almost swooning, “I just kissed Al Pacino.” - do something like this with the landscape - invent if have to. like someone wilfully ignoring a huge advertising hoarding

film/play/game in which someone jumps between two times spatially - upstairs downstairs

In the winter of 1974, unbound and mimeographed samizdat copies of The Gulag Archipelago began being surreptitiously passed between Soviet citizens. These initial readers were normally given 24 hours to finish the work before passing it on to the next person, requiring the reader to spend an uninterrupted day and night to get through the work. Years later, this initial generation of Soviet readers could still recall who had given them their copy, to whom they had passed it on, and who they had trusted enough to discuss their thoughts about the book

She liked to quote a line from Carson McCullers: “I must go home periodically to renew my sense of horror.”

do a concordance of questions in books by searching for ?

“

I am I. Here am I. Where are you?

Ah, there you are! Now, damn the consequences, we have met.
”

- D.H. Lawrence Studies in Classic American Literature

what has the internet done to cafe culture? Why no more moveable feasts? or are all feasts moveable?

i've never experienced bright light as anything friendly, but as something threatening - Ingmar Bergman

gilmore girls and fanny alexander - he power of revealing unexpected but cohesive and thematic motivations for doing what people do eg the bishop being an actor. but is this a false lulling structure to life?

i think a lot of women are terribly angry

an ordinary suburban family who get visions

mother tongue: they go and hang out in notting hill looking at the big houses trying to get into a front garden. The teacher sees them, invites them in with disastrous consequences

interview with famous artist - turns out to be his friend/batman and the artist is the interviewer

on one occasion a draftee’s unusual tattoo provoked a sergeant to exclaim, “Oh, boy, that’s out!” Its four-letter word was considered disqualifying for combat.

fictional literary criticism: someone has to read all of hemingway so they can get it out of the way and write for themselves. Then they pick up hemingway they've read before and find new things in it.....

someone who thinks the someone that they are when they are asleep is the real them and the someone they are when they are awake is the inconsequential one

hating the wire: bad reviews of popular things

you know the monument? some kid climbed on it but the coppers said ‘GET DOWN FROM THERE, IT’S A RELIGIOUS MONUMENT’ and i’m like ‘it’s for the falklands war’ then he replied ‘RELIGIOUS, MILITARY, IT’S THE SAME THING’.

M being a young pretty drunk - also a young couple who get each other addicted to the things they are addicted to

man only stays human by preserving large patches of simplicity in his life, while the tendency of many modern inventions-in particular the film, the radio and the aeroplane-is to weaken his consciousness, dull his curiosity, and, in general, drive him nearer to the animals - george orwell

voyage around my mouth - use all the tools available (usergroups on anatomy, microscopes, other travel writers) to get a prismatic view of my mouth.

someone throws a handful of dust in the air, throws a picture. the dust forms a face; no-one believes him when he says that it was an accident

lit crit of my degree certificate

I convinced a mechanic to let me live in an Audi that was waiting to get fixed. I’d drive it around for a while, then it would break down and have to be fixed again, which meant I got to keep it for a little while longer. It was kind of an everybody-wins situation, except for the poor lady who was waiting for her Audi.

man makes a woman travel a million miles for his love

arithmetical paint shading for a legoman head

what is a constellation? the rejection of neighbouring stars, that's what it is. it tells us a lot about how we think of things

Mike Lightning and Minus Juan - what is the opposite of 'France'? The Opposite Engine

pages of a book that talk and hate each other

musical instruments that talk

“I am so busy keeping my head above water that I scarcely know who I am, much less who anyone else is. But I must discipline myself. I must be imaginative and create plots, knit motives, probe dialogue – rather than merely trying to record descriptions and sensations. The latter is pointless, without purpose, unless it is later to be synthesized into a story. The latter is also a rather pronounced symptom of an oversensitive and unproductive ego.”

- The Journals of Sylvia Plath

a whole film where you can't understand the two male leads

the narrative implications of entropy

'filmed with the naked fury of FACT!' - Canon City, 1948

If, as William Burroughs used to say, a novel is but a map of a territory, an outline is but a map of a map.

No one cares about what you think, unless you do what you think. No one cares what you do, unless you think about what you do. No one ever really cares what you say.

We could not lightly draw water after dark, for there were snakes swimming in the pools or clustering in knots around their brinks. Twice puff-adders came twisting into the alert ring of our debating coffee-circle. Three of our men died of bites; four recovered after great fear and pain, and a swelling of the poisoned limb. Howeitat treatment was to bind up the part with snake-skin plaster and read chapters of the Koran to the sufferer until he died.

a cocktail where as part of the drinking experience a beautiful woman slaps you across the face

photostitch

parts of reconstructed faces

old building photos with new ones

different exposures and colour schemes

parts of my face badly

parts of my face with different expressions

animate and inanimate objects

things and their opposites

one thing people like and one thing they hate

game boards out of parts of photos

dirt made of little curlicues

straight lines on the photo

the things you see when youwake up - in limited b&w

take pictures of people naked and get them to draw what costume they would like to wear

a guy who takes his wife around the world testing the effects of geography and diet on the taste of her vagina

someone hanging from a harness from a rope from the ceiling and they are only 3 inches off the ground

young man contemplates his own reflection as with that physics guy saying he is inside out

one state takes on its own defence

a history of fan interference in sports

common sense is no longer photogenic

religion used to be the seat of learning but that has now shifted to science. religion is now about ignorance

frustrating superheros whose powers are almost amazing but actually rubbish

ten days before the invention of the wheel

oil rig gets towed away by greenpeace, interfered with by someone who wants to make it into a country and the cowboy ceo of the oil company

modern king and his fool

so she called me aggressive, i wanted to punch her in the face, it's caled new jersey!

susan blackmore - the meme machine

fractals and narrative structure

our conception of science as objective is not conducive to invention as people assumes everything has been worked out - the idea that science is a creative enterprise diminishes science's objectivity so inventors are seen as geniuses rather than poets

- but then, poets too are seen as geniuses. goddam romantics. both should be seen as sportsmen

To a worm in horseradish, the world is horseradish - Yiddish Proverb

my stained mug teases me

Los Angeles County Fire Department Battalion Chief Steve Martin said, "We are going to burn, cut, foam and gel. And if that doesn't work, we're going to pray. This place is worth a lot, but it's not worth dying for. "

it's all about questions and examples

making shadows into things is interesting - shadows are actually a gap

explore the thingness of blobs of color

In England barristers wear wigs. Wigs! I don't want my barrister spending precious minutes before a trial thinking about wear his wig is at

journalism is to be read once: writing is to read twice. that is a good tension to have going through a book

respect for people with knowledge: medicine is arguable if you know enough, it is based on judgment more than we think. physics, though, involves visualisation in completely different ways eg spacetime. harder to argue against. but maybe that's not a problem? need visualisation experts to work out equations inside out?

dream: had a big but not unwieldy sword, was slitting throats and beheading on behalf of a beleaguered group - jews, maybe - who were imprisoned in a church to be burnt. Killed lots of seeming conquistadors and then at threat of disease everyone went back inside the church: went onto a balcony and a bunch of caribbeans in 50s clothing were there to offer their help

the idea of once you know how the world works you go mad but on a very specific scale, like one word extra = madness

imagine if superpowers were not genetic but taught: once knowledge got to a certain level we could do things humans couldn't do before. Aren't we already there with machines? what is the difference?

the biosociologist's foundation for tragedy

why do we have preconceptions? in some ways we need them to know what to look for. but why and how do people get hunches? Can they be harnessed?