>Thus by the taking up of Drama into literature, a mere new form was found in which the art of Poetry might indite herself afresh; only borrowing from Life the accidental stuff which she might twist and turn to suit her solitary need, her own self-glorification. All matter and each form were only there to help her introduce to the best graces of the reader one abstract thought, the poet's idealised, beloved 'I.' How faithlessly she forgot, the while, that she had first to thank them all—even the most complex of her forms—to just this haughtily-despised material Life! From the Lyric through all the forms of poetry down to this literary Drama, there is not one which has not blossomed in far purer and more noble shape from the bodily directness of the People's life. What are all the products of the seeming spontaneous action of abstract poetic art, exhibited in language, verse, and expression, compared with the ever fresh-born beauty, variety, and perfection of the Folk's-lyric, whose teeming riches the spirit of research is toiling now at last to drag from under the rubbish-heap of ages? >But these Folk-ballads are not so much as thinkable without their twin-bred melodies: and what was not only said but also sung, was part and parcel of Life's immediate utterance. Who speaks and sings, at the same time ex presses his feelings by gestures and by motion—at least whoever does this from sheer instinct, like the Folk,—though not the tutored foundling of our song-professors.—Where such an art still flourishes, it finds of itself a constant train of fresh turns of expression, fresh forms of composition ("Dichtung"); and the Athenians teach us unmistakably, how, in the progress of this self-unfolding, the highest artwork, Tragedy, could come to birth.—Opposed to this, the art of Poetry must ever stay unfruitful when she turns her back on Life; all her shaping then can never be aught else but that of Fashion, that of wilful combination,—not invention. Unfortunate in her every rub with Matter, she therefore turns for ever back to thought: that restless mill-wheel of the Wish, the ever craving, ever unstilled Wish which—thrusting off its only possible assuagement, in the world of sense—must only wish itself eternally, eternally consume itself. >The Literary Drama can only redeem itself from this state of misery by becoming the actual living Drama. The path of that redemption has been repeatedly entered, and even in our latter days,—by many an one from honest yearning, but alas I by the majority for no other reason than that the Theatre had imperceptibly become a more remunerative market than the counter of the Publisher.
The Peregrine by J. A. Baker >He was a skimming black crescent, cutting across the saltings, sending up a cloud of dunlin dense as a swarm of bees. He drove up between them, black shark in shoals of silver fish, threshing and plunging. With a sudden stab down he was clear of the swirl and was chasing a solitary dunlin up into the sky. The dunlin seemed to come slowly back to the hawk. It passed into his dark outline, and did not re-appear. There was no brutality, no violence. The hawk’s foot reached out, and gripped, and squeezed, and quenched the dunlin’s heart as effortlessly as a man’s finger extinguishing an insect. Languidly, easily, the hawk glided down to an elm on the island to plume and eat his prey.
>The Sarazin sore daunted with the buffe >Snatcheth his sword, and fiercely to him flies; >Who well it wards, and quyteth cuff with cuff: >Each others equall puissaunce enuies, >And through their iron sides with cruell spies >Does seeke to perce: repining courage yields >No foote to foe. The flashing fier flies >As from a forge out of their burning shields, >And streames of purple bloud new dies the verdant fields.
The Faerie Queene
>The decor has seen updates. Dramatic dildonics adorn the hall, so many myriad members throbbing in sculpture out from the walls, sprouting from the floor—a veritable boneyard of penises—they come cut and uncut, trimmed and untrimmed, from every angle by which the eye might pass; penises light and dark, large and small, some curving sideways, others in helices reaching up in pairs of two, in triplicate or more, towards the now-darkened lamplights; some rakish penises angled askance, others laid low along the ground; veiny, smooth, hard, soft, every possible configuration of wiener expressing some dick dreamer's unbounded gnosis, interred for all eternity—or what remains of it—in marble here, in granite there, some chrysoprase detailing on lacquered hardwoods—ebony, hickory, olivewood—streams of gold sprouting mock-molten from rosewood glans… there are chairs here whose peniform backings rise from cushions of bristling black boarshair, felted brown upholstery, bare alder, to droop lazily down upon the seated’s ostensible shoulder, the crook of its laconic wooden foreskin inviting rest beneath its shade, the embrace would be warm and caring, like sitting under a banyan at the height of summer… and, in the distant past, were one to sit upon one of these chaises, he or she might have listened at dusk, the lights glowed down to incandescence, the timbre of campfire, to waters flowing gently perhaps, from the pièce de résistance, whose flaccid Greek proportions bely a sheer magnitude of scope—its descent from the high-vaulted ceiling, some fifty or sixty feet up, drags nearly its terminant foreskin across the lobby floor—emitting waters which once flowed steady, dribbled fits and starts, or gushed voluminous bursts into an ornate and embossed circular basin of immense proportion held low aloft by a dwarf colonnade in keeping with the finest of Ionian tradition, and whose facade entablature might have been carved by Michaelangelo himself… and which bears still a mysterious ammonic smell whose origin I cannot imagine nor postulate.
Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories by Andrea Camilleri >“What? They’re still using the lupara?” Montalbano wondered aloud, since the method seemed, well, archaic, in an age when automatic weapons and Kalashnikovs could be had at three for a dime at the local open-air markets. >“The rival bosses are traditionalists,” his colleague explained. “Don Sisino Cuffaro is over eighty, and Don Balduccio Sinagra just sailed past eighty-five. They’re very attached, you see, to their childhood memories, which include the lupara. But Don Sisino’s son, Don Lillino Cuffaro, who’s over sixty now, and Don Balduccio’s fifty-year-old boy, Don Masino Sinagra, are champing at the bit. They’re anxious to take over for their fathers and would like to modernize, but they’re afraid to because their parents are still liable to slap them around in public.” >“Are you kidding me?” >“Not at all. The two old men—Don Sisino and Don Balduccio, that is— are very sensible. And they’re always trying to keep up with each other. If someone from the Sinagra family kills someone from the Cuffaro family, you can bet your last lira that in less than a week’s time, one of the Cuffaros will kill one of the Sinagras. But only one, mind you.” >“So what’s the score at present?” Montalbano asked sportingly. >“Six-six,” his colleague said in all seriousness. “The next penalty kick goes to the Sinagras.”
Ernie placed his gun on the ground and advanced upon the small boy. He grabbed him and threw him to the ground. Raymond took the roll of string from his pocket and cut off a length of it. Together, they forced the boy's arms in front of him and tied his wrists together tight.
"Now the legs," Raymond said. Peter struggled and received a punch in the stomach. That winded him and he lay still. Next, they tied his ankles together with more string. He was now trussed up like a chicken and completely helpless.
Ernie picked up his gun, and then, with his other hand, he grabbed one of Peter's arms. Raymond grabbed the other arm and together they began to drag the boy over the grass towards the railway lines. Peter kept absolutely quiet. Whatever it was they were up to, talking to them wasn't going to help matters.
They dragged their victim down the embankment and on to the railway lines themselves. Then one took the arms and the other the feet and they lifted him up and laid him down again lengthwise right between two lines.
"You're mad!" Peter said. "You can't do this!"
"'Oo says we can't? This is just a little lesson we're teachin' you not to be cheeky."
"More string," Ernie said.
Raymond produced the ball of string and the two larger boys now proceeded to tie the victim down in such a way that he couldn't wriggle away from between the rails. They did this by looping string around each of his arms and then threading the string under the rails on either side. They did the same with his middle body and his ankles. When they had finished, Peter Watson was strung down helpless and virtually immobile between the rails. The only parts of his body he could move to any extent were his head and feet.
Ernie and Raymond stepped back to survey their handiwork. "We done a nice job," Ernie said.
"There's trains every 'alf 'our on this line," Raymond said. "We ain't gonna 'ave long to wait."
— 'The Swan' ('The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar And Six More'), Roald Dahl
>This now leads us to elucidate more precisely the error of the idea that the majority should make the law, because, even though this idea must remain theoretical - since it does not correspond to an effective reality - it is necessary to explain how it has taken root in the modern outlook, to which of its tendencies it corresponds, and which of them - at least in appearance - it satisfies. Its most obvious flaw is the one we have just mentioned: the opinion of the majority cannot be anything but an expression of incompetence, whether this be due to lack of intelligence or to ignorance pure and simple; certain observations of 'mass psychology' might be quoted here, in particular the widely known fact that the aggregate of mental reactions aroused among the component individuals of a crowd crystallizes into a sort of general psychosis whose level is not merely not that of the average, but actually that of the lowest elements present.
René Guénon - The Crisis of the Modern World
>It began raining a little from a hazy, cloudless-seeming sky as Paul, 26, and Michelle, 21, walked toward Chelsea to attend a magazine-release party in an art gallery. Paul had resigned to not speaking and was beginning to feel more like he was “moving through the universe” than “walking on a sidewalk.” He stared ahead with a mask-like expression, weakly trying to remember where he was one year ago, last November, more for something to do than because he wanted to know, though he was not incurious. Michelle, to his left, drifted in and out of his peripheral vision—far enough away for pedestrians to pass unknowingly between them—like a slow, amorphous flickering. Paul was thinking the word “somewhere,” meditatively as both placeholder and ends, when Michelle asked if he was okay. “Yes,” said Paul automatically. As they entered a building, a few minutes later, he sort of glanced at Michelle and was surprised to see her grinning, then couldn’t stop himself from grinning. Sometimes, during an argument, feeling like he’d been acting in a movie and the scene had ended, Paul would suddenly grin, causing Michelle to grin, and they’d be able to enjoy doing things together again, for one to forty hours, but that hadn’t happened this time, partly because Michelle had grinned first. Paul looked away, slightly confused, and suppressed his grin. “What,” he said in an unintentionally loud monotone, unsure what he felt exactly, and they entered a large, mundane elevator, whose door closed slowly. “What,” said Paul at a normal volume. “Nothing,” said Michelle still grinning a little. “Why are you grinning?” “No reason,” said Michelle. “What caused you to grin?” “Nothing. Just life. The situation.” Entering the party, on the fifth floor, Paul realized he’d said vaguely negative things on the internet, at some point, about a person who was probably in attendance, so walked quickly to Jeremy—an easy-to-talk-to acquaintance—and asked what movies he’d seen recently.
I kinda avoided this guy then read this yesterday. Not bad, might right the rest.
>Thus by the taking up of Drama into literature, a mere new form was found in which the art of Poetry might indite herself afresh; only borrowing from Life the accidental stuff which she might twist and turn to suit her solitary need, her own self-glorification. All matter and each form were only there to help her introduce to the best graces of the reader one abstract thought, the poet's idealised, beloved 'I.' How faithlessly she forgot, the while, that she had first to thank them all—even the most complex of her forms—to just this haughtily-despised material Life! From the Lyric through all the forms of poetry down to this literary Drama, there is not one which has not blossomed in far purer and more noble shape from the bodily directness of the People's life. What are all the products of the seeming spontaneous action of abstract poetic art, exhibited in language, verse, and expression, compared with the ever fresh-born beauty, variety, and perfection of the Folk's-lyric, whose teeming riches the spirit of research is toiling now at last to drag from under the rubbish-heap of ages?
>But these Folk-ballads are not so much as thinkable without their twin-bred melodies: and what was not only said but also sung, was part and parcel of Life's immediate utterance. Who speaks and sings, at the same time ex presses his feelings by gestures and by motion—at least whoever does this from sheer instinct, like the Folk,—though not the tutored foundling of our song-professors.—Where such an art still flourishes, it finds of itself a constant train of fresh turns of expression, fresh forms of composition ("Dichtung"); and the Athenians teach us unmistakably, how, in the progress of this self-unfolding, the highest artwork, Tragedy, could come to birth.—Opposed to this, the art of Poetry must ever stay unfruitful when she turns her back on Life; all her shaping then can never be aught else but that of Fashion, that of wilful combination,—not invention. Unfortunate in her every rub with Matter, she therefore turns for ever back to thought: that restless mill-wheel of the Wish, the ever craving, ever unstilled Wish which—thrusting off its only possible assuagement, in the world of sense—must only wish itself eternally, eternally consume itself.
>The Literary Drama can only redeem itself from this state of misery by becoming the actual living Drama. The path of that redemption has been repeatedly entered, and even in our latter days,—by many an one from honest yearning, but alas I by the majority for no other reason than that the Theatre had imperceptibly become a more remunerative market than the counter of the Publisher.
Reads like shit.
That’s pretty good.
The Peregrine by J. A. Baker
>He was a skimming black crescent, cutting across the saltings, sending up a cloud of dunlin dense as a swarm of bees. He drove up between them, black shark in shoals of silver fish, threshing and plunging. With a sudden stab down he was clear of the swirl and was chasing a solitary dunlin up into the sky. The dunlin seemed to come slowly back to the hawk. It passed into his dark outline, and did not re-appear. There was no brutality, no violence. The hawk’s foot reached out, and gripped, and squeezed, and quenched the dunlin’s heart as effortlessly as a man’s finger extinguishing an insect. Languidly, easily, the hawk glided down to an elm on the island to plume and eat his prey.
That actually puts me off from reading that. That was on my list, but as an ESL I'd have to look up way too many words.
>J. A. Baker
Who?
>The Sarazin sore daunted with the buffe
>Snatcheth his sword, and fiercely to him flies;
>Who well it wards, and quyteth cuff with cuff:
>Each others equall puissaunce enuies,
>And through their iron sides with cruell spies
>Does seeke to perce: repining courage yields
>No foote to foe. The flashing fier flies
>As from a forge out of their burning shields,
>And streames of purple bloud new dies the verdant fields.
The Faerie Queene
It reads like shit.
filtered hard
>The decor has seen updates. Dramatic dildonics adorn the hall, so many myriad members throbbing in sculpture out from the walls, sprouting from the floor—a veritable boneyard of penises—they come cut and uncut, trimmed and untrimmed, from every angle by which the eye might pass; penises light and dark, large and small, some curving sideways, others in helices reaching up in pairs of two, in triplicate or more, towards the now-darkened lamplights; some rakish penises angled askance, others laid low along the ground; veiny, smooth, hard, soft, every possible configuration of wiener expressing some dick dreamer's unbounded gnosis, interred for all eternity—or what remains of it—in marble here, in granite there, some chrysoprase detailing on lacquered hardwoods—ebony, hickory, olivewood—streams of gold sprouting mock-molten from rosewood glans… there are chairs here whose peniform backings rise from cushions of bristling black boarshair, felted brown upholstery, bare alder, to droop lazily down upon the seated’s ostensible shoulder, the crook of its laconic wooden foreskin inviting rest beneath its shade, the embrace would be warm and caring, like sitting under a banyan at the height of summer… and, in the distant past, were one to sit upon one of these chaises, he or she might have listened at dusk, the lights glowed down to incandescence, the timbre of campfire, to waters flowing gently perhaps, from the pièce de résistance, whose flaccid Greek proportions bely a sheer magnitude of scope—its descent from the high-vaulted ceiling, some fifty or sixty feet up, drags nearly its terminant foreskin across the lobby floor—emitting waters which once flowed steady, dribbled fits and starts, or gushed voluminous bursts into an ornate and embossed circular basin of immense proportion held low aloft by a dwarf colonnade in keeping with the finest of Ionian tradition, and whose facade entablature might have been carved by Michaelangelo himself… and which bears still a mysterious ammonic smell whose origin I cannot imagine nor postulate.
Montalbano's First Case and Other Stories by Andrea Camilleri
>“What? They’re still using the lupara?” Montalbano wondered aloud, since the method seemed, well, archaic, in an age when automatic weapons and Kalashnikovs could be had at three for a dime at the local open-air markets.
>“The rival bosses are traditionalists,” his colleague explained. “Don Sisino Cuffaro is over eighty, and Don Balduccio Sinagra just sailed past eighty-five. They’re very attached, you see, to their childhood memories, which include the lupara. But Don Sisino’s son, Don Lillino Cuffaro, who’s over sixty now, and Don Balduccio’s fifty-year-old boy, Don Masino Sinagra, are champing at the bit. They’re anxious to take over for their fathers and would like to modernize, but they’re afraid to because their parents are still liable to slap them around in public.”
>“Are you kidding me?”
>“Not at all. The two old men—Don Sisino and Don Balduccio, that is— are very sensible. And they’re always trying to keep up with each other. If someone from the Sinagra family kills someone from the Cuffaro family, you can bet your last lira that in less than a week’s time, one of the Cuffaros will kill one of the Sinagras. But only one, mind you.”
>“So what’s the score at present?” Montalbano asked sportingly.
>“Six-six,” his colleague said in all seriousness. “The next penalty kick goes to the Sinagras.”
Ernie placed his gun on the ground and advanced upon the small boy. He grabbed him and threw him to the ground. Raymond took the roll of string from his pocket and cut off a length of it. Together, they forced the boy's arms in front of him and tied his wrists together tight.
"Now the legs," Raymond said. Peter struggled and received a punch in the stomach. That winded him and he lay still. Next, they tied his ankles together with more string. He was now trussed up like a chicken and completely helpless.
Ernie picked up his gun, and then, with his other hand, he grabbed one of Peter's arms. Raymond grabbed the other arm and together they began to drag the boy over the grass towards the railway lines. Peter kept absolutely quiet. Whatever it was they were up to, talking to them wasn't going to help matters.
They dragged their victim down the embankment and on to the railway lines themselves. Then one took the arms and the other the feet and they lifted him up and laid him down again lengthwise right between two lines.
"You're mad!" Peter said. "You can't do this!"
"'Oo says we can't? This is just a little lesson we're teachin' you not to be cheeky."
"More string," Ernie said.
Raymond produced the ball of string and the two larger boys now proceeded to tie the victim down in such a way that he couldn't wriggle away from between the rails. They did this by looping string around each of his arms and then threading the string under the rails on either side. They did the same with his middle body and his ankles. When they had finished, Peter Watson was strung down helpless and virtually immobile between the rails. The only parts of his body he could move to any extent were his head and feet.
Ernie and Raymond stepped back to survey their handiwork. "We done a nice job," Ernie said.
"There's trains every 'alf 'our on this line," Raymond said. "We ain't gonna 'ave long to wait."
— 'The Swan' ('The Wonderful Story Of Henry Sugar And Six More'), Roald Dahl
>This now leads us to elucidate more precisely the error of the idea that the majority should make the law, because, even though this idea must remain theoretical - since it does not correspond to an effective reality - it is necessary to explain how it has taken root in the modern outlook, to which of its tendencies it corresponds, and which of them - at least in appearance - it satisfies. Its most obvious flaw is the one we have just mentioned: the opinion of the majority cannot be anything but an expression of incompetence, whether this be due to lack of intelligence or to ignorance pure and simple; certain observations of 'mass psychology' might be quoted here, in particular the widely known fact that the aggregate of mental reactions aroused among the component individuals of a crowd crystallizes into a sort of general psychosis whose level is not merely not that of the average, but actually that of the lowest elements present.
René Guénon - The Crisis of the Modern World
Beautifully put. Gonna pick this up
Lol complete dogshit
I never read Guenon, but I honestly expected something much better. This is midwit tier.
>You never thought we'd go to war after all the things we saw. It's April Fools' day tomorrow never comes until it's too late.
>It began raining a little from a hazy, cloudless-seeming sky as Paul, 26, and Michelle, 21, walked toward Chelsea to attend a magazine-release party in an art gallery. Paul had resigned to not speaking and was beginning to feel more like he was “moving through the universe” than “walking on a sidewalk.” He stared ahead with a mask-like expression, weakly trying to remember where he was one year ago, last November, more for something to do than because he wanted to know, though he was not incurious. Michelle, to his left, drifted in and out of his peripheral vision—far enough away for pedestrians to pass unknowingly between them—like a slow, amorphous flickering. Paul was thinking the word “somewhere,” meditatively as both placeholder and ends, when Michelle asked if he was okay. “Yes,” said Paul automatically. As they entered a building, a few minutes later, he sort of glanced at Michelle and was surprised to see her grinning, then couldn’t stop himself from grinning. Sometimes, during an argument, feeling like he’d been acting in a movie and the scene had ended, Paul would suddenly grin, causing Michelle to grin, and they’d be able to enjoy doing things together again, for one to forty hours, but that hadn’t happened this time, partly because Michelle had grinned first. Paul looked away, slightly confused, and suppressed his grin. “What,” he said in an unintentionally loud monotone, unsure what he felt exactly, and they entered a large, mundane elevator, whose door closed slowly. “What,” said Paul at a normal volume. “Nothing,” said Michelle still grinning a little. “Why are you grinning?” “No reason,” said Michelle. “What caused you to grin?” “Nothing. Just life. The situation.” Entering the party, on the fifth floor, Paul realized he’d said vaguely negative things on the internet, at some point, about a person who was probably in attendance, so walked quickly to Jeremy—an easy-to-talk-to acquaintance—and asked what movies he’d seen recently.
I kinda avoided this guy then read this yesterday. Not bad, might right the rest.
*read
>I asked her how she can be so good at blowjobs and she told me she grew up with five brothers.
I plan on reading this as well as his other book "Heroes"