Alphabet Playlist - "Orange Sky" - Alexi Murdoch

Warning: listening to this song when you're a little blue and kind of sad your brother is moving away is probably not the best idea...

Excerpts from the article "Nerval: A Man and His Lobster"

I found this article on Harper's Magazine online and wanted to share my favorite parts (to reiterate, I did NOT write this):
source

Albrecht Dürer, A Lobster (1495)

So you alone are blessed, you free-thinking man,
In a world where life sprouts in everything?
You seize the liberty to dispose of the forces you hold,
But in all your plans a sense of the universe is lacking.
Honor in each creature the spirit which moves it:
Each flower is a soul moved by Nature’s face;
In each metal resides some of love’s mystery;
“All things feel!” And all you are is powerful.
Beware, even the blind walls may spy on you:
Even matter is vested with the power of voice…
Do not make it serve an impious purpose.
Often in the most obscure beings resides yet the hidden God;
And like the infant’s eye covered by its lid,
The pure spirit forces its kernel though the husk of stones.

–Gérard de Nerval, Vers dorés (1845) in Œuvres complètes, vol. 1, p. 739 (J. Guillaume & C. Pichois eds. 1989)(S.H. transl.)

With all due respect for cats, however, let us consider the case for the humble lobster. The poet Gérard de Nerval had a penchant for lobsters, or at least for one lobster. Nerval was seen one day taking his pet lobster for a walk in the gardens of the Palais-Royal in Paris. He conducted his crustacean about at the end of a long blue ribbon. As word of this feat of eccentricity spread, Nerval was challenged to explain himself. “And what,” he said, “could be quite so ridiculous as making a dog, a cat, a gazelle, a lion or any other beast follow one about. I have affection for lobsters. They are tranquil, serious and they know the secrets of the sea.” (The episode is captured by Guillaume Apollinaire in a collection of anecdotes from 1911). Was there any basis to this story? A generation of Nerval scholars attempted to debunk it, but then a letter to his childhood friend Laura LeBeau was discovered. Nerval had just returned from some days at the seaside at the Atlantic coastal town of La Rochelle: “and so, dear Laura, upon my regaining the town square I was accosted by the mayor who demanded that I should make a full and frank apology for stealing from the lobster nets. I will not bore you with the rest of the story, but suffice to say that reparations were made, and little Thibault is now here with me in the city…” Nerval, it seems, had liberated Thibault the lobster from certain death in a pot of boiling water and brought him home to Paris. Thus we know that it was Thibault, and not just “some lobster,” who went for that celebrated promenade in the gardens of the Palais-Royal.
But Nerval’s attitude towards animals is not, as his contemporaries supposed, a casual eccentricity. Rather, he follows in the footsteps of the great Pythagoras, whose thinking has come down to us only in the fragmentary accounts of other writers—including the “Golden Verses” which provide direct inspiration to this remarkable poem. Pythagoras was a vegetarian of a very strict sort; indeed, he would not even harm beans, a fact which according to some accounts led to his death.
“All things feel,” says Nerval’s Pythagoras. There is a ribbon, though it may not be blue, that ties all the forms of life on our planet; their interrelationship is very profound. And humankind is too quick to assume its own mastery and to turn all other things and creatures to its use. But the lobster is a special case, as animal rights activists argue (still much disputed, particularly by the seafood industry) that lobsters are sentient beings with a great capacity for feeling pain which is maximized by the once-favored cooking technique of emersion in boiling water. When Nerval proudly took his lobster for a promenade, he was making the same point he made in this poem: humans make themselves the masters of their environment and the beasts around them, and in so doing have they not lost a sense of the universe and the natural order among beings? Do they not recognize obligations that go with that mastery? It was not, perhaps, quite so comic an act as it may have seemed.

Excerpt from The Sisters Brothers by Patrick DeWitt

Most people are chained to their own fear and stupidity and haven't the sense to level a cold eye at just what is wrong with their lives. Most people will continue on, dissatisfied but never attempting to understand why, or how they might change things for the better, and they die with nothing in their hearts but dirt and old, thin blood - weak blood, diluted - and their memories aren't worth a goddamned thing, you will see what I mean. 

- Hermann Kermit Warm

Alphabet Playlist - "One Shot, Two Shots" - The Format

Before there was Fun., there was The Format.

Alphabet Playlist - "Night On The Sun" - Modest Mouse

So, turn off the light 'cause it's night on the sun
You're hopelessly hopeless
I hope so, for you.

Confidence in the Government

"Socialized medicine is ... entrusting medical services to the same bankrupt organization that can't even deliver the mail reliably." - Doug Casey

Thought Catalog Excerpts

I greatly enjoy this author's phrasing and need to document it somewhere:

...I can blame you for the death of us even though I know full well it takes two to make a relationship flourish or fall apart and I’m just as responsible, maybe it was more my fault than yours or maybe we’re like oil and water, unable to mix even with the best of intentions, who knows and who cares. 

 ...I can do that or I can just stop; keep nourishing my pain or snap my vertebrae straight and leave you in the past where you fell. I can shed my delicate skin and grow armor, feel safe in my own arms and learn to forget without forgiving.  

... I can stop viewing myself as inherently incomplete and become my own reason to smile. 

The full article 

"She's On My Arm Now" - Cinema

I think we'll be fine here
So let's take the next year
Just to try out
Let's drink some whiskey
Let's go to mexico
Let's throw our eyes at the ocean
I told them
We're never coming back here

Current Obsession - "Don't Move" - Phantogram

All you know how to do is shake shake shake
Keep your body still, keep your body still.
All you do is, shake shake shake
Keep your body still, keep your body still.


Don't you realize you're fine?
Oh can't you see that you're fine?
And know that you're still alive.
You know that you're still alive.
Oh don't you know you're alive?
Don't you know you're alive?
Burning in the sky.

Lyrics

Stephen Hawking on Aliens

"The laws of physics appear to be the same everywhere. So it follows that the laws of life should be universal too, even if the detail is different." - Stephen Hawking

State Intervention in Women's Health

This is not about politics, it's about leaving the practice of medicine up to doctors and most importantly, it's about trusting women to make the best decisions for themselves and their families. 

Read more: a mother's letter

 

Alphabet Playlist - "Never Going Back Again" - Fleetwood Mac

When I was in college, I went to a Fleetwood Mac concert with my parents. Mainly because no one my age wanted to go, but also because my parents are pretty cool. As far as musical talent goes, it was one of the best concerts I've ever attended. Here's my favorite Mac song, a tune near and dear to my heart.

Vaporize, Broken Bells

"Doubtless, we've been through this. And if you wanna follow me you should know: I was lost then, and I'm lost now. And I doubt I'll ever know which way to go." - Vaporize, Broken Bells

Doug Casey on the Nanny State

I recently read an interview with Doug Casey on the Nanny State. I don't agree with everything he said, but it was an interesting conversation with some noteworthy quotes: 

If the car were invented today, it would never be approved for use. The idea of millions of people racing towards each other at high speeds in vehicles they control themselves, with tanks full of explosive gasoline... it would never make it through OSHA, EPA, or a dozen other agencies.

...The fact that an ignorant hypocrite like Limbaugh, who wanted to have drug users executed even as he was getting phony prescriptions for his Oxycontin habit, has such a large following is another sad sign of our times.

...The current situation is unsustainable. It's going to collapse.

Life is too Short

Via

Alphabet Playlist - "Naked As We Came" - Iron and Wine

I really don't think Iron and Wine can do anything wrong. Here's a beauty, in the form of an official music video with no ad reel to sit through beforehand!