Delirium Tremens - St. Mary's Revenge

 "In a morbid condition, dreams are often distinguished by their remarkably graphic, vivid, and extremely lifelike quality. The resulting picture is sometimes monstrous, but the setting and the whole process of the presentation sometimes happen to be so probable, and with details so subtle, unexpected, yet artistically consistent with the whole fullness of the picture, that even the dreamer himself would be unable to invent them in reality, though he were as much an artist as Pushkin or Turgenev. Such dreams, morbid dreams, are always long remembered and produce a strong impression on the disturbed and already excited organism of the person."

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Crime and Punishment

Summer Song

"Different strokes for different folks, they say now, and that's cool. So if I say summer to you, you get one set of private, personal images that are all the way different from mine. That's cool. But for me, summer is always going to mean running down the road to the Florida Market with change jingling in my pockets, the temperature in the gay nineties, my feet dressed in Keds. The word conjures an image of the GS&WM railroad tracks running into a perspective-point in the distance, burnished so white under the sun that when you closed your eyes you could still see them there in the dark, only blue instead of white.

But there was more to that summer than our trip across the river to look for Ray Brower, although that looms the largest. Sounds of The Fleetwoods singing, "Come Softly to Me" and Robin Luke singing "Susie Darlin" and Little Anthony popping the vocal on "I Ran All the Way Home." Were they all hits in that summer of 1960? Yes and no. Mostly yes. In the long purple evenings when rock and roll from WLAM blurred into night baseball from WCOU, time shifted. I think it was all 1960 and that the summer went on for a space of years, held magically intact in a web of sounds: the sweet hum of crickets, the machine-gun roar of playing-cards riffling against the spokes of some kid's bicycle as he pedaled home for a late supper of cold cuts and iced tea, the flat Texas voice of Buddy Knox singing "Come along and be my party doll, and I'll make love to you, to you," and the baseball announcer's voice mingling with the song and with the smell of fresh cut grass: "Count's three and two now. Whitey Ford leans over... shakes off the sign... now he's got it... Ford pauses... pitches... and there it goes! Williams got all of that one! Kiss it goodbye! RED SOX LEAD, THREE TO ONE!" Was Ted Williams still playing for the Red Sox in 1960? You bet your ass he was—.316 for my man Ted."

Stephen King

The Body

Inverse Vanity

 

"On the night Jose Torres beat Willie Pastrano for the Light-Heavyweight Championship, he had been afraid to cheer for fear bad luck would fall upon his friend Jose. He loved Torres more after the fight because he had been able to win despite the luxury of a friend who was such bad luck as Norman Mailer. That is a frightful idea for a man to have of himself. It is inverse vanity more poisonous than vanity itself. The agent of bad luck. He ever doubted whether he had the right to run with Ali. So a victory for Muhammad on this night would be like a sign of liberation for himself, an indication that he might be rid of the curse of carrying treacherous luck."

Norman Mailer

The Fight

When We Went to See Bob Dylan

When I think about the old days, babe
You're always on my mind
I know it ain't like I remember
I guess my memories run wild

Like when we went to see Bob Dylan
We danced to "Desolation Row"
But I don't live here anymore
But I got no place to go

The War on Drugs

"I Don't Live Here Anymore"

spiritual drowsiness

 With increasing animation he stated again that I had missed his point. Entirely. And in a tone of growing self-conscious complacency he told me that few things escaped his attention, and he was rather used to think them out, and generally from his experience of life and men arrived at the right conclusion.

This bit of self-praise, of course, fitted excellently the laborious inanity of the whole conversation. The whole thing strengthened in me that obscure feeling of life being but a waste of days, which, half-unconsciously, had driven me out of a comfortable berth, away from men I liked, to flee from the menace of emptiness . . . and to find inanity at the first turn. Here was a man of recognized character and achievement disclosed as an absurd and dreary chatterer. And it was probably like this everywhere—from east to west, from the bottom to the top of the social scale.

A great discouragement fell on me. A spiritual drowsiness. Giles’ voice was going on complacently; the very voice of the universal hollow conceit. And I was no longer angry with it. There was nothing original, nothing new, startling, informing, to expect from the world; no opportunities to find out something about oneself, no wisdom to acquire, no fun to enjoy. Everything was stupid and overrated, even as Captain Giles was. So be it.

Joseph Conrad

The Shadow-line

Get a Job!

"He was appalled at the awful intellectual chasm that yawned between him and his people.  He could never cross it and explain to them his position, - the Nietzschean position, in regard to socialism.  There were not words enough in the English language, nor in any language, to make his attitude and conduct intelligible to them.  Their highest concept of right conduct, in his case, was to get a job.  That was their first word and their last.  It constituted their whole lexicon of ideas.  Get a job!  Go to work! Poor, stupid slaves, he thought, while his sister talked.  Small wonder the world belonged to the strong.  The slaves were obsessed by their own slavery.  A job was to them a golden fetich before which they fell down and worshipped."

Jack London

Martin Eden

Deer Lake

So Martin thought, and he thought further, till it dawned upon him that the difference between these lawyers, officers, business men, and bank cashiers he had met and the members of the working class he had known was on a par with the difference in the food they ate, clothes they wore, neighborhoods in which they lived. Certainly, in all of them was lacking the something more which he found in himself and in the books. The Morses had shown him the best their social position could produce, and he was not impressed by it. A pauper himself, a slave to the money-lender, he knew himself the superior of those he met at the Morses'; and, when his one decent suit of clothes was out of pawn, he moved among them a lord of life, quivering with a sense of outrage akin to what a prince would suffer if condemned to live with goat-herds.

"You hate and fear the socialists," he remarked to Mr. Morse, one evening at dinner; "but why? You know neither them nor their doctrines."

journal entry from 2015 or

Martin Eden

Jack London