John Myles White: Die Sudelbücher

Kindness is loving people more than they deserve.¹

A good thought to keep in mind for Christmas, the day in which kindness is most called for.

1. Joseph Joubert↩

Patience is the virtue of slaves.

When we envy, we see only in others what we were not lucky enough to have. We forget all those things we are lucky enough not to have.

So much farther left to climb. Not one inch has been secure.¹

I’ve spent and will spend this weekend in the studio, pushing against the limits of what I can do. And all that comes to mind are those words.

1. With Honor : This Is Our Revenge : Elevens↩

I think I may have just made the two best purchases of the year: a copy of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s “Schubert : 21 Lieder” CD and a copy of the book Psychopathia Sexualis by Krafft-Ebing. Quite possibly the most emotionally intense pieces of music I have ever heard are Schubert’s lieder when sung by Fischer-Dieskau. And if you don’t find Psychopathia Sexualis interesting, you are boring.

Obsessed Fan: You fucked my girlfriend with a cellphone.

Gwar: We did not fuck her. We raped her. And it was not with a cellphone. It was with a phonebooth.¹

1. Gwar Concert : Irving Plaza, NYC : December 14, 2006↩

Our lives are like lightning-strikes: everything is illuminated and by the time you understand what’s happened, it’s gone.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. And then the sons of the former slaves will stand right back up and clear the tables, proud to have been able to sit, if even for a moment, at a table full of rich, white men and their mean-spirited, petty wives.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character and how much they excessively drink, smoke marijuana and snort cocaine.¹

1. David Cross : It’s Not Funny : When All Is Said and Done, I Am Lonely and Miserable and Barely Able to Mask My Contempt for the Audience As I Trot Out the Same Sorry Act I’ve Been Doing Since The Mid-Eighties!↩

The philistine is to the mind what the obese are to the body. In the same way that most people sit on their couch for hours a day and do not run marathons, most people watch Lost and do not read The Golden Bough. Both are results of an excess of civilization, the point at which civilization’s comforts promote indolence and thereby begin to destroy culture.

The differences between men never end: the relation between one’s ideals and one’s experiences admits of two antipodes. Some men find in their experience evernew cause for hope in an endless stream of new causes for delight; others find rather that every experience fails to meet their hopes and makes them miserable because they had dreamt of such more. One group has a dream and curses reality for being unlike their dream; the others perpetually discover a new dream in reality at every moment.

There is a point between these two extremes, which constitutes a mixing of them, that is vital to perfect health — though it may be unattainble in practice and, if it were attained briefly, might prove unsustainable.