A commonplace book of sorts
being a collection of interesting quotations, half-formed thoughts, and as of yet unrealized ideas
1. A certain man owned a copy of Wakan Roei Shu which, he claimed, was in the hand of Ono no Tofu. Another man
commented, "I am sure that there must be good reason for the attribution, sir, but does it not seem an anachronism that
Tofu should have written the manuscript of a work compiled by Fujiwara no
Kinto, a man born after his death? It seems
rather strange." The owner replied, "That's precisely what makes this manuscript so unusual." He treasured it more than
ever. -the Tsurezuregusa of Kenko, ch. 88
2. Pink as pixie semen.
3. "Where was I? Oh yes, what would be result of administering curare plus iron lung during acute mania? Possibly the
subject, unable to discharge his tensions in motor activity, would succumb on the spot like a jungle rat. Interesting
cause of death, what?" William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
4. sign on door: ANDROID LAB- RESTRICTED ACCESS
5. What is strange is not the stupid, thoughtless things others do, but that I believe that I do not do the same
things.
6. Rats and rabbits.
7. Living the dream, in all its surreality.
8. SPIDERS HAVE FINE BASEBALL PROSPECTS (seen in Richmond Times-Dispatch, c. 1910)
9."The Dreams in the Witch House" retold as the tale of a student
of Chinese.
10. ...as I look at these pages, they seem to protect me from a terrible
world that is filled with suffering. -Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate
11. Nothing to offer, even upon this altar.
12. Heartsick for aeons.
13. "festooned with viruses"- found in a Metafilter comment.
14. I'm slipping beautifully, he thought. Every night a dozen new chapters
for the secret lost book he dreamed of finding, exquisitely beautiful
episodes, nothing would ever come of them. -Edward Whittemore, Sinai
Tapestry
15. The characters walk away at the worst possible time, taking meaning with them.
16. The wood-paneled dream.
17. An unexpected meeting in a vast supermarket turns into an interview for a teenage sidekick. Her name is Fleming, she's fond of paper doll theatre,
knows Europe well, and can get good drugs ("well, you do need teenagers to get good drugs."). (source: jet lag dream, 8.22-23.11)
18. An intelligence agency (or similar shadowy organization) test disguised as an increasingly horrifying quiz/game show, based on yes/no questions
that, if answered untruthfully, will ultimately reveal the participant's true nature. In this case, said nature is that of a giant millipede
masquerading as human. (source: as #17)
19. Houston in summertime looks like it was shot on late-80s film stock.
20. Sunshine Satanism.
21. "Finally, I logged two requests for more Star Trek references. I am happy to make it so." -Dr. Cameron Buckner, email re: informal evaluations of
his PHIL 1321 class)
22. Snail script.
23. Was it possible to be normal without being someone's dupe?
-Neal Stephenson, REAMDE
24."What price the firmament rent asunder? Whither the heavenly host? These are not matters for we men whose hearts beat betwixt the ribs of
tree-roots."
25. "Armchair wizard!" -Tracey Robertson, while playing Skyrim's "Vaermina's Torpor" mission, 11/22/11
26. "Vinyl... [is] the musical equivalent of hardback books" -Erik Davis
27. Heavy metal speaks the volumes that a million written words never could.
28. Loser at the edge of time.
29. A god among kobolds.
30. "He's a bad egg. Doesn't do anything. Writes poetry or something." -Dashiell Hammett, "Too Many Have Lived"
31. Her universe, she thought, was so incredibly circumscribed, though there was no clear boundary; instead, there were,
or seemed to be, a collection of intangible notes, written into the very fabric of her home, her neighborhood, the lives
of her friends and even her dreams. Sometimes these notes, unseen yet somehow legible in a way she couldn't describe,
grew in number, and her existence was that much more defined, but at other times they vanished, taking some aspect of life
with them. No matter how many details came or went, though, she was always aware of those scraps of thought that marked
the limits of her small, enclosed life.
32. "Anybody who wanders around the world saying, 'Yes, I'm from Texas,' deserves whatever happens to him." -Hunter S.
Thompson, "The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved"
33. The first time Rebecca smoked weed in years was, obviously, awesome, but there was more to it than just getting high.
When she opened a web browser on her laptop she entered a URL without even thinking about it. Not the URL of one of the
sites she regularly visited, but of a site she didn't recognize. No, she did recognize it, but only vaguely, as if the
site was a high school classmate seen in passing fifteen years later. She didn't think about this very much, though, as
the realization that getting stoned and getting online had triggered a reflexive action she had no idea existed was much
more fascinating, and then she was thinking about how only being stoned would have made that fascination as intense as it
was, and then she got up to pour a cup of coffee. Only after that little excursion had been mined of its minute gems of
insight and appreciation, and promptly forgotten when she went back to the couch, did she turn her attention to the
website she'd unconsciously pulled up.
34. A Ming/Qing scholar transplanted to today. Not time travel, but more of a "what if that kinda dude had survived into
the present" thing.
35. Empire of graveyards.
36. Donut lawyer.
37. The Ming'i Pieh'lu, written by the famous physician T'ao Hung Ching in the 5th century AD, says that, "Ma fen is not
much used in prescriptions (now-a-days). Necromancers use it in combination with ginseng to set forward time in order to
reveal future events." (found at http://www.hempfood.com/IHA/iha02111.html)
38. Robot hand soup.
39. When I move my joints sound like Pop-Rocks in the mouth of God.
40. "Who will marry the mountain?"
41. "Totally pissin' mine away for theirs. Don't matter who they are; theirs means more."
42. "He writes like kind of an old person." -Tracey, re: a certain New Mexico food writer
43. "History sooner or later takes back her gifts." -Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in
the Age of Philip II, vol. I
44. " So I see that religion, be it what it will, is but a humour, and so the esteem of it passeth as other things do."
-Samuel Pepys, diary entry, 2 October 1660
45. Lemongrab Proust.
46. Strip malls: architectural suicide notes.
47. Last night I dreamed that I picked up where Oedipa Maas left off.
48. "Se podes engolir tudo isto, caro leitor, que te aproveite." -Padre Manuel Teixeira, Cam??es Esteve Em Macau
49. ...Like some stoner demigod, pretty much but not completely unaware that some degree of godhead had been dropped on him a while back, which
explained why he never had a particularly good grasp of his powers of time and space manipulation.
50. "Se esporte e morte acabam pelo mesmo som, para mim nunca rimaram."
Carlos Drummond de Andrade, Cadeira de Balan??o
51."The brain is such a wonderful instrument (until God sinks his teeth
into it)." -Hunter S. Thompson, Kingdom of Fear
52. Sixpoint's beer cans look like the shells in which one might load
chemical weapons.
53. "The human being has an unfortunate tendency to wish to please."
Philip K. Dick, Radio Free Albemuth
54. This is it: this is the shore whose sands are made of pulverized, blackened quartz, and whose seas grow as pale as dark wine only in
Homer's infectious imagination. This is where you endlessly stand looking seaward, quietly desperate for signs of ships, or lighthouses, or
the lowliest sea mammal with which you might connect on a tenuous evolutionary level. This is not just loneliness, but the world reduced to
those components heretofore unshaped by human expectation and need. This is it.
55. "Thus speaketh the sword."
56. Fragrant wounds.
57. The underform.
58. A thorn in the lung.
59. "God's needy tirade continues unabated" -Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time
60. "Motherfucker eats tacos with a fork. Their opinion doesn't mean
shit."
61. "The Internet was always awful, and I'm never leaving." -Joana
Mang
62. Lightborne stragglers.
63. "It was the right human thing to do in the face of the dawning deep--that ferocious zone of endless world-spawning I can't shake the
hunch that I will face again one day, come bardo time." -Erik Davis, Peaks: A High Weirdness Companion
64. "In times of decline, decay, and stagnation, the rich party and the
bards despair." -Moshe Lewin
65. Their mouths are like some sort of enameled abyss. (thanks to Shari
F.)
66. Not human, but a human-seeming, sentient, noxious weed.
67. If unfed for long enough, the nicotine habit makes you think it's gone for good. In reality, it just takes up residence elsewhere in
the nervous system, yawping silently from time to time like the starved, sharp-toothed beast it is and knowing, with the utter
certainty one sees in religious fanatics, that it will eventually be invited back home.
68. "An acquaintance of mine, a man of inexhaustible energy, sleeps only two hours a day but he only does bad things." -Omori Sogen,
Introduction to Zen Training
69. "You put all this work into browbeating them, giving them what they need even though they still don't know it, and probably never
will. You hammer them constantly, but they're like metal that never got heated before it hit the anvil. And you keep going. And going.
And going. I want to think that whatever you're teaching them is taking, that they're getting it, but there just isn't any proof. You're
a bigger failure than the analogy you came in here with."
70."Mauve underwent reconstructive stockbrocker's daughter surgery" - from the back cover of a romance novel that appeared in a dream,
August 2020
71. "To answer the original question, I think it was perfectly fine to sex traffic the robot." -Natalia, during a sci-fi book
club discussion of Ted Chiang's Exhalation
72. "If there's something I hate more than comedy, it's Pink Floyd." -Mike Smith, sci-fi book club discussion of The World's
End
73. "...like some leisure gargoyle."
74. "I am not afraid to have Christmas-Leninist networks" - from an interview with a Romanian punk or metal band in a zine, read in a dream on 2.10.21
75. "He had never written anything serious and wasn't sure he was sincere about wanting to." Robert Silverberg, Dying Inside
76. "All novelists of any consequence are psychic assassins in a very literal sense." -William S. Burroughs, letter to Allen Ginsberg, 14 April 1961
77. "It felt like being a child again, though it was not. Being a child is like nothing. It's only being. Later, when we think about it, we make it into youth." China
Mi??ville, Embassytown
78. "Will our heads clear when we get to Texas?" "It's hard to say, Ed. We probably shouldn't count on it." Charles Portis, Masters of Atlantis
79. "For I have met with a marvel, I may not deny." Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, line 475 (Marie Borroff translation)
80. "Robert, you want too much from life. Why can't you accept its small consolations? Architecture, for example, and lighting, and the interplay between the two."
Paul La Farge, The Night Ocean
81. " O
??dio era um v??mito que os livrava de v??mito maior, o v??mito da alma." Clarice Lispector, "Onde estivestes de noite"
82. "to predict the future, one only need extrapolate current trends and imagine the most stupid thing that could happen" - Molly Noise, (Cyber)punk is dead"
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