Billie Holiday, Strange Fruit

"Happiness is a delicate thing. It is difficult to find within ourselves, and impossible to find elsewhere." ~ Sébastien-Roch Nicolas

"But trying to make sense of the movie’s [Wild At Heart] story as a mystery, or even as a plot in any ordinary sense, is ultimately to play a fool’s game. Lynch uses Gifford’s novel (with kinky additions) chiefly as an armature and a come-on for a series of lurid imaginings, an anthology of shocks and conceits that is tied to a plot only in the sense that a boat is moored to a dock."

This Be The Verse by Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
  They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
  And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
  By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
  And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
  It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
  And don't have any kids yourself.

"You are not controlling the storm, and you are not lost in it. You are the storm." ~ Sam Harris, Free Will

The Swans have a new album out. It's intense. Listen.

The video, not necessarily the song.

"Hell isn't other people. Hell is yourself." ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein in response to Jean-Paul Sartre

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." ~ Oscar Wilde

"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown." ~ H.P. Lovecraft

The polycephalic creations of Russian scientist Vladimir Demikhov are the stuff of nightmares. Despair.

That Fall by Frederick Seidel

The body on the bed is made of china,
Shiny china vagina and pubic hair.
The glassy smoothness of a woman’s body!
I stand outside the open door and stare.

I watch the shark glide by . . . it comes and goes — 
Must constantly keep moving or it will drown.
The mouth slit in the formless fetal nose
Gives it that empty look — it looks unborn;

It comes into the room up to the bed
Just like a dog. The smell of burning leaves,
Rose bittersweetness rising from the red,
Is what I see. I must be twelve. That fall.