Mar 9, 2009
Mar 7, 2009
"if i were hungry, i would happily hunt anything that runs or crawls or flies, even relatives, and tear them down with my teeth. but it isn't hunger that drives millions of armed american males to forests and hills every autumn, as the high incidence of heart failure among the hunters will prove. somehow the hunting process has to do with masculinity, but i don't quite know how. i know there are any number of good and efficient hunters who know what they are doing; but many more are overweight gentlemen, primed with whisky and armed with high-powered rifles. they shoot at anything that moves or looks as though it might, and their success in killing one another may well prevent a population explosion. if the casualties were limited to their own kind there would be no problem, but the slaughter of cows, pigs, farmers, dogs, and highway signs makes autumn a dangerous season in which to travel. a farmer in upper new york state painted the word COW in big black letters on both sides of his white bossy, but the hunters shot it anyway. in wisconsin, as i was driving through, a hunter shot his own guide between the shoulder blades. the coroner questioning this nimrod asked, "did you think he was a deer?"
"yes, sir, i did."
"but you weren't sure he was a deer."
"well, no sir. i guess not."
John Steinbeck
"Travels with Charley in Search of America"
Mar 6, 2009
"david laid a down payment on a house in short hills, new jersey...it was a nice house on knollwood road. a two-story pale yellow neo-colonial with black shutters on a one-acre plot of land. downstairs: kitchen, a dining room, living room, a porch. upstairs: two bedrooms and a study with angled ceiling. there was a stone-lined pond in back. there were brick pillars at the driveway's entrance. there was a mailbox with the silhouette of a bird flying in front of the sun.
david taylor bought a new oak desk for his home office and placed it in the study next to the black leather couch which had been moved from his office at the leonard company. other items for the house included a $30,000 dinning-room table that seated six with a leaflet extension to accommodate four more, a piano, a sony home-entertainment system with a forty-two-inch flat-screen tv, dvd player, surround sound, and three-thousand-disc hi-fi cd changer that worked like a jukebox, a john deere 2004 model lawn mower, a krups espresso machine, and a king-size antique "opium bed" from a gallery on wooster street. they woke to the sound of water being filtered through the fishpond.
they would walk to town for mediocre italian food or ice cream or a movie.
they set their espresso machine on an automatic timer which had coffee brewing in the morning before they woke up. they drank it together before david drove his new lexus seven miles to the train station. since short hills was relatively far out on the morning commute (eleven stops) david always had his own seat while he ate a bagel and read the times and stared absently at the satellite towns passing by.
unless she was meeting a friend in the city or going to an auction at christie's, samona stayed home reading magazines while she drank coffee in her nightgown until noon, at which point she got dressed. then she would drive the passat david had bought her to the short hills mall a mile away or else she'd stay home and and sketch or research the interior design company she wanted to start. she filled small notebooks with arcane details about this phantom company that she knew was never going to happen. she went to yoga four times a week."
Jeff Hobbs
"The Tourists"
Mar 5, 2009
"Most tourists feel compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is remarkable that they encounter. unsure of other responses, they take a picture. this gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move on. the method especially appeals to people handicapped by a ruthless work ethic - germans, japanese, and americans. using a camera appeases the anxiety which the work-driven feel about not working when they are on vacation and supposed to be having fun. they have something to do that is like a friendly imitation of work: they can take pictures."
Susan Sontag
"In Plato's Cave"
also from The Tourists:
"the talk reminded me of why i'd never joined a fraternity, and smugly resented the friends of mine who had - the backslapping, the rough embraces, the constant cock-talking, the intense drinking that led to tears and hugs and "i love ya, dude's," and the sitting around the common room in boxer shorts, legs intertwined - it all seemed more homoerotic than anything you'd see in an abercrombie & fitch catalog and with a thicker veneer of hypocrisy."
"he didn't know that on monday he wouldn't even imagine there being such a thing as friday, and when friday finally arrived, it would seem unreal that monday had ever existed - it would seem so far in the past. and on saturdays it would seem even more unreal that another monday was starting two days later..."
Jeff Hobbs
"The Tourists"
Mar 2, 2009
Mar 1, 2009
"here i'll make a confession, or rather two. the first is that when i look back through my life i can't honestly say that anything i've ever done has given me quite such a kick as fishing. everything else has been a bit of a flop in comparison, even women. i don't set up to be one of those men that don't care about women. i've spent plenty of time chasing them, and i would even now if i had the chance. still, if you gave me the choice of having any woman you care to name, but i mean any woman, or catching a ten-pound carp, the carp would win every time. and the other confession is that after i was sixteen i never fished again.
why? because that's how things happen. because in this life we lead...we don't do the things we want to do. it isn't because we're always working...it's because there's some devil in us that drives us to and fro on everlasting idiocies. there's time for everything except the things worth doing. think of something you really care about. then add hour to hour and calculate the fraction of your life that you've actually spent doing it. and then calculate the time you've spent on things like shaving, riding to and fro on buses, waiting in railway junctions, swapping dirty stories, and reading newspapers."
Coming up for Air
George Orwell
(an excellent study, if ever there was one, of the sarcastic soul, written in the first person. - sk)
one of the many joys inherent in the unemployed life (so long as one is fortunate enough to have the economic realities somewhat under control) is the ability to tackle that pile of books that has been accumulating for years. the books that everyday life never affords you the time to read. you know the story: a few pages here, read half asleep at the end of a long day, a chapter or two there, on that precious ten day holiday, for many a paltry few paragraphs on the tube, taxi or bus ride to and fro work. in short, it takes us weeks or months to get through your average novel - and you can forget about those classic tomes you've been yearning after for years, always high on the list but never accomplished - the dead russians, englishmen & americans of literary fame. with that said, perhaps in way of an excuse for my lack of writing on this site thus far, i'll periodically add excerpts from books i've had the pleasure - and luxury - to read as of late. you likely won't find too many unheard-ofs on shane's reading list. 19th & 20th century classics feature highly - along with a smattering of contemporary stuff.
sk
although sunset shots are the ugg boots of the photographic world -
loathed and loved in equal measures by those with taste and
those unfortunate souls born without -
i still find this image beautiful,
if only because it served its purpose as a photo:
capturing a moment i observed in person and did not want to forget.
(and for the record, this is not to be interpreted as my condonation of ugg products.
may they be worn by all suffering souls in the proverbial eternal inferno)
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