Orson Welles

"I’m not a free soul. I’m doing the impossible thing of trying to make money off the kind of movies that don’t make money."

-- Orson Welles

Sugar and Time

It is funny, working on an old Sugar IM. Reading through her account of her troubles and editing it, I feel as though I slip back in time and I am in the middle of that unfolding drama again. I like that feeling a lot. I wish I could generate it a lot more. Part of it, I think, is the freshness of it. Rereading it again and again won't provide for nearly as rich an illusion. I guess merely rereading it does not actively engage my mind enough. Accordingly, I cannot see how I can manufacture this pleasing sense of time-travel. I guess I should just enjoy it while I can.

Beauty

Although the object of beauty is debated, the experience of beauty is not. Beauty can stir up a snarl of emotions but pleasure must always be one (tortured longings and envy are not incompatible with pleasure). Our body responds to it viscerally and our names for beauty are synonymous with physical cataclysms and bodily obliteration — breathtaking, femme fatale, knockout, drop-dead gorgeous, bombshell, stunner, and ravishing. We experience beauty not as rational contemplation but as a response to physical urgency.

-- Nancy Etcoff, "Survival Of the Prettiest"

Kafka

Writing is a sweet and wonderful reward, but for what? In the night it became clear to me, as clear as a child's visual instruction, that it is the reward for serving the devil. This descent to the dark powers, this unshackling of spirits bound by nature, these dubious embraces and whatever else may take place down below, which is unknown to those up above, writing their stories in the sunlight. Perhaps there are other forms of writing, but I know only this kind; at night, when fear prevents me from sleeping I know only this kind.

-- Kafka

Daily Fun

So cute. This is a squirrel having a drink of condensation from the window. Photo by seizethedave

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