Adam Phillips on the mad

“The mad are people we can’t understand and who do things that are too unacceptable; and so they are people we may be, or feel ourselves to be, endangered by. They expose what an enormous cultural investment we have in understanding people; madness, we could almost say, is what makes us idealize understanding each other, and makes us want to believe that we do.” Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2012, p. 187.

Rise and Fall of the City of Mahogany

https://youtu.be/EseSe7IggQc

Tiguini-Tiguini by M'Mah Sylla

Rilke, from Book of Hours

Make me the guardian of your estate,

make me the listener upon the rock,

give me the eye to spread across

your seas of loneliness;

allow me to pair up with the rivers' flow

and flee from the screaming of either side

and drift into the sound of the night.






--


Rainer Maria Rilke, The Book of Hours, trans.


Annemarie S. Kidder (Evanston: Northwestern




UP, 2001). p. 167.

The golf links lie so near the mill

That almost very day

The laboring children can look out

And see the men at play.

• Sarah N. Cleghorn

Martin Amis on Supreme Court

“The American publisher of Mein Kampf sued another publisher who printed unauthorized extracts of those books. And it didn’t go to the Supreme Court, it went to some district court, but the court found in favor of Hitler. That’s a good metaphor for what the Supreme Court is always doing—finding in favor of Hitler. Cute legalism, pedantry, anti–common sense.” Martin Amis

Lorrie and Larry Collins - Whistle Bait