About

This is a place where I gather and make public some of the thoughts that occur to me as life goes on.

I apologize for the crappy site layout, lack of a search engine, etc. I promise to work on improving things, but it won’t happen fast.

As I move this online, many links, particularly to images, break. It will take me awhile to fix everything.

- George Entenman, Chapel Hill, NC

Miscellaneous links

ge’s start page

• sounds
• duckduckgo (search)
• mojeek (search)
• startpage (search)

Quotations

Clear Thinking and Writing

Why does Butler prefer to write in this teasing, exasperating way? The style is certainly not unprecedented. Some precincts of the continental philosophical tradition, though surely not all of them, have an unfortunate tendency to regard the philosopher as a star who fascinates, and frequently by obscurity, rather than as an arguer among equals. When ideas are stated clearly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pursue them on one’s own. When they remain mysterious (indeed, when they are not quite asserted), one remains dependent on the originating authority.

– Martha Nussbaum, The Professor of Parody, The New Republic

Deutsch sein heisst klar sein.

– Adolf Hitler

Beauty

Dan Gurney had a company All American Racers. His Eagles model “…looked like birds on purpose, noses feminine and sharp, because Dan figured race cars should be pretty.”

“If you have the chance to make something beautiful,” he once told me, “and you don’t, well, what does that say about you?”

— Road & Track, March/April 2018, p. 22

Life (a perfect definition)

A series of awkward events separated by snacks

– Alice, 11, Modern Love in NY Times Magazine

Photographic (dis)inspiration

Before becoming a writer, [Mark Alice] Durant was himself a photographer and performance artist - an evolution that he charts in the book [27 Contexts: An Anecdotal History in Photography]. In 1999, though, while doing a residency at an artists’ colony, he “had this very distinct feeling that I didn’t have any images inside me any more.” He did, however, have words. Lots of them, it turned out.

– Interview in theliteratelens.com

Os Novos Bahianos (only slightly misquoted)

Besta é tu se você não viver nesse mundo

Robert Burns

O, wad some Power the giftie gie us To see oursels as others see us!

Winifred Gallagher

From Winifred Gallagher, I.D.: How Temperament and Experience Create the Individual (Random House, 1966, Uncorrected Proof)

“We Westeners tend to think of personality as a monolith, an unchanging entity that objectively takes in and processes information and generates consistent responses. This is a heroic idea, but inaccurate. Far from being a solitary, unchanging Rock of Gibraltar, personality is deeply social and inherently multitudinous - elements reflected in the origins of the word itself. Per is Latin for”through,” and sonus, for “sound,” recalling classical actors’ practice of using small megaphones to project their voices through their characters’ masks.”

Unfortunately, he goes on to say:

“On life’s stage, personality, like those ancient props, enables us to communicate and collaborate with our fellow players and, when necessary, to”put a good face” on the sensitive hidden self: the insider’s view of personality that is one’s immediate awareness of being.”

The hidden self sounds like Gilbert Ryle’s ghost in the machine.

Stick Shift

“Stick shift is great for millennial theft control.”

– Doug Read, KZYX, Mendocino, CA (WSJ, CCLXXIV, # 132)

Camus

« Êtes-vous un intellectuel de gauche ? — Je ne suis pas sûr d’être un intellectuel… Quant au reste, je suis pour la gauche, malgré moi et malgré elle. »

– Entretien du 14 décembre 1959, Albert Camus avec François Meyer, université d’Aix en Provence.

Christophe Boltanski - La Cache - 6

Dans un lieu ouvert à tous – un hall d’aéroport, une terrasse de café, une salle de cinéma ou le salon du livre de la fête de L’Humanité, j’avais interdiction de l’appeler Mère-Grand ou de prononcer toute autre formule équivalente qui aurait pu évoquer son âge, un sujet sur lequel elle gardait le plus grand secret. Au moment où j’écris ces lignes, je ne sais toujours pas avec précision quand elle est née et je répugne à faire les recherches nécessaires auprès des administrations concernées, par crainte de violer son intimité la plus profonde. Elle refusait, disait-elle, « tout ce qui marque ».

Self-Knowledge Ain’t

Any angler who can tell you exactly why he fishes is lying.

– Mark Kurlansky ,Review of The Unreasonable Virtue of Fly Fishing By Josh Greenberg ,Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. 20 Mar 2021: C.11.

Love

Love is a gross exaggeration of the difference between one person and everybody else.

– George Bernard Shaw

(Un)reification

Amira sits under a tree, unpinning the names from things.

– Claire Schwartz, Lecture on the History of the House, Poetry, Volume 217, No 4, January 2021, p. 369.