Anti-Job Quote Of The Week 4

Even if I could begin again it would be no use, because fundamentally I have no desire to work and no desire to become a useful member of society. I sit there staring at the house across the way. It seems not only ugly and senseless, like all the other houses on the street, but from staring at it so intently, it has suddenly become absurd. The idea of constructing a place of shelter in that particular way strikes me as absolutely insane. The city itself strikes me as a piece of the highest insanity, everything about it, sewers, elevated lines, slot machines, newspapers, telephones, cops, doorknobs, flophouses, screens, toilet paper, everything.
--Henry Miller, Tropic Of Capricorn

Anti-Job Quote Of The Week 3

The only reason for living is being fully alive. And you can’t be fully alive if you’re crushed by secret fear, and bullied with the threat, get money or eat dirt; and forced to do a thousand mean things meaner than your nature. And forced to clutch on to possessions in the hope they’ll make you feel safe. And forced to watch everyone that comes near you lest they’ve come to do you down.
D. H. Lawrence

Anti-Job Quote Of The Week 2

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty. The obedient must be slaves.
Henry David Thoreau

Anti-Job Quote Of The Week 1

What of the western nations? Here, too, the technological revolution could provide the means of realizing the democratic concept of the human essence... It could, that is to say, by releasing more and more time and energy from compulsive labor, allow people to think and act as enjoyers and developers of their human capacities, rather than devoting themselves to labor as a necessary means of acquiring commodities. At the same time the technological revolution could enable people to discard the concept of themselves as essentially acquirers and appropriators. For, as we have seen, that concept was needed as an incentive to continual exertion of human productive energy and continual accumulation of capital. These incentives will no longer be needed. The problem will not be to enlist people's energies in the material productive process, but to provide alternative outlets for those energies.

C.B. Macpherson,
Democratic Theory, Essays In Retrieval

C. B. Macpherson - 1911-1987. C. B. Macpherson was a Professor who taught primarily at the University of Toronto in the Department of Political Science.

Idea Too Late

Out for an early bike ride this morning, came up with an idea for a book:
Ventriloquism For Dummies.

Surely I'm not the first with this inspiration, so now I'll do a Google search for it.

Yep, it's already out there. So it goes.

Me And Saul Bellow

The only good I ever knew of was done by people when they were happy.
--Saul Bellow

I was referred to the book The Adventures Of Augie March by the poet John Berryman in an interview published in an old copy of the Paris Review I found in the WIN (Women in Need) thrift store on Cook St. here in Victoria, B.C., Canada some years back. Probably issue #53, Winter 1972.

I remember buying the copy because at the till I dug my hand in my pocket, fished out the change, nickels, quarters, pennies-- and it was the synchronicity of det är lagom to pay for the book, including tax, some obscure amount like $2.81.

Jim Andrews recommended Henderson The Rain King, I inherited his used paperback copy in fire-damaged but perfectly readable condition after the fire that gutted the apartments in the building in which he lived, across the street from the WIN store. Nice to read a book that smells of smoke.

My readings-aloud/recordings from those books were performed, among other places, in Greg Darms’s VW Beetle in a rainstorm, and in a chalet on Mt. Washington in the off-season where the owner, a woman in an excellent dream-discussion group I was attending had handed me the keys.

From there I went on to several of Bellow’s other works. Then I read on Carole’s deck in the sun a hardcover brand new volume of interviews with Bellow over the years, borrowed on a friend's card from the McPherson Library, UVic.

But Augie March and Henderson are the most memorable to me—delightful, powerful novels.

“Mr. Bellow stuck to an individualistic path, and steered clear of cliques, fads and schools of writing.”
--Mel Gussow and Charles Mcgrath New York Times, April 6, 2005