Anas’s Blog

Come & chat @ paraplegic theatre:

http://www.glitchgore.com/talk.html

Boddhisatva Pimp … an interview with Reverend Spook.

Plus, I’m getting rid of some of the old shit posts, and my intention, at least, is to be more active with this blog.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.—Goethe

Just to remind everyone that Rev Spook’s excellent blog, the daily excrement, is back up again:

http://excrement.wordpress.com/

He’s also a really exciting musician, check out these links:

http://www.myspace.com/ripisc

http://www.myspace.com/gl1tchg0r3

I am currently reading RAW’s Cosmic Trigger II  which has led me to rediscover my love for the man’s work. I have to say that I’m especially fond of the brilliant, incisive quotes that RAW generously peppers the book with, usually at the head of each chapter. I enjoyed these a lot so I thought I’d share:

“Don’t you know that if people could bottle the air they would? Don’t you know that there would be an American Air-bottling Association? And don’t you know that they would allow thousands and millions to die for want of breath, if they could not pay for air? I am not blaming anybody. I am just telling how it is.”
Robert Ingersoll, A Lay Sermon

“The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells.”
John_T._Flynn

“How many does it take to metamorphose wickedness into righteousness? One man must not kill. If he does, it is murder…. But a state or nation may kill as many as they please, and it is not murder. It is just, necessary, commendable, and right. Only get people enough to agree to it, and the butchery of myriads of human beings is perfectly innocent. But how many does it take?”
Adin Ballou - The Non-Resistant, 5 February 1845

“To plunder, to slaughter, to steal, these things they misname empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.”
Calgacus

Any relevance to modern day Western Foreign Policy is purely coincidental.

I also really like this haiku by Basho that I found at the front of Jim Dodge’s Fup, even though it sounds a bit too profound for the likes of me:

The temple bell stops
but the sound keeps coming
out of the flowers.

Is there for honest poverty
That hangs his head, an’ a’ that
The coward slave, we pass him by
We dare be poor for a’ that
For a’ that, an’ a’ that
The rank is but the guinea’s stamp
The man’s the gowd for a’ that

What though on hamely fare we dine
Wear hoddin grey, an’ a’ that
Gie fools their silks, and knaves their wine
A man’s a man, for a’ that
For a’ that, an’ a’ that
Their tinsel show an’ a’ that
The honest man, though e’er sae poor
Is king o’ men for a’ that

Ye see yon birkie ca’d a lord
Wha struts an’ stares an’ a’ that
Tho’ hundreds worship at his word
He’s but a coof for a’ that
For a’ that, an’ a’ that
The man o’ independent mind
He looks an’ laughs at a’ that

A prince can mak’ a belted knight
A marquise, duke, an’ a’ that
But an honest man’s aboon his might
Gude faith, he maunna fa’ that
For a’ that an’ a’ that
Their dignities an’ a’ that
The pith o’ sense an’ pride o’ worth
Are higher rank that a’ that

Then let us pray that come it may
(as come it will for a’ that)
That sense and worth, o’er a’ the earth
Shall bear the gree an’ a’ that
For a’ that an’ a’ that
It’s coming yet for a’ that
That man to man, the world o’er
Shall brithers be for a’ that

‘I postulate that the function of all art and all creative thought is to make us aware of what we know and don’t know we know. You can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t know already. Like those folks living on the sea coast in the Middle Ages, watching those ships come in mast first year after year — then Galileo wises them up and they are ready to burn him as an egghead deviant. But they cool it out over the years and finally have to admit:”It’s round boys, it’s round. We knew it all along.” Cezanne showed the viewer objects seen from a certain angle in a certain light and they attacked his canvases with umbrellas at the first exhibition. Well, that doesn’t happen any more and any child would recognize the objects in a Cezanne canvas. Joyce made readers aware of their own stream of consciousness and was accused of promulgating a cult of unintelligibility.’

– William S. Burroughs

Much as I love this particular excerpt I have to ask myself how accurate it is. ”You can’t tell anybody anything he doesn’t already know.” Take for example Einstein’s theory of Relativity, how many people already had a strong intuition of its veracity before he’d formulated it? Not many at all judging from the contemporary response to his ideas. The same thing applies to quantum mechanics, which is so amazing precisely because it goes against what we’d come to expect from reality up to that point – again its impact testifies to just how unexpected it was.

In matter of fact the reason I’m posting the excerpt is because I love Burroughs’ style — and most of all his pitch black sense of humour, the mordant acidic wit that is typical of his writing. In the above instance summed up for me by the little quote he inserts “It’s round boys, it’s round. We knew it all along” — and I couldn’t stop laughing at that line on first reading the passage — and the dry use of hipster language. The other thing is of course what everyone who’s heard him speak gets: that you can hear his arid, corrosive, monotonous voice in almost everything he writes, which personally I find makes it even more pleasurable to read.

The streak of wank that is Morrissey 

Why is it that the arseholes who moan about there being too much immigration into the UK, and about how it’s diluting Britain’s distinctive Anglo-Saxon/Aryan culture, always end either up threatening to IMMIGRATE themselves, or like bequiffed indie tosser Morrissey –who’s just got into some bother for opening his big fat mouth about there being too many foreigners round these parts – have already immigrated to somewhere else, much to the betterment of this country. I mean, why do you think it’s OK to pollute ’someone else’s’ country with your pasty white presence and your loud ignorant opinions?  Why spoil another country?

In the past one of the most popular solutions to the prospect of an overwhelming tide of foul-smelling foreigners coming here and threatening the greatness of this nation was to cry repatriation. But nowadays that’s a bit too nazi-like even for the likes of Mozzer, so they’re reduced to fucking off somewhere else or telling us about how they’ve been forced to contemplate it. The UK is such a cold, miserable shitty country, crammed so full of deadbeats, workshy drunkyards and Conservatives that we should welcome these influxes of new blood, of people willing to actually work for a living and willing to live here. In particular we should be thankful to this influx of foreigners if it means we lose a Morrissey or two along the way.

“Maybe if you return to a place, you’ve never really left that place because in waiting to come back, part of you is still there. If this were not true, then it would be a brand new place, not seen before nothing to remember it by.”

–Richard Brautigan, An Unfortunate Woman