“Desire,” Langston Hughes

Desire to us
Was like a double death,
Swift dying
Of our mingled breath,
Evaporation
Of an unknown strange perfume
Between us quickly
In a naked
Room.


 -- Langston Hughes, Desire

Outliers: The Story of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell

"Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all."


"To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages today that determine success--the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history--with a society that provides opportunities for all."


"Those three things - autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It's whether our work fulfills us."

 -- Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

Héctor Tobar, from Deep Down Dark

"Yonni Barrios places his ear to the stone. 'It was like listening to the inside of a seashell,' he will say later. You hear nothing and you hear everything, you can imagine an ocean roiling inside that shell, and then you take away your ear and realize it's all an illusion." p. 92

 - Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free, Héctor Tobar

The Jerk, by Jeffrey McDaniel

Hey you, dragging the halo-
how about a holiday in the islands of grief?

Tongue is the word I wish to have with you.
Your eyes are so blue they leak.

Your legs are longer than a prisoner's
last night on death row.
I'm filthier than the coal miner's bathtub
and nastier than the breath of Charles Bukowski.

You're a dirty little windshield.

I'm standing behind you on the subway,
hard as calculus. My breath
be sticking to your neck like graffiti.

I'm sitting opposite you in the bar,
waiting for you to uncross your boundaries.

I want to rip off your logic
and make passionate sense to you.

I want to ride in the swing of your hips.

My fingers will dig in you like quotation marks,
blazing your limbs into parts of speech.

But with me for a lover, you won't need
catastrophes. What attracted me in the first place
will ultimately make me resent you.

I'll start telling you lies,
and my lies will sparkle,
become the bad stars you chart your life by.

I'll stare at other women so blatantly
you'll hear my eyes peeling,

because sex with you is like Great Britain:
cold, groggy, and a little uptight.

Your bed is a big, soft calculator
where my problems multiply.

Your brain is a garage
I park my bullshit in, for free.

You're not really my new girlfriend,
just another flop sequel of the first one,
who was based on the true story of my mother.

You're so ugly I forgot how to spell.

I'll cheat on you like a ninth grade math test,
break your heart just for the sound it makes.

You're the 'this' we need to put an end to.
The more you apologize, the less I forgive you.

So how about it?

  -- Jeffrey McDaniel, The Jerk

from Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

  --  Matthew Arnold, Dover Beach

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

(Pleasure/Bliss: terminologically, there is always a vacillation -- I stumble, I err. In any case, there will always be a margin of indecision; the distinction will not be the source of absolute classifications, the paradigm will falter, the meaning will be precarious, revocable, reversible, the discourse incomplete)

Thus every writer's motto reads: mad I cannot be, sane I do not deign to be, neurotic I am.

The subversive edge may seem privileged because it is the edge of violence; but it is not violence which affects pleasure, nor is it the destruction which interests it; what pleasure wants is the site of a loss, the seam, the cut, the deflation, the dissolve which seizes the subject in the midst of bliss.

But if I believe on the contrary that pleasure and bliss are parallel forces, that they cannot meet, and that between them there is more than a struggle: an incommunication, then I must believe that history, our history, is not peaceable and perhaps not even intelligent, that the text of bliss always rises out of it like a scandal

"...Whoever speaks, by speaking denies bliss, or correlatively, whoever experiences bliss causes the letter -- and all possible speech -- to collapse in the absolute degree of the annihilation he is celebrating" [Barthes quoting Leclaire]



  --  Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text

From: Naked, David Sedaris

"I don't know why I felt the need to present any excuse at all. Except for the original owner of my pink jacket, my leaving affected no one. I'd spent several months there and they had added up to nothing. Seeing as I was not the type of person to make things happen, my only option was the let things happen.... Things wouldn't be any different in North Carolina than they'd been in Oregon. I thought of those people on the bus, going from one shitty place to the next, expecting nothing to change but the landscape. Soon I'd be sitting beside them, sharing my potato chips and thinking of them as my kind of crowd."

  -- David Sedaris, Naked