“What is happening is radio in the modern age is a curious thing, psychologically. Radio is back strong after its early losses to television but in an altogether form. The radio is now something people listen to while they are doing something else. They’re getting dressed in the morning, driving to work, sorting mail, painting a building, working in a manhole and listening to the radio. Then comes nightfall and all the adults in New York and New Jersey and Long Island and Connecticut, like everywhere else, are stroked out, catatonic, in front of the television set. The kids, however, are more active. They are outside, all over the place, tooling around in automobiles, lollygagging around with transistors plugged into their skulls, listening to the radio. Listening is not exactly the word. They use the radio as a background, the aural prop for whatever kind of life they want to imagine they’re leading. They don’t want any messages at all, they want an atmosphere. Half the time, as soon as they get a message – namely, a commercial or a news spot – they start turning the dial, looking for the atmosphere they lost. So there are all these kids out there somewhere, roaming the dial, looking for something that will hook not the minds, but the psyche.”
—Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, 1965 (but still applies now)
February 2011
38 posts
“In traveling, a companion, in life, compassion,” she repeats, making sure of it. ”So what does that really mean? In simple terms.”
I think it over. It takes me a while to gather my thoughts, but she waits patiently.
“I think it means,” I say, “that chance encounters are what keep us going. In simple terms.”
Kafka on the Shore, Haruki Murakami
“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.”
— D.H. Lawrence, “Self Pity”
“Life has to be given a meaning because of the obvious fact that it has no meaning.”
—Henry Miller
“For every poet it is always morning in the world. History a forgotten, insomniac night; History and elemental awe are always our early beginning, because the fate of poetry is to fall in love with the world, in spite of History.”
—Derek Walcott, in his 1992 acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize in Literature
“To accomplish much you must first lose everything.”
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