This is why Xenu gave us Christmas.
Cheap Wine, Plastic Chairs: Oliver Sacks at Barnes & Noble: A weekly series that celebrates everyone’s favorite part of the author reading: the Q&A.
With science rather than spirituality, how do you find consolation in life?
I in no sense downplay the importance of given experience in various sorts. For me, for example, music is tremendously important; music transports me. I regard Mozart’s music as coming from heaven. That is only a way of speaking, but I can’t help speaking that way. I find my joys in nature and in human art and culture. And sometimes in science. There’s a lovely book by a great physicist called The Joy of Insight, and he describes epiphanies and ecstasies and feelings of revelation quite as intense as any religious person. But I personally have no taste for immortality. I think it would be a disaster for the species if any prominent way of averting death was found. I’d like a few more years of relative health to enjoy life and write and I will be happy to bill it in.
"Connecticut, I think, owned the little remaining part of Ohio—being the same where they now send Giddings to Congress, and beat all creation at making cheese."
— Abraham Lincoln, Speech on the Kansas-Nebraska act at Peoria, Illinois, 16 October, 1854
It’s time for #Fridayreads, books-I’m-currently-reading and books-I-can’t-wait-to-read edition!
Currently: Real Man Adventures, T Cooper’s memoir about being a dude; and That’s Not a Feeling, Dan Josefson’s novel of a (harmlessly?) creepy boarding school.
Can’t wait: The Other Side of the World by Jay Neugeboren, whom I trust; and Confessions from a Dark Wood by Internet friend Eric Raymond, who included a business card (pictured) and a hilarious metafictional corporate cover letter (not pictured), so I have yet to determine whether he can be trusted.
It must be
pin-the-shit-out-of-your-Tumblr-posts-season as well.
"Jeff was the star, so when we were in New York he stayed at the Waldorf-Astoria on posh Park Avenue, while Woody and I would be installed a little way across town in the much cheaper Gorham Hotel. But that was OK. It was a rock ‘n’ roll haunt at the time and you would always run into bands there: Cream, Sly and the Family Stone, Ten Years After. Janis Joplin, who was by no means a shy or retiring kind of woman, was always chasing Ronnie and me around the place, trying to shag one or the other of us, though without success. We were terrified of her and would hide behind the potted plant in the lobby until she had gone past."
— Rod Stewart, Rod: The Autobiography
