Characters Double Quotes

No weakness of the human mind has more frequently incurred animadversion, than the negligence with which men overlook their own faults, however flagrant, and the easiness with which they pardon them, however frequently repeated.

Courage doesn't mean never being afraid. We're all afraid sometimes. Bravery means doing the right thing anyway. That's true strength.

Consider what an amoral, unprincipled cynicI am-think of all the improvements you could make to my character.

The specific character of [women's] oppression cannot be explained away by equating different situations through superficial and childish simplifications[:] It is true that both the woman and the male worker are condemned to silence by their exploitation. But under the current system, the worker's wife is also condemned to silence by her worker-husband. In other words, in addition to the class exploitation common to both of them, women must confront a particular set of relations that exist between them and men, relations of conflict and violence that use physical differences as their pretext.

Need someone to rescue?” She interrupted him again, spitting her words out with all the rage, contempt, and anger she had bottled up inside. “I’m not a damsel in distress, and you sir, are no knight in shining double breasted, JC Penny!

That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names — anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yevtuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression — but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It. It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency — sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying — are not just unpleasant but literally horrible. It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one. The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who's being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.

I didn't like showing weakness, not to anybody.

I shall not vote for Sen. Obama and it will not be because he—like me and like all of us—carries African genes. And I shall not be voting for Mrs. Clinton, who has the gall to inform me after a career of overweening entitlement that there is 'a double standard' at work for women in politics; and I assure you now that this decision of mine has only to do with the content of her character. We will know that we have put this behind us when [...] we have outgrown and forgotten the original prejudice.

One realizes that even in harmonious families there is this double life: the group life, which is the one we can observe in our neighbour’s household, and, underneath, another – secret and passionate and intense – which is the real life that stamps the faces and gives character to the voices of our friends. Always in his mind each member of these social units is escaping, running away, trying to break the net which circumstances and his own affections have woven about him. One realizes that human relationships are the tragic necessity of human life; that they can never be wholly satisfactory, that every ego is half the time greedily seeking them, and half the time pulling away from them. In those simple relationships of loving husband and wife, affectionate sisters, children and grandmother, there are innumerable shades of sweetness and anguish which make up the pattern of our lives day by day . . .

Mr. Johnson's character was not much more exceptional than his double chin.

Chinese say that good things come in pairs, such as the character for double happiness, cut out of red paper and pasted on doors for weddings, and the two stone lions that guard temples.

I was in the fifth grade the first time I thought about turning thirty. My best friend Darcy and I came across a perpetual calendar in the back of the phone book, where you could look up any date in the future, and by using this little grid, determine what the day of the week would be. So we located our birthdays in the following year, mine in May and hers in September. I got Wednesday, a school night. She got a Friday. A small victory, but typical. Darcy was always the lucky one. Her skin tanned more quickly, her hair feathered more easily, and she didn't need braces. Her moonwalk was superior, as were her cart-wheels and her front handsprings (I couldn't handspring at all). She had a better sticker collection. More Michael Jackson pins. Forenze sweaters in turquoise, red, and peach (my mother allowed me none- said they were too trendy and expensive). And a pair of fifty-dollar Guess jeans with zippers at the ankles (ditto). Darcy had double-pierced ears and a sibling- even if it was just a brother, it was better than being an only child as I was. But at least I was a few months older and she would never quite catch up. That's when I decided to check out my thirtieth birthday- in a year so far away that it sounded like science fiction. It fell on a Sunday, which meant that my dashing husband and I would secure a responsible baby-sitter for our two (possibly three) children on that Saturday evening, dine at a fancy French restaurant with cloth napkins, and stay out past midnight, so technically we would be celebrating on my actual birthday. I would have just won a big case- somehow proven that an innocent man didn't do it. And my husband would toast me: "To Rachel, my beautiful wife, the mother of my chidren and the finest lawyer in Indy." I shared my fantasy with Darcy as we discovered that her thirtieth birthday fell on a Monday. Bummer for her. I watched her purse her lips as she processed this information. "You know, Rachel, who cares what day of the week we turn thirty?" she said, shrugging a smooth, olive shoulder. "We'll be old by then. Birthdays don't matter when you get that old." I thought of my parents, who were in their thirties, and their lackluster approach to their own birthdays. My dad had just given my mom a toaster for her birthday because ours broke the week before. The new one toasted four slices at a time instead of just two. It wasn't much of a gift. But my mom had seemed pleased enough with her new appliance; nowhere did I detect the disappointment that I felt when my Christmas stash didn't quite meet expectations. So Darcy was probably right. Fun stuff like birthdays wouldn't matter as much by the time we reached thirty. The next time I really thought about being thirty was our senior year in high school, when Darcy and I started watching ths show Thirty Something together. It wasn't our favorite- we preferred cheerful sit-coms like Who's the Boss? and Growing Pains- but we watched it anyway. My big problem with Thirty Something was the whiny characters and their depressing issues that they seemed to bring upon themselves. I remember thinking that they should grow up, suck it up. Stop pondering the meaning of life and start making grocery lists. That was back when I thought my teenage years were dragging and my twenties would surealy last forever. Then I reached my twenties. And the early twenties did seem to last forever. When I heard acquaintances a few years older lament the end of their youth, I felt smug, not yet in the danger zone myself. I had plenty of time..

Its emotional character … is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency —sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying— are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.

[J]ust the sight of this book, even though it was of no authority, made me wonder how it happened that so many different men – and learned men among them – have been and are so inclined to express both in speaking and in their treatises and writings so many wicked insults about women and their behaviour. Not only one or two ... but, more generally, from the treatises of all philosophers and poets and from all the orators – it would take too long to mention their names – it seems that they all speak from one and the same mouth. Thinking deeply about these matters, I began to examine my character and conduct as a natural woman and, similarly, I considered other women whose company I frequently kept, princesses, great ladies, women of the middle and lower classes, who had graciously told me of their most private and intimate thoughts, hoping that I could judge impartially and in good conscience whether the testimony of so many notable men could be true. To the best of my knowledge, no matter how long I confronted or dissected the problem, I could not see or realise how their claims could be true when compared to the natural behaviour and character of women.

My Lady, you certainly tell me about wonderful constancy, strength and virtue and firmness of women, so can one say the same thing about men? (...) Response [by Lady Rectitude]: "Fair sweet friend, have you not yet heard the saying that the fool sees well enough a small cut in the face of his neighbour, but he disregards the great gaping one above his own eye? I will show you the great contradiction in what the men say about the changeability and inconstancy of women. It is true that they all generally insist that women are very frail [= fickle] by nature. And since they accuse women of frailty, one would suppose that they themselves take care to maintain a reputation for constancy, or at the very least, that the women are indeed less so than they are themselves. And yet, it is obvious that they demand of women greater constancy than they themselves have, for they who claim to be of this strong and noble condition cannot refrain from a whole number of very great defects and sins, and not out of ignorance, either, but out of pure malice, knowing well how badly they are misbehaving. But all this they excuse in themselves and say that it is in the nature of man to sin, yet if it so happens that any women stray into any misdeed (of which they themselves are the cause by their great power and longhandedness), then it's suddenly all frailty and inconstancy, they claim. But it seems to me that since they do call women frail, they should not support that frailty, and not ascribe to them as a great crime what in themselves they merely consider a little defect.

If we were to take a stick and put it into a glass of water, it would seem to be crooked. Why? Because we look at it through two mediums—air and water. It is the same with our understanding of God. His various characteristics, such as His justice, seem crooked to us. The wicked seem to prosper and the righteous suffer. It seems that unfair events take place all the time. The problem is not with God but with us. We view God’s proceedings through a double medium of flesh and spirit. Therefore, it is not that God’s character is bent, it is that man is not competent to judge.

Love this description of minor character, Lou Zicutto: "Lou was branch claims manager of the mammoth insurance company where Decker worked part-time as an investigator. Lou was a spindly little twit, maybe a hundred twenty pounds, but he had a huge florid head, which he shaved every day. As a result he looked very much like a Tootsie Pop with lips.

Out of a hundred birds of the same stock perhaps one will be that bird all breeders hope for—a bird of highly individual character, courageous and resourceful. Much depends on the individual bird and especially its character and intelligence.

These are treacherous times, and I know how easily perceptions can be twisted by a single word spoken into the wrong ear. Impugn a man's character, and everything that man does is made to seem underhanded, suspect, fraught with double motives.

Double Indemnity, Gaslight, Saboteur, The Big Clock . . . We lived in monochrome those nights. For me, it was a chance to revisit old friends; for Ed, it was an opportunity to make new ones. And we’d make lists. The Thin Man franchise, ranked from best (the original) to worst (Song of the Thin Man). Top movies from the bumper crop of 1944. Joseph Cotten’s finest moments. I can do lists on my own, of course. For instance: best Hitchcock films not made by Hitchcock. Here we go: Le Boucher, the early Claude Chabrol that Hitch, according to lore, wished he’d directed. Dark Passage, with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall—a San Francisco valentine, all velveteen with fog, and antecedent to any movie in which a character goes under the knife to disguise himself. Niagara, starring Marilyn Monroe; Charade, starring Audrey Hepburn; Sudden Fear!, starring Joan Crawford’s eyebrows. Wait Until Dark: Hepburn again, a blind woman stranded in her basement apartment. I’d go berserk in a basement apartment.

Who dies best, the soldier who falls for your sake, or the fly in my whiskey-glass? The happy agony of the fly is his reward for an adventurous dive in no cause but his own. Gorged and crazed, he touches bottom, knows he's gone as far as he can go, and bravely sticks. I sleep on. In the morning I pour new happiness upon the crust of the old, and only as I raise the glass to my lips descry through that rich brown double inch my flattened hero. I drink around his death, being no angler by any inclination, and leave him in the weird shallows. The glass set down, I idle beneath the fan, while beyond my window-bars a warm drizzle passes silently from clouds to leaves. How to die? How to live? These questions, if we ask the dead fly, are both answered thus: In a drunken state. But drunk on WHAT should we all be? Well, there's love to drink, of course, and death, which is the same thing, and whiskey, better still, and heroin, best of all—except maybe for holiness. Accordingly, let this book, like its characters, be devoted to Addiction, Addicts, Pushers, Prostitutes and Pimps. With upraised needles, Bibles, dildoes and shot glasses, let us now throw our condoms in the fire, unbutton our trousers, and happily commit THIS MULTITUDE OF CRIMES.

The happiness of my existence, its unique character perhaps can be found in its fatefulness: to speak in a riddle, as my father I have already died, as my mother I still live and grow old. This double origin taken as it were from the highest and lowest rungs of the ladder of life at once decadent and beginning — this if anything explains that neutrality, that freedom from bias in regard to the general problem of existence which perhaps distinguishes me. My nose is more sensitive than any man that has yet lived as to signs of ascent or decline. In this domain I am a true master — I know both sides for I am both sides.

Disability fluctuates, growing visible, then invisible, then visible again, becoming both ever-present and haunting. Such a problematizing of physical life added a new wrinkle to the genre's double/secret identity trope: the characters now interact with their shifting bodies as bodies with all the complications involved.

He stumbled, almost fell, and decided to sit down, with his back against the tunnel wall, his feet resting against the opposite wall. Roaring out of the morass of pity, terror, happiness, joy, sadness, elation that he had inherited - shooting forth from this void, the single sharp thought: She does not love me. It was almost more than he could take. But he was not the kind of person to fold, to crack, to be broken, and so instead, in those moments after the realization, he bent - and bent, and kept on bending beneath the pressure of this new and terrible knowledge. Soon he would bend into a totally new shape altogether. He welcomed that. He wanted that. Maybe the new thing he would become would no longer hurt, would no longer fear, would no longer look back down into the void and wonder what was left of him. She did not love him. It made him laugh as he sat there -- great belly laughs that doubled him over in the dust, where he lay for a long moment, recovering. It was funny beyond bearing. He had fought through a dozen terrors all for love of her. And she did not love him. He felt like a character in a holovid - the jester, the clown, the fool.

Bekka treated her role has Frankenstein's bride more like an audition to be Brett's bride. Every part of her body had been colored bright kelly green - even parts that her mother had stressed were 'not to be seen by anyone except God and the inside of a toilet bowl.' Instead of wearing a wig, Bekka had teased and then shellacked her own hair into a windblown cone and she'd used female-mustache bleach to create white streaks. Her seams, made of real suture thread, had been attached to her neck and wrists with clear double-sided costume tape because drawing them on with kohl would not have been 'honoring the character.' Her Costume Castle dress had been exchanged for something 'more authentic' from the Bridal Barn. If Brett didn't see his future in her heavily black-shadowed eyes tonight, he never would. Or so she believed.

At her very first attempt Agatha had understood – or intuited – that a clue based upon character has double the value.

I don't know what I was looking for . . . I felt empty. I guess. Not hearing from you made it all seem surreal, like you were never there, a dream, a figment of my imagination. I went to your site that day to . . . I guess, double-check. I thought. . . maybe you wrote something, a new story . . . a message . . . anything. I did find a new story . . . It wasn't about us . . . And I ended up feeling even emptier.

From the first time I set eyes on Marilyn, I thought she was just wonderful. On the silver screen, her lovely skin and platinum hair were luminescent and fantastic. I loved the fantasy of it. In the fifties, when I grew up. Marilyn was an enormous star, but there was such a double standard. The fact that she was such a hot number meant that many middle-class women looked down on her as a slut. And since the publicity machine behind her sold her as a sex idol, she wasn’t valued as a comedic actor or given credit for her talent. I never felt that way about her, obviously. I felt that Marilyn was also playing a character, the proverbial dumb blonde with the little-girl voice and big-girl body, and that there was a lot of smarts behind the act. My character in Blondie was partly a visual homage to Marilyn, and partly a statement about the good old double standard.

The writer Lee Smith, who once had a New York copy editor query in the margin of her manuscript “Double-wide what?” tells a perfectly marvelous, spot-on story about Eudora Welty when she came to Hollins College, where Smith was a student. Welty read a short story in which one female character presents another with a marble cake. In the back of the audience Smith noted a group of leather-elbowed, goatee-sporting PhD candidates, all of whom were getting pretty excited. One started waving his hand as soon as she stopped reading and said, “Miz Welty, how did you come up with that powerful symbol of the marble cake, with the feminine and masculine, the yin and the yang, the Freudian and the Jungian all mixed together like that?” Smith reported that Welty looked at him from the lectern without saying anything for a while. Finally she replied mildly, “Well, you see, it’s a recipe that’s been in my family for some time.

As the chapters took shape, a change came over her. It was the double-sided recognition that this book, the last that she would write, might achieve esteem and success equal to her great novel, but that its emotional heart would lie in her own unhappiness for having failed to find the one thing she wanted. For the first time she was a character in her own writing, and her frailties and mistakes were trapped on the page by the beauty and unsparing focus of her prose. Towards the end it was a battle to finish a page. The story was the story she had told herself for decades, deep within her own mind, and now as it grew, line by line, on the paper before her, she wrestled with each turn in the path all over again, as if it were still possible to change its course with the power of her words.

The average baby demands adult attention of one kind or another every twenty seconds. New mothers lose an average of seven hundred hours of sleep during that first year. Marital satisfaction plummets 70 percent, while the risk of maternal depression more than doubles.

Ell's Double Down....5 Stars keep shining bright! From Leah "I LOVED this book! The characters are strong and the story line never once is dull. It's so fun and fluid. Can't wait to read the second and third!" Thank you Leah I am glad you enjoyed meeting Ell and Reggie!

That fellow Argencourt is well born but ill bred, a worse-than-second-rate diplomat, a loathsome husband and a womanizer, a double-faced stage character. He’s one of those men who are incapable of understanding but perfectly capable of destroying the high things in life.

But even in such works where the author is ideally unobtrusive, he remains diffused through the book so that his very absence becomes a kind of radiant presence. As the French say, il brille par son absence — "he shines by his absence." In connection with Bleak House we are concerned with one of those authors who are so to speak not supreme deities, diffuse and aloof, but puttering, amiable, sympathetic demigods, who descend into their books under various disguises or send therein various middlemen, representatives, agents, minions, spies, and stooges. [...] Roughly speaking, there are three types of such representatives. Let us inspect them. First, the narrator insofar as he speaks in the first person, the capital I of the story, its moving pillar. [...] Second, a type of author's representative, what I call the sifting agent. [...] The third type is the so-called perry, possibly derived from periscope, despite the double r, or perhaps from parry in vague connection with foil as in fencing. But this does not matter much since anyway I invented the term myself many years ago.

It represented a monster of vaguely anthropoid outline, but with an octopus-like head whose face was a mass of feelers, a scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. This thing, which seemed instinct with a fearsome and unnatural malignancy, was of a somewhat bloated corpulence, and squatted evilly on a rectangular block or pedestal covered with undecipherable characters. The tips of the wings touched the back edge of the block, the seat occupied the centre, whilst the long, curved claws of the doubled-up, crouching hind legs gripped the front edge and extended a quarter of the way down toward the bottom of the pedestal. The cephalopod head was bent forward, so that the ends of the facial feelers brushed the backs of huge fore paws which clasped the croucher’s elevated knees.

It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self’s most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs into Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency—sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying—are not just unpleasant but literally horrible. It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability To Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, 282 a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.

Literary style is like crystal-ware: the cleaner the wineglass, the brighter the brilliance. As a reader, I agree with those who believe that a colour of the dress, which a character has on, as well as any enumeration and description of dishes at dinner or in the kitchen should be mentioned only in case if all this has a strong consequent relation to the plot, but as an author, I can’t help mentioning all this, with no particular reason, just for love for my characters, desiring to give them something nice and pleasant. Melancholy grows a platinum rose. Affection grows a double rose.

The immense accretion of flesh which had descended on her in middle life like a flood of lava on a doomed city had changed her from a plump active little woman with a neatly-turned foot and ankle into something as vast and august as a natural phenomenon. She had accepted this submergence as philosophically as all her other trials, and now, in extreme old age, was rewarded by presenting to her mirror an almost unwrinkled expanse of firm pink and white flesh, in the centre of which the traces of a small face survived as if awaiting excavation. A flight of smooth double chins led down to the dizzy depths of a still-snowy bosom veiled in snowy muslins that were held in place by a miniature portrait of the late Mr. Mingott; and around and below, wave after wave of black silk surged away over the edges of a capacious armchair, with two tiny white hands poised like gulls on the surface of the billows.

When the clowns of British politics - arch-Brexiteer cartoon characters 'Boorish Johnson' and 'JackOff Grease-Smug' advocate ad infinitum that Britain should leave the EU in order to be free to sign her own trade deals; they seem to have overlooked the towering elephant in the room, namely the current occupant of the White House (another clown) - who appears hell-bent on destabilising world trade via crude protectionist policies. Both Tories, despite receiving the best British education money can buy, would do well to revisit their post war history books and be reminded of one of the key objectives of the European Project and in due course the European Union - specifically to promote peace and prosperity amongst previously warring neighbours by forming a unified trading bloc which in time, due to its effective size, also acted as a useful counterweight to US hegemony. Go find another circus for your buffoonery and leave the deadly serious business of politics to principled individuals with the true national interest at heart !

Dazzlement and enchantment are Bester’s methods. His stories never stand still a moment; they’re forever tilting into motion, veering, doubling back, firing off rockets to distract you. The repetition of the key phrase in “Fondly Fahrenheit,” the endless reappearances of Mr. Aquila in “The Star-comber” are offered mockingly: try to grab at them for stability, and you find they mean something new each time. Bester’s science is all wrong, his characters are not characters but funny hats; but you never notice: he fires off a smoke-bomb, climbs a ladder, leaps from a trapeze, plays three bars of “God Save the King,” swallows a sword and dives into three inches of water. Good heavens, what more do you want?

when Twitter announced the number of permissible characters in a single tweet was being doubled from 140 to 280, Trump told Porter he thought the change made sense on one level. Now he would be able to flesh out his thoughts and add more depth. “It’s a good thing,” Trump said, “but it’s a bit of a shame because I was the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.

eBooks are not transferrable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement on the copyright of these works. This book is an original publication of the author who wrote the story herein contained. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously,

Any animal can fuck. But only humans can experience sexual passion, something wholly different from the biological urge to mate. And sexual passion’s endured for millennia as a vital psychic force in human life — not despite impediments but because of them. Plain old coitus becomes erotically charged and spiritually potent at just those points where impediments, conflicts, taboos, and consequences lend it a double-edged character — meaningful sex is both an overcoming and a succumbing, a transcendence and a transgression, triumphant and terrible and ecstatic and sad. Turtles and gnats can mate, but only the human will can defy, transgress, overcome, love: choose. History-wise, both nature and culture have been ingenious at erecting impediments that give the choice of passion its price and value: religious proscriptions; penalties for adultery and divorce; chivalric chastity and courtly decorum; the stigma of illegitimate birth; chaperonage; madonna/whore complexes; syphilis; back-alley abortions; a set of “moral” codes that put sensuality on a taboo-level with defecation and apostasy… from the Victorians’ dread of the body to early TV’s one-foot-on-the-floor-at-all-times rule; from the automatic ruin of “fallen” women to back-seat tussles in which girlfriends struggled to deny boyfriends what they begged for in order to preserve their respect. Granted, from 1996’s perspective, most of the old sexual dragons look stupid and cruel. But we need to realize that they had something big in their favor: as long as the dragons reigned, sex wasn’t casual, not ever. Historically, human sexuality has been a deadly serious business — and the fiercer its dragons, the seriouser sex got; and the higher the price of choice, the higher the erotic voltage surrounding what people chose." -from "Back in New Fire

The entire man must pray. The whole man, life, heart, temper, mind, are in it. Each and all join in the prayer exercise. Doubt, double-mindedness, division of the affections, are all foreign to the closet character and conduct, undefiled, made whiter than snow, are mighty potencies, and are the most seemly beauties for the closet hour, and for the struggles of prayer.

Cletus Byron Winston, you are being rude.” I might have my own less than glowing thoughts about my father, but he was my father. He opened his mouth to respond, then snapped it shut and did a double take, his eyes narrowing on me. “First of all, how do you know my middle name?” “Your momma used to use it when you were naughty, when you boys would help her shelve books in the library. ‘Cletus Byron! Stop stuffing Astrophysics Monthly down your pants!’” Cletus grinned. Then he chuckled. His eyes lost some of their zealous focus as he pushed away from the tree and strolled closer. “Oh yeah. She did, didn’t she?” “I felt sorry for Billy, though.” I scooched to one side as he sat down. “His name always confused everyone, like your momma was trying to talk to Shakespeare’s ghost. ‘William Shakespeare, would you please stop Beauford from pulling down his pants in front of the girls?’” Cletus laughed harder, leaning backward and holding his stomach. “I remember that. How old was Beau?” “He was ten. He was trying to show us his new Tarzan underwear. I don’t think he meant any harm.” “He sure did love that underwear.” Cletus nodded and he scratched his beard. “I’m going to have to find him some Tarzanunderwear in adult size.” “So you can torture him about it?” He pretended to be shocked by my accusation. “Certainly not. I don’t torture my siblings.” “Yeah, right.” I gave him my side-eye. “You forget, I’m a people watcher. I know you sell embarrassing pictures of them onstock photo sites. Jethro was griping about it after church over the summer. If it’s not torture, what do you call it then?” He lifted his chin proudly. “I offer invaluable character building opportunities. I help them reach their true potential through suffering.” “Oh, please

Every morning, as I walk into Pixar Animation Studios—past the twenty-foot-high sculpture of Luxo Jr., our friendly desk lamp mascot, through the double doors and into a spectacular glass-ceilinged atrium where a man-sized Buzz Lightyear and Woody, made entirely of Lego bricks, stand at attention, up the stairs past sketches and paintings of the characters that have populated our fourteen films—I am struck by the unique culture that defines this place. Although I’ve made this walk thousands of times, it never gets old.

If the body is no longer a site of otherness but of identification, then we have urgently to become reconciled with it, repair it, perfect it, turn it into an ideal object. Everyone treats their bodies the way men treat women in projective identification: they invest them as a fetish, making an autistic cult of them, subjecting them to a quasi-incestuous manipulation. And it is the body's resemblance to its model which becomes a source of eroticism and 'white' seduction -- in the sense that it effects a kind of white magic of identity, as opposed to the black magic of otherness. This is how it is with body-building: you get into your body as you would into a suit of nerve and muscle. The body is not muscular, but muscled. It is the same with the brain and with social relations or exchanges: body-building, brainstorming, word-processing. Madonna is the ideal specimen of this, our muscled Immaculate Conception, our muscular angel who delivers us from the weaknesses of the body (pity the poor shade of Marilyn!). The sheath of muscles is the equivalent of character armour. In the past, women merely wrapped themselves in their image and their finery -- Freud speaks of those people who live with a kind of inner mirror, in a fleshly, happy self-reference. That narcissistic ideal is past and gone; body-building has wiped it out and replaced it with a gymnastic Ego-Ideal -- cold, hard, stressed, artificial self-reference. The construction of a double, of a physical and mental identity shell. Thus, in `body simulation', where you can animate your body remotely at any moment, the phantasy of being present in more than one body becomes an operational reality. An extension of the human being. And not a metaphorical or poetic extension, as in Pessoa's heteronyms, but quite simply a technical one.

My twenties and thirties were contradictory decades, years when I eliminated conditions and truths that went against my grain. The value in this conservative era was that it safeguarded me from fatal character debits early in life. It was a time when I was often more concerned with not running red lights than I was with investing in the greenlights. I did what I wanted, I learned to live. I survived. My forties were a much more affirming decade, years when I started to play offense with truths I had learned and put them into action. An era where I doubled down on what fed me. The value of this liberal age was that it illuminated my most life-endorsing character assets. It was a time when I not only cruised through more greenlights because I had eliminated more red and yellow ones, but a time when I created more greenlights to travel through. A time when past reds and yellows finally turned green, as old hardships revealed themselves as good fortune, a time when the greenlights beamed brighter because I gave them more power to shine. I did what I needed, I lived to learn. I thrived. As I approach the next chapter of truths to cross, the only thing I know for sure is that I will recalibrate again,

In the evening, she proposed that the three of them should visit the Pit Theatre, in Stench Street, Seven Dials, to see a new play by Brandt Slurb called ‘Manallalive-O!’, a Neo-Expressionist attempt to give dramatic form to the mental reactions of a man employed as a waiter in a restaurant who dreams that he is the double of another man who is employed as a steward on a liner, and who, on awakening and realizing that he is still a waiter employed in a restaurant and not a steward employed on a liner, goes mad and shoots his reflection in a mirror and dies. It had seventeen scenes and only one character

...Emery Staines, lost to meditation, doubts his own intentions, his natural frankness having accepted very readily the fact of his desire, and the fact of his delight, and the ease with which his pleasure might be got, expressions that cause him no shame, but that nevertheless give him pause, for he feels, whatever the difference in their respective stations, a certain bond with Anna Wetherell, a connexion, by virtue of which he feels less, rather than more, complete, in the sense that her nature, being both oppositional to and in accord with his own, seems to illumine those internal aspects of his character that his external manner does not or cannot betray, leaving him feeling both halved and doubled, or in other words, doubled when in her presence, and halved when out of it, and as a consequence he becomes suddenly doubtful of those qualities of frankness and good-natured curiosity upon which he might ordinarily have acted, without doubt and without delay; these meditations being interrupted, frequently, by a remark of Joseph Pritchard's —'if it weren't for her debt, her dependency, she'd have had a dozen propositions from a dozen men'—that keeps returning, uncomfortably and without variation, to his mind.

There’s no way to explain it, just a tingling twitch of cat whiskers. When Yi was alive, he often felt this sixth sense. People said it was magic, but Ren knows it’s because they were a matched pair. Chinese say that good things come in pairs, such as the character for double happiness, cut out of red paper and pasted on doors for weddings, and the two stone lions that guard temples. As children, Ren and Yi were perfect doubles of one another. Seeing them, people would break into smiles of delight. Twins, and boys—how fortunate! But all this came to an end when Yi died. If a chopstick breaks, the other is discarded. After all, half of a broken pair is one: the unlucky number of loneliness.

Double pneumonia and an overscheduled life can happen to anyone, of course, but for Little, it was the result of acting out of character for too long and without enough restorative niches. When your conscientiousness impels you to take on more than you can handle, you begin to lose interest, even in tasks that normally engage you. You also risk your physical health. “Emotional labor,” which is the effort we make to control and change our own emotions, is associated with stress, burnout, and even physical symptoms like an increase in cardiovascular disease. Professor Little believes that prolonged acting out of character may also increase autonomic nervous system activity, which can, in turn, compromise immune functioning.

Writing fiction twists your brain in knots. You get to experience the life of a compulsive liar. You are constantly double-checking for consistency, acting as continuity supervisor for your own imagination. You become a detective, picking through the diary of a suspect; checking for the slip up that undermines the story and breaks the alibi. You wake up sweating about some detail that wrecks the timeline, or breaches the established character of the person you invented. You craft wonderful, frightening people, who you fall in love with, but must discard. You find brilliant twists that you can’t use because they somehow subtly compromise the story. It drains you. You can’t sleep. You are preoccupied with minutia. It’s brilliant.

Cities have characters, pathologies that can make or destroy or infect you, states of mind that run through daily life as surely as a fault line. Chandler’s “mysterious something” was a mood of disenchantment, an intense spiritual malaise that identified itself with Los Angeles at a particular time, what we call noir. On the one hand noir is a narrow film genre, born in Hollywood in the late 1930s when European visual style, the twisted perspectives and stark chiaroscuros of German Expressionism, met an American literary idiom. This fruitful comingling gave birth to movies like Double Indemnity, directed by Vienna-born Billy Wilder and scripted by Raymond Chandler from a James M. Cain novella. The themes — murderous sex and the cool, intricate amorality of money — rose directly from the psychic mulch of Southern California. But L.A. is a city of big dreams and cruelly inevitable disappointments where noir is more than just a slice of cinema history; it’s a counter-tradition, the dark lens through which the booster myths came to be viewed, a disillusion that shadows even the best of times, an alienation that assails the sense like the harsh glitter of mica in the sidewalk on a pitiless Santa Ana day. Noir — in this sense a perspective on history and often a substitute for it — was born when the Roaring Twenties blew themselves out and hard times rushed in; it crystallized real-life events and the writhing collapse of the national economy before finding its interpreters in writers like Raymond Chandler.

Of course, they say you can't steal first.  Detroit's Germany Schaefer did though. That zany character used to do his own announcing:  "Ladies and gentlemen!" he'd call out.  "Herman 'Germany' Schaefer now coming to bat for the Dee-troit Tagers.  That was the way he pronounced 'Tigers.'  Well, he was on first this day and Davy Jones on third in the ninth inning when they try to pull a double steal.  Nig Clarke, the catcher doesn't throw the ball, so on the next pitch Germany runs back to first.  He yells that he is gonna steal second again, and this time Nig tries to throw him out and Davy steals home with the winning run.  Craziest damned play you'll ever see.  They changed the rules after that.  Once you reach second, you can't run back and steal first.

The tweets were not incidental to his presidency. They were central. He ordered printouts of his recent tweets that had received a high number of likes, 200,000 or more. He studied them to find the common themes in the most successful. He seemed to want to become more strategic, find out whether success was tied to the subject, the language or simply the surprise that the president was weighing in. The most effective tweets were often the most shocking. Later, when Twitter announced the number of permissible characters in a single tweet was being doubled from 140 to 280, Trump told Porter he thought the change made sense on one level. Now he would be able to flesh out his thoughts and add more depth. “It’s a good thing,” Trump said, “but it’s a bit of a shame because I was the Ernest Hemingway of 140 characters.

Nature is both passive and active, product and productivity, but a productivity that always needs to produce something else (for example, human generation, which ceaselessly repeats without end). There is a double moment of expansion and contraction, which Lowith compared to respiration, which never goes to the end of its movement except in death, and which designates the character of a relative production as always begun again. Nature is beyond the World and on this side of God, and as such, Nature is neither God nor World. It is a producer that is not all-powerful, which does not succeed in ending its production: it is a rotary movement that produces nothing definitive. There is a general 'duplicity' of Nature as necessary as Nature itself is. If productive Nature were withdrawn from the product, it would mean only death.

A husband looks for himself in his wife, a lover in his mistress, in the guise of a stone statue; he seeks in her the myth of his virility, his sovereignty, his unmediated reality...But he himself is a slave to his double: what effort to build up an image in which he is always in danger! After all, it is founded on the capricious freedom of women: it must constantly be made favorable; man is consumed by the concern to appear male, important, superior; he playacts so that others will playact with him; he is also aggressive and nervous; he feels hostility for women because he is afraid of them, and he is afraid of them because he is afraid of the character with whom he is assimilated. What time and energy he wastes in getting rid of, idealizing, and transposing complexes, in speaking about women, seducing, and fearing them! He would be liberated with their liberation. But that is exactly what he fears. And he persists in the mystifications meant to maintain women in chains.

One could understand feminism generally as an attack on woman as she was under “patriarchy” (that concept is a social construction of feminism). The feminine mystique was her ideal; in regard to sex, it consisted of women’s modesty and in the double standard of sexual conduct that comes with it, which treated women’s misbehavior as more serious than men’s. Instead of trying to establish a single standard by bringing men up to the higher standard of women, as with earlier feminism, today’s feminism decided to demand that women be entitled to sink to the level of men. It bought into the sexual revolution of the late sixties and required that women be rewarded with the privileges of male conquest rather than, say, continue serving as camp followers of rock bands. The result has been the turn for the worse. ... What was there in feminine modesty that the feminists left behind? In return for women’s holding to a higher standard of sexual behavior, feminine modesty gave them protection while they considered whether they wanted to consent. It gave them time: Not so fast! Not the first date! I’m not ready for that! It gave them the pleasure of being courted along with the advantage of looking before you leap. To win over a woman, men had to strive to express their finer feelings, if they had any. Women could judge their character and choose accordingly. In sum, women had the right of choice, if I may borrow that slogan. All this and more was social construction, to be sure, but on the basis of the bent toward modesty that was held to be in the nature of women. That inclination, it was thought, cooperated with the aggressive drive in the nature of men that could be beneficially constructed into the male duty to take the initiative. There was no guarantee of perfection in this arrangement, but at least each sex would have a legitimate expectation of possible success in seeking marital happiness. They could live together, have children, and take care of them. Without feminine modesty, however, women must imitate men, and in matters of sex, the most predatory men, as we have seen. The consequence is the hook-up culture now prevalent on college campuses, and off-campus too (even more, it is said). The purpose of hooking up is to replace the human complexity of courtship with “good sex,” a kind of animal simplicity, eliminating all the preliminaries to sex as well as the aftermath. “Good sex,” by the way, is in good part a social construction of the alliance between feminists and male predators that we see today. It narrows and distorts the human potentiality for something nobler and more satisfying than the bare minimum. The hook-up culture denounced by conservatives is the very same rape culture denounced by feminists. Who wants it? Most college women do not; they ignore hookups and lament the loss of dating. Many men will not turn down the offer of an available woman, but what they really want is a girlfriend. The predatory males are a small minority among men who are the main beneficiaries of the feminist norm. It’s not the fault of men that women want to join them in excess rather than calm them down, for men too are victims of the rape culture. Nor is it the fault of women. Women are so far from wanting hook-ups that they must drink themselves into drunken consent — in order to overcome their natural modesty, one might suggest. Not having a sociable drink but getting blind drunk is today’s preliminary to sex. Beautifully romantic, isn’t it?

He felt like a character in a book. He thought of Mary Lennox as she discovered her secret garden. The blackberry bushes had become too thick to ride through and Percy dismounted, leaving Prince beneath the shade of a thick-trunked oak tree. He chose a strong whip of wood and started carving his way through the knotted vines. He was no longer a boy whose legs didn't always do as he wished; he was Sir Gawain on the lookout for the Green Knight, Lord Byron on his way to fight a duel, Beowulf leading an army upon Grendel. So keen was his focus on his swordplay that he didn't realize at first that he'd emerged from the forested area and was standing now on what must have been the top of a gravel driveway. Looming above him was not so much a house as a castle. Two enormous floors, with mammoth rectangular windows along each face and an elaborate stone balustrade of Corinthian columns running around all four sides of its flat roof. He thought at once of Pemberley, and half expected to see Mr. Darcy come striding through the big double doors, riding crop tucked beneath his arm as he jogged down the stone steps that widened in an elegant sweep as they reached the turning circle where he stood.

We already have eight hundred million people living in hunger—and population is growing by eighty million a year. Over a billion people are in poverty—and present industrial strategies are making them poorer, not richer. The percentage of old people will double by 2050—and already there aren’t enough young people to care for them. Cancer rates are projected to increase by seventy percent in the next fifteen years. Within two decades our oceans will contain more microplastics than fish. Fossil fuels will run out before the end of the century. Do you have an answer to those problems? Because I do. Robot farmers will increase food production twentyfold. Robot carers will give our seniors a dignified old age. Robot divers will clear up the mess humans have made of our seas. And so on, and so on—but every single step has to be costed and paid for by the profits of the last.” He paused for breath, then went on, “My vision is a society where autonomous, intelligent bots are as commonplace as computers are now. Think about that—how different our world could be. A world where disease, hunger, manufacturing, design, are all taken care of by AI. That’s the revolution we’re shooting for. The shopbots get us to the next level, that’s all. And you know what? This is not some binary choice between idealism or realism, because for some of us idealism is just long-range realism. This shit has to happen. And you need to ask yourself, do you want to be part of that change? Or do you want to stand on the sidelines and bitch about the details?” We had all heard this speech, or some version of it, either in our job interviews, or at company events, or in passionate late-night tirades. And on every single one of us it had had a deep and transformative effect. Most of us had come to Silicon Valley back in those heady days when it seemed a new generation finally had the tools and the intelligence to change the world. The hippies had tried and failed; the yuppies and bankers had had their turn. Now it was down to us techies. We were fired up, we were zealous, we felt the nobility of our calling…only to discover that the general public, and our backers along with them, were more interested in 140 characters, fitness trackers, and Grumpy Cat videos. The greatest, most powerful deep-learning computers in humanity’s existence were inside Google and Facebook—and all humanity had to show for it were adwords, sponsored links, and teenagers hooked on sending one another pictures of their genitals.

A Conversation with the Author What was your inspiration for The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle? Inspiration is a flash-of-lightning kind of word. What happens to me is more like sediment building. I love time travel, Agatha Christie, and the eighties classic Quantum Leap, and over time a book emerged from that beautiful quagmire. Truthfully, having the idea was the easy part, keeping track of all the moving parts was the difficulty. Which character was the most interesting to write, and in which host do you feel Aiden truly flourishes? Lord Cecil Ravencourt, by miles. He occupies the section of the book where the character has to grapple with the time travel elements, the body swapping elements, and the murder itself. I wanted my most intelligent character for that task, but I thought it would be great to hamper him in some way, as well. Interestingly, I wanted to make him really loathsome—which is why he’s a banker. And yet, for some reason, I ended up quite liking him, and feeding a few laudable qualities into his personality. I think Derby ended up getting a double dose of loathsome instead. Other than that, it’s just really nice seeing the evolution of his relationship with Cunningham. Is there a moral lesson to Aiden’s story or any conclusion you hope the reader walks away with as they turn the final page? Don’t be a dick! Kind, funny, intelligent, and generous people are behind every good thing that’s ever happened to me. Everybody else you just have to put up with. Like dandruff. Or sunburn. Don’t be sunburn, people. In one hundred years, do you believe there will be something similar to Blackheath, and would you support such a system? Yes, and not exactly. Our prison system is barbaric, but some people deserve it. That’s the tricky part of pinning your flag to the left or right of the moral spectrum. I think the current system is unsustainable, and I think personality adjustment and mental prisons are dangerous, achievable technology somebody will abuse. They could also solve a lot of problems. Would you trust your government with it? I suppose that’s the question. The book is so contained, and we don’t get to see the place that Aiden is escaping to! Did you map that out, and is there anything you can share about the society beyond Blackheath’s walls? It’s autocratic, technologically advanced, but they still haven’t overcome our human weaknesses. You can get everywhere in an hour, but television’s still overrun with reality shows, basically. Imagine the society that could create something as hateful as Annabelle Caulker.

April 19 Is It Not in the Least Likely? For Joab had turned after Adonijah, though he turned not after Absalom. 1 Kings 2:28 Joab stood the big test, he remained absolutely loyal and true to David and did not turn after the fascinating and ambitious Absalom, but yet towards the end of his life he turned after the craven Adonijah. Always remain alert to the fact that where one man has gone back is exactly where any one may go back (see 1 Corinthians 10:13). You have gone through the big crisis, now be alert over the least things; take into calculation the “retired sphere of the leasts.” We are apt to say—“It is not in the least likely that having been through the supreme crisis, I shall turn now to the things of the world.” Do not forecast where the temptation will come; it is the least likely thing that is the peril. In the aftermath of a great spiritual transaction the “retired sphere of the leasts” begins to tell; it is not dominant, but remember it is there, and if you are not warned, it will trip you up. You have remained true to God under great and intense trials, now beware of the undercurrent. Do not be morbidly introspective, looking forward with dread, but keep alert; keep your memory bright before God. Unguarded strength is double weakness, because that is where the “retired sphere of the leasts” saps. The Bible characters fell on their strong points, never on their weak ones. “Kept by the power of God”—that is the only safety.

For this reason the ancients often compared the symbol to water, a case in point being tao, where yang and yin are united. Tao is the “valley spirit,” the winding course of a river. The symbolum of the Church is the aqua doctrinae, corresponding to the wonder-working “divine” water of alchemy, whose double aspect is represented by Mercurius. The healing and renewing properties of this symbolical water—whether it be tao, the baptismal water, or the elixir—point to the therapeutic character of the mythological background from which this idea comes. Physicians who were versed in alchemy had long recognized that their arcanum healed, or was supposed to heal, not only the diseases of the body but also those of the mind. Similarly, modern psychotherapy knows that, though there are many interim solutions, there is, at the bottom of every neurosis, a moral problem of opposites that cannot be solved rationally, and can be answered only by a supraordinate third, by a symbol which expresses both sides. This was the “veritas” (Dorn) or “theoria” (Paracelsus) for which the old physicians and alchemists strove, and they could do so only by incorporating the Christian revelation into their world of ideas. They continued the work of the Gnostics (who were, most of them, not so much heretics as theologians) and the Church Fathers in a new era, instinctively recognizing that new wine should not be put into old bottles, and that, like a snake changing its skin, the old myth needs to be clothed anew in every renewed age if it is not to lose its therapeutic effect.

A shudder went through me at the thought of what I should still learn in this hour. How awry, altered and distorted everything and everyone was in these mirrors, how mockingly and unattainably did the face of truth hide itself behind all these reports, counter-reports and legends! What was still truth? What was still credible? And what would remain when I also learned about myself, about my own character and history from the knowledge stored in these archives? I must be prepared for anything. Suddenly I could bear the uncertainty and suspense no longer. I hastened to the section Chattorum res gestas, looked for my sub-division and number and stood in front of the part marked with my name. This was a niche, and when I drew the thin curtains aside I saw that it contained nothing written. It contained nothing but a figure, an old and worn-looking model made from wood or wax, in pale colours. It appeared to be a kind of deity or barbaric idol. At first glance it was entirely incomprehensible to me. It was a figure that really consisted of two; it had a common back. I stared at it for a while, disappointed and surprised. Then I noticed a candle in a metal candlestick fixed to the wall of the niche. A match-box lay there. I lit the candle and the strange double figure was now brightly illuminated. Only slowly did it dawn upon me. Only slowly and gradually did I begin to suspect and then perceive what it was intended to represent. It represented a figure which was myself, and this likeness of myself was unpleasantly weak and half-real; it had blurred features, and in its whole expression there was something unstable, weak, dying or wishing to die, and looked rather like a piece of sculpture which could be called "Transitoriness" or "Decay," or something similar. On the other hand, the other figure which was joined to mine to make one, was strong in colour and form, and just as I began to realise whom it resembled, namely, the servant and President Leo, I discovered a second candle in the wall and lit this also. I now saw the double figure representing Leo and myself, not only becoming clearer and each image more alike, but I also saw that the surface of the figures was transparent and that one could look inside as one can look through the glass of a bottle or vase. Inside the figures I saw something moving, slowly, extremely slowly, in the same way that a snake moves which has fallen asleep. Something was taking place there, something like a very slow, smooth but continuous flowing or melting; indeed, something melted or poured across from my image to that of Leo's. I perceived that my image was in the process of adding to and flowing into Leo's, nourishing and strengthening it. It seemed that, in time, all the substance from one image would flow into the other and only one would remain: Leo. He must grow, I must disappear. As I stood there and looked and tried to understand what I saw, I recalled a short conversation that I had once had with Leo during the festive days at Bremgarten. We had talked about the creations of poetry being more vivid and real than the poets themselves. The candles burned low and went out. I was overcome by an infinite weariness and desire to sleep, and I turned away to find a place where I could lie down and sleep.

I have talked to many people about this and it seems to be a kind of mystical experience. The preparation is unconscious, the realization happens in a flaming second. It was on Third Avenue. The trains were grinding over my head. The snow was nearly waist-high in the gutters and uncollected garbage was scattered in a dirty mess. The wind was cold, and frozen pieces of paper went scraping along the pavement. I stopped to look in a drug-store window where a latex cooch dancer was undulating by a concealed motor–and something burst in my head, a kind of light and a kind of feeling blended into an emotion which if it had spoken would have said, “My God! I belong here. Isn’t this wonderful?” Everything fell into place. I saw every face I passed. I noticed every doorway and the stairways to apartments. I looked across the street at the windows, lace curtains and potted geraniums through sooty glass. It was beautiful–but most important, I was part of it. I was no longer a stranger. I had become a New Yorker. Now there may be people who move easily into New York without travail, but most I have talked to about it have had some kind of trial by torture before acceptance. And the acceptance is a double thing. It seems to me that the city finally accepts you just as you finally accept the city. A young man in a small town, a frog in a small puddle, if he kicks his feet is able to make waves, get mud in his neighbor’s eyes–make some impression. He is known. His family is known. People watch him with some interest, whether kindly or maliciously. He comes to New York and no matter what he does, no one is impressed. He challenges the city to fight and it licks him without being aware of him. This is a dreadful blow to a small-town ego. He hates the organism that ignores him. He hates the people who look through him. And then one day he falls into place, accepts the city and does not fight it any more. It is too huge to notice him and suddenly the fact that it doesn’t notice him becomes the most delightful thing in the world. His self-consciousness evaporates. If he is dressed superbly well–there are half a million people dressed equally well. If he is in rags–there are a million ragged people. If he is tall, it is a city of tall people. If he is short the streets are full of dwarfs; if ugly, ten perfect horrors pass him in one block; if beautiful, the competition is overwhelming. If he is talented, talent is a dime a dozen. If he tries to make an impression by wearing a toga–there’s a man down the street in a leopard skin. Whatever he does or says or wears or thinks he is not unique. Once accepted this gives him perfect freedom to be himself, but unaccepted it horrifies him. I don’t think New York City is like other cities. It does not have character like Los Angeles or New Orleans. It is all characters–in fact, it is everything. It can destroy a man, but if his eyes are open it cannot bore him. New York is an ugly city, a dirty city. Its climate is a scandal, its politics are used to frighten children, its traffic is madness, its competition is murderous. But there is one thing about it–once you have lived in New York and it has become your home, no place else is good enough. All of everything is concentrated here, population, theatre, art, writing, publishing, importing, business, murder, mugging, luxury, poverty. It is all of everything. It goes all right. It is tireless and its air is charged with energy. I can work longer and harder without weariness in New York than anyplace else….

I was dumbfounded to witness this specimen of male beauty in such a compromising position. I had never imagined finding the famous Rick Samuels in a dungeon, let alone in such a vulnerable and decubitus posture. He was my visiting lecturer, who had advised me to be selective in posing pornographically and for high art. He specifically told me that he was careful not to associate himself in the porn industry. Here he was, lying bare among men whom he did not know or have the vision to see. They were using him as a sex object, gratifying themselves regardless of how he felt. The men took turns pumping their swollen instruments into both his orifices until they could stave off their cravings no longer before they released their loads into Rick’s welcoming openings. He was the ‘power bottom,’ otherwise known to the gay underground community as a ‘cum pig’ or a ‘pig bottom.’ That evening was an eye-opener and a reformation. It reaffirmed men’s double standards in their words and actions for me. They were just like seasoned politicians, who promise a world of positive reforms before election. When elected to office, their promises are thrown to the wind. A set of new rules for personal gains then take effect. Thus is the nature of mankind. That evening, Andy, I learned an important lesson that humankind has its strengths and foibles. It is therefore worth the effort to take a closer look at a person’s character instead of embracing the superficiality that could often cloud a sound judgment. My beloved ex-’big brother,’ I am positive in my heart of hearts that you are an honorable gentleman of your word. From the first time I met you to our recent reconnection, you will always be the man I respect, honor, cherish, and, most importantly, LOVE. Young.

Tanya Latty and Madeleine Beekman of the University of Sydney were studying the way slime molds handled tough choices. A tough choice for a slime mold looks something like this: On one side of the petri dish is three grams of oats. On the other side is five grams of oats, but with an ultraviolet light trained on it. You put a slime mold in the center of the dish. What does it do? Under those conditions, they found, the slime mold chooses each option about half the time; the extra food just about balances out the unpleasantness of the UV light. If you were a classical economist of the kind Daniel Ellsberg worked with at RAND, you’d say that the smaller pile of oats in the dark and the bigger pile under the light have the same amount of utility for the slime mold, which is therefore ambivalent between them. Replace the five grams with ten grams, though, and the balance is broken; the slime mold goes for the new double-size pile every time, light or no light. Experiments like this teach us about the slime mold’s priorities and how it makes decisions when those priorities conflict. And they make the slime mold look like a pretty reasonable character. But then something strange happened. The experimenters tried putting the slime mold in a petri dish with three options: the three grams of oats in the dark (3-dark), the five grams of oats in the light (5-light), and a single gram of oats in the dark (1-dark). You might predict that the slime mold would almost never go for 1-dark; the 3-dark pile has more oats in it and is just as dark, so it’s clearly superior. And indeed, the slime mold just about never picks 1-dark. You might also guess that, since the slime mold found 3-dark and 5-light equally attractive before, it would continue to do so in the new context. In the economist’s terms, the presence of the new option shouldn’t change the fact that 3-dark and 5-light have equal utility. But no: when 1-dark is available, the slime mold actually changes its preferences, choosing 3-dark more than three times as often as it does 5-light!

YOU FIRST When entering into relationships, we have a tendency to bend. We bend closer to one another, because regardless of what type of relationship it might be — romantic, business, friendship — there’s a reason you’re bringing that other person into your life, and that means the load is easier to carry if you carry it together, both bending toward the center. I picture people in relationships as two trees, leaning toward one another. Over time, as the relationship solidifies, you both become more comfortable bending, and as such bend farther, eventually resting trunk to trunk. You support each other and are stronger because of the shared strength of your root system and entwined branches. Double-tree power! But there’s a flaw in this mode of operation. Once you’ve spent some time leaning on someone else, if they disappear — because of a breakup, a business upset, a death, a move, an argument — you’re all that’s left, and far weaker than when you started. You’re a tree leaning sideways; the second foundation that once supported you is…gone. This is a big part of why the ending of particularly strong relationships can be so disruptive. When your support system presupposes two trunks — two people bearing the load, and divvying up the responsibilities; coping with the strong winds and hailstorms of life — it can be shocking and uncomfortable and incredibly difficult to function as an individual again; to be just a solitary tree, alone in the world, dealing with it all on your own. A lone tree needn’t be lonely, though. It’s most ideal, in fact, to grow tall and strong, straight up, with many branches. The strength of your trunk — your character, your professional life, your health, your sense of self — will help you cope with anything the world can throw at you, while your branches — your myriad interests, relationships, and experiences — will allow you to reach out to other trees who are likewise growing up toward the sky, rather than leaning and becoming co-dependent. Relationships of this sort, between two equally strong, independent people, tend to outlast even the most intertwined co-dependencies. Why? Because neither person worries that their world will collapse if the other disappears. It’s a relationship based on the connections between two people, not co-dependence. Being a strong individual first alleviates a great deal of jealousy, suspicion, and our innate desire to capture or cage someone else for our own benefit. Rather than worrying that our lives will end if that other person disappears, we know that they’re in our lives because they want to be; their lives won’t end if we’re not there, either. Two trees growing tall and strong, their branches intertwined, is a far sturdier image than two trees bent and twisted, tying themselves into uncomfortable knots to wrap around one another, desperately trying to prevent the other from leaving. You can choose which type of tree to be, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with either model; we all have different wants, needs, and priorities. But if you’re aiming for sturdier, more resilient relationships, it’s a safe bet that you’ll have better options and less drama if you focus on yourself and your own growth, first. Then reach out and connect with others who are doing the same.

This is the trait constituting the soulful, inner, higher ideal which enters here in place of the quiet grandeur and independence of the figures of antiquity. The gods of the classical ideal too do not lack a trait of mourning, of a fateful negative, present in the cold necessity imprinted on these serene figures, but still, in their independent divinity and freedom, they retain an assurance of their simple grandeur and power. But their freedom is not the freedom of that love which is soulful and deeply felt because this depends on a relation of soul to soul, spirit to spirit. This depth of feeling kindles the ray of bliss present in the heart, that ray of a love which in sorrow and its supreme loss does not feel sang-froid or any sort of comfort, but the deeper it suffers yet in suffering still finds the sense and certainty of love and shows in grief that it has overcome itself within and by itself. It is only the religious love of romanticism which has an expression of bliss and freedom. This oneness and satisfaction is in its nature spiritually concrete because it is what is felt by the spirit which knows itself in another as at one with itself. Here therefore if the subject-matter portrayed is to be complete, it must have two aspects because love necessarily implies a double character in the spiritual personality. It rests on two independent persons who yet have a sense of their unity; but there is always linked with this unity at the same time the factor of the negative. Love is a matter of subjective feeling, but the subject which feels is this self-subsistent heart which, in order to love, must desist from itself, abandon itself, and sacrifice the inflexible focus of its own private personality. This sacrifice is what is moving in the love that lives and feels only in this self-surrender. Yet on this account a person in this sacrifice still retains his own self and in the very cancelling of his independence acquires a precisely affirmative independence. Nevertheless, in the sense of this oneness and its supreme happiness there still remains left the negative factor, the moving sense not so much of sacrifice as rather of the undeserved bliss of feeling independent and at unity with self in spite of all the self-surrender. The moving emotion is the sense of the dialectical contradiction of having sacrificed one’s personality and yet of being independent at the same time; this contradiction is ever present in love and ever resolved in it. So far as concerns the particular human individual personality in this depth of feeling, the unique love which affords bliss and an enjoyment of heaven rises above time and the particular individuality of that character which becomes a matter of indifference. in the pure ray of bliss which has just been described, particular individuality is superseded: in the sight of God all men are equal, or piety, rather, makes them all actually equal so that the only thing of importance is the expression of that concentration of love which needs neither happiness nor any particular single object. It is true that religious love too cannot exist without specific individuals who have some other sphere of existence apart from this feeling. But here the strictly ideal content is provided by the soulful depth of spiritual feeling which does not have its expression and actuality in the particular difference of a character with its talent, relationships, and fates, but is rather raised above these.

En somme, la fonction politique de la famille est double : 1. Elle se reproduit elle-même en mutilant sexuellement les individus. En se perpétuant, la famille patriarcale perpétue la répression sexuelle et tout ce qui en dérive : troubles sexuels, névroses, démences et crimes sexuels. 2. Elle rend l'individu apeuré par la vie et craintif devant l'autorité, et renouvelle donc sans cesse la possibilité de soumettre des populations entières à la férule d'une poignée de dirigeants. C'est pourquoi la famille revêt pour le conservateur cette signification privilégiée de rempart de l'ordre social auquel il croit. On s'explique aussi pourquoi la sexologie conservatrice défend si opiniâtrement l'institution familiale. C'est qu'elle "garantit la stabilité de l'Etat et de la Société", au sens conservateur, réactionnaire, de ces notions. La valeur attribuée à la famille devient donc la clé de l'appréciation générale de chaque type d'ordre social. (p. 141)

[...] l'exigence de chasteté des jeunes filles prive les jeunes gens d'objets d'amour, ce qui crée les conditions typiques de notre ordre social, inévitables quoique non désirées en elles-mêmes: le mariage monogamique donne naissance à l'adultère, la chasteté des filles donne naissance à la prostitution. L'adultère et la prostitution sont le lot de la double morale sexuelle qui accorde à l'homme, avant comme pendant le mariage, ce qu'elle refuse à la femme, pour des raisons économiques. Etant donné les urgences naturelles de la sexualité, la rigueur de la morale sexuelle engendre l'opposé de ce à quoi elle vise ; l'immoralité au sens réactionnaire, c'est-à-dire l'adultère et les relations sexuelles extra-matrimoniales, se redouble en phénomènes sociaux grotesques: la perversion sexuelle d'une part, et la sexualité mercenaire, à l'intérieur comme à l'extérieur du mariage, d'autre part. (p. 85-86)

She was pointedly reminding me,' Professor Coles shares pensively, 'that she hadn't forgotten my repeated references to [Emerson's speech at Harvard], to the emphasis its author ... placed on character, the distinction he made between it and intellect. She was implying that even such a clarification, such an insistence, could all too readily become an aspect of the very problem Emerson was discussing---the intellect at work, analyzing its relationship to the lived life of conduct (character), with no apparent acknowledgement of the double irony of it all! The irony that the study of philosophy, say, even moral philosophy or oral reasoning, doesn't by any means necessarily prompt in either the teacher or the student a daily enacted goodness; and the further irony that a discussion of that very irony can prove equally sterile, in the sense that yet again one is being clever---with no apparent consequences, so far as one's every actions go.

Dear Sir, I am writing to inform you of the whereabouts of a certain book which frequently doubles as a bird. I understand you are concerned about it, and no wonder! Such a large volume containing so much knowledge. In fact, I believe it is actually several volumes in one, due to the rather impressive appetite of said bird in devouring many of its comrades. Perhaps you will recall that I left your home without a word of good-bye, and for this you must pardon my poor manners. I find myself averse to being trapped in doorless rooms, to say nothing of being methodically tortured. It is a character defect owning to my savage ancestry. To atone, I have entrusted the book into the care of your friend Lord Ackerly. He assures me that he will keep the volume perfectly safe, so long as I myself remain unmolested and left entirely to my own devices. To this end, he has worked a magical connection that will destroy the book should I meet harm at your lordship's hands, or anyone working on behalf of your lordship, as your lordship's time is precious and sometimes these things must be delegated. Looking forward to never meeting again, Jessamin Olea

Maybe I'd always been pushing people into motion, poking at problems to move conflicts toward their conclusion. Was this the indescribable character trait people were alluding to when they said I suited the name of Stormy?

dear little baby of the folks I work for, I got a present for you .. my whole damn life! I'm handin' it over to you & your ma & pa. if you got no money to pay, I wanna stay anyhow, my pleasure is to wait on you forever. to hell with my children & hooray for you!.. you stayin' up all night fixin' up Character Parts for me! givin' 'em what you call dignity! dignity! you know what your dignity is? a black straw hat with a flower stickin' up in front, hands folded cross my stomach, sayin' the same damn fool things .. only nice & easy & proper!" --trouble in mind (1955)

There is no greater example of double standards in leadership than First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Is it too inconvenient or cumbersome for her to follow the same rules that agents in the field have to follow? Maybe it would make morale too high? Clinton’s behavior harkens to the old motto: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.” Once when my encoder to log in to my work email malfunctioned, I couldn’t even file my invoice to get paid for the month through my personal email, because it wasn’t protected enough. I was told that a potential enemy could use my invoice against the country, and I believe that’s the truth. It’s truer for a secretary of state and the material he or she handles. Still, we’re asked to believe nothing inappropriate happened, no slip-ups, no wrongdoing. It all reeks of “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

The popular culture has also lowered the threshold on public shaming rituals. It is not only suppressing certain speech on college campuses, but making public denunciation of certain classes of people into a form of popular entertainment. The masters of the funny cheap shot are comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who routinely and cleverly skewer conservatives as stupid bigots. After the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, for example, Stewart asked what was wrong with opponents of same-sex marriage, as if a view held for thousands of years, even not very long ago by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, were incomprehensible. The use of humor is a cultural trick. It provides a cultural permission slip to be nasty because, or so the assumption goes, the enemies of "the people" are so unattractive that they deserve whatever Stewart or Colbert throws at them. When Stewart compares Senator Ted Cruz to the Harry Potter character Voldemort, he knows we will then think of Cruz as the book's author describes Voldemort, "a raging psychopath, devoid of the normal human responses to other people's suffering". It may seem futile to complain about the crudeness of American mass culture. It has been around for decades, and it is not about to change anytime soon. The thin line that exists these days between politics and entertainment (witness the rise of Donald Trump) is undoubtedly coarsening our politics. It is becoming more culturally acceptable to split the world into us-versus-them schemata and to indulge in all sorts of antisocial and illiberal fantasies about crushing one's enemies. Only a few decades ago most liberals had a different idea of tolerance. Most would explain it with some variation of Evelyn Beatrice Hall's line about Voltaire's philosophy of free speech: "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it". That is no longer the case. It is now deemed necessary, indeed even noble, to be intolerant in the cause of tolerance. Any remark or viewpoint that liberals believe is critical of minorities is by definition intolerant. A liberal critique of conservatives or religious people, on the other hand, is, again by definition, incapable of being intolerant. It is a willful double standard. For liberals, intolerance is a one-way street leading straight to conservatism.

The Power of Myth For screenwriting, Jon recommends The Writer’s Journey by Christopher Vogler, which he used to determine if Swingers was structurally correct. He is also a big fan of The Power of Myth, a video interview of Joseph Campbell by Bill Moyers. “With The Jungle Book, I really am going back and doubling down on the old myths.” TF: We recorded our podcast during the shooting of The Jungle Book, in his production office next to set. Months later, The Jungle Book was the #1 movie in the world and currently has a staggering 95% review average on Rotten Tomatoes. Long-Term Impact Trumps Short-Term Gross “Thanks to video, and later DVD and laser disc, everybody had seen this film [Swingers], and it had become part of our culture. That’s when I learned that it’s not always the movie that does the best [financially] that has the most impact, or is the most rewarding, or does the most for your career, for that matter.” Another Reason to Meditate “In the middle of [a meditation session], the idea for Chef hit me, and I let myself stop, which I don’t usually do, and I took out a pad. I scribbled down like eight pages of ideas and thoughts, [and then I] left it alone. If I look back on it, and read those pages, it really had 80% of the heavy lifting done, as far as what [Chef] was about, who was in it, who the characters were, what other movies to look at, what the tone was, what music I would have in it, what type of food he was making, the idea of the food truck, the Cuban sandwiches, Cuban music . . . so it all sort of grew out from that.

The major religious fundamentalisms—Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Hindu—certainly all demonstrate intense concern for and scrutiny of bodies, through dietary restrictions, corporeal rituals, sexual mandates and prohibitions, and even practices of corporeal mortification and abnegation. What primarily distinguishes fundamentalists from other religious practitioners, in fact, is the extreme importance they give to the body: what it does, what parts of it appear in public, what goes into and comes out of it. Even when fundamentalist norms require hiding a part of the body behind a veil, headscarf, or other articles of clothing, they are really signaling its extraordinary importance. Women’s bodies are obviously the object of the most obsessive scrutiny and regulation in religious fundamentalism, but no bodies are completely exempt from examination and control—men’s bodies, adolescents’ bodies, infants’ bodies, even the bodies of the dead. The fundamentalist body is powerful, explosive, precarious, and that is why it requires constant inspection and care… Nationalist fundamentalisms similarly concentrate on bodies through their attention to and care for the population. The nationalist policies deploy a wide range of techniques for corporeal health and welfare, analyzing birthrates and sanitation, nutrition and housing, disease control and reproductive practices. Bodies themselves constitute the nation, and thus the nation’s highest goal is their promotion and preservation. Like religious fundamentalisms, however, nationalisms, although their gaze seems to focus intently on bodies, really see them merely as an indication or symptom of the ultimate, transcendent object of national identity. With its moral face, nationalism looks past the bodies to see national character, whereas with its militarist face, it sees the sacrifice of bodies in battle as revealing the national spirit. The martyr or the patriotic soldier is thus for nationalism too the paradigmatic figure for how the body is made to disappear and leave behind only an index to a higher plane. Given this characteristic double relation to the body, it makes sense to consider white supremacy (and racism in general) a form of fundamentalism.

Acclaim for the past works of Charles Martin “Beautiful writing . . . offers hope and redemption without too-neat resolution.” —Publishers Weekly regarding Maggie “. . . charming characters and twists that keep the pages turning.” —Southern Living, regarding When Crickets Cry Southern Living Book-of-the-Month selection, April 2006 “How is Charles Martin able to take mere words and breathe such vibrant life into them? Each character is drawn with an artist’s attention to detail, beauty and purpose. Readers won’t want the story to end because that means leaving these lovable people who have become so much more than just a name in a book.” —inthelibraryreviews.net regarding When Crickets Cry “[The Dead Don’t Dance is] an absorbing read for fans of faith-based fiction . . . [with] delightfully quirky characters . . . [who] are ingeniously imaginative creations.” —Publishers Weekly “[In When Crickets Cry,] Martin has created highly developed characters, lifelike dialogue, and a well-crafted story.” —Christian Book Previews.com “Martin spins an engaging story about healing and the triumph of love . . . Filled with delightful local color.” —Publishers Weekly regarding Wrapped in Rain “[O]ne of the best books I’ve been asked to review, and certainly the best one this year!” — bestfiction.tripod.com regarding When Crickets Cry “Charles Martin has proven himself a master craftsman. Double the story-telling ability of Nicholas Sparks, throw in hints of Michael Crichton and Don J. Snyder, and you have Charles Martin.

Page 16: …the character of the Chinese immigrant gradually changed from that of a simple Oriental trader or labourer to an essential middleman between Western importers and exporters on the one hand and the mass of the peasant population on the other. Chinese shopkeepers and itinerant traders funneled the manufactures of the West from European import houses in Bangkok to the indigenous population throughout the Kingdom, and at the same time acted as collection agencies for local products—tin, shellac, rubber—exported to the industries of the West.

You really need to be careful In taking advice, being influenced, or following and supporting someone on Social Media. Choose to double-check, verify, and apply logic and reasonable thinking in everything. It is because you don’t know the state of mind, intentions, situation, or conditions of the person posting. They might be posting from prison, psychiatric hospital or dark place. They might be bots, egocentric, pessimists, greedy, dishonest, manipulative, narcissistic, vindictive, sarcastic, toxic, selfish, hostile, pedophiles, scammers, murderers, insane, minors, catfish or psychopaths. They might have bipolar disorder. Because they have a large number of followers or they are too vocal it doesn’t mean you should listen and take everything they say.

April 19 Beware of the Least Likely Temptation “Joab had defected to Adonijah, though he had not defected to Absalom.” 1 Kings 2: 28 Joab withstood the greatest test of his life, remaining absolutely loyal to David by not turning to follow after the fascinating and ambitious Absalom. Yet toward the end of his life he turned to follow after the weak and cowardly Adonijah. Always remain alert to the fact that where one person has turned back is exactly where anyone may be tempted to turn back (see 1 Corinthians 10: 11–13). You may have just victoriously gone through a great crisis, but now be alert about the things that may appear to be the least likely to tempt you. Beware of thinking that the areas of your life where you have experienced victory in the past are now the least likely to cause you to stumble and fall. We are apt to say, “It is not at all likely that having been through the greatest crisis of my life I would now turn back to the things of the world.” Do not try to predict where the temptation will come; it is the least likely thing that is the real danger. It is in the aftermath of a great spiritual event that the least likely things begin to have an effect. They may not be forceful and dominant, but they are there. And if you are not careful to be forewarned, they will trip you. You have remained true to God under great and intense trials—now beware of the undercurrent. Do not be abnormally examining your inner self, looking forward with dread, but stay alert; keep your memory sharp before God. Unguarded strength is actually a double weakness, because that is where the least likely temptations will be effective in sapping strength. The Bible characters stumbled over their strong points, never their weak ones. “Kept by the power of God”—that is the only safety (1 Peter 1: 5).

Although the nucleus might have been recognized by Antonie van Leeuwenhoek in the late 17th century, it was not until 1831 that it was reported as a specific structure in orchid epidermal cells by a Scottish botanist, Robert Brown (better known for recognizing ‘Brownian movement’ of pollen grains in water). In 1879, Walther Flemming observed that the nucleus broke down into small fragments at cell division, followed by re-formation of the fragments called chromosomes to make new nuclei in the daughter cells. It was not until 1902 that Walter Sutton and Theodor Boveri independently linked chromosomes directly to mammalian inheritance. Thomas Morgan’s work with fruit flies (Drosophila) at the start of the 20th century showed specific characters positioned along the length of the chromosomes, followed by the realization by Oswald Avery in 1944 that the genetic material was DNA. Some nine years later, James Watson and Francis Crick showed the structure of DNA to be a double helix, for which they shared the Nobel Prize in 1962 with Maurice Wilkins, whose laboratory had provided the evidence that led to the discovery. Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray diffraction images of DNA from the Wilkins lab had been the key to DNA structure, died of cancer aged 37 in 1958, and Nobel Prizes are not awarded posthumously. Watson and Crick published the classic double helix model in 1953. The final piece in the jigsaw of DNA structure was produced by Watson with the realization that the pairing of the nucleotide bases, adenine with thymine and guanine with cytosine, not only provided the rungs holding the twisting ladder of DNA together, but also provided a code for accurate replication and a template for protein assembly. Crick continued to study and elucidate the base pairing required for coding proteins, and this led to the fundamental ‘dogma’ that ‘DNA makes RNA and RNA makes protein’. The discovery of DNA structure marked an enormous advance in biology, probably the most significant since Darwin’s publication of On the Origin of Species .

The world will never be a better place until the West doesn't change its nature, hypocritical and double-standard behaviour and racist ideology with hunger for power and ruling. It's the so-called first world with the values and character of a 4th world.

the only thing I had so far learned with any certainty about the film world was that back-biting, hypocrisy, double-dealing, innuendo and character assassination formed so integral a part of its conversational fabric that it was quite impossible to know where the truth ended and falsehood began. The only safe guide, I’d discovered, was to assume that the truth ended almost immediately.

The word chivalry has meant at different times a good many different things--from heavy cavalry to giving a woman a seat in a train. But if we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals--if we want to isolate that particular conception of the man, comme il faut (as it should be), which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture--we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory's Morte D'arthur. 'Thou wert the meekest man', says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. 'Thou were the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.' The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced the best knight in the world, 'he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten'...The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. In so doing, the Middle Ages fixed on the one hope of the world. It may or may not be possible to produce by the thousand men who combine the two sides of Launcelot's character. But if it is not possible, then all talk of any lasting happiness or dignity in human society is pure moonshine.

The word chivalry has meant at different times a good many different things, from heavy cavalry to giving a woman a seat in a train. But if we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals, if we want to isolate that particular conception of the man, comme il faut (as it should be), which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture--we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory's Morte D'arthur. 'Thou wert the meekest man', says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. 'Thou were the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.' The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced the best knight in the world, 'he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten'...The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. In so doing, the Middle Ages fixed on the one hope of the world. It may or may not be possible to produce by the thousand men who combine the two sides of Launcelot's character. But if it is not possible, then all talk of any lasting happiness or dignity in human society is pure moonshine.

The word chivalry has meant at different times a good many different things, from heavy cavalry to giving a woman a seat in a train. But if we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals, if we want to isolate that particular conception of the man, comme il faut (as it should be), which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture, we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory's Morte D'arthur. 'Thou wert the meekest man', says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. 'Thou were the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.' The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced the best knight in the world, 'he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten'...The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. In so doing, the Middle Ages fixed on the one hope of the world. It may or may not be possible to produce by the thousand men who combine the two sides of Launcelot's character. But if it is not possible, then all talk of any lasting happiness or dignity in human society is pure moonshine.

The word chivalry has meant at different times a good many different things, from heavy cavalry to giving a woman a seat in a train. But if we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals, if we want to isolate that particular conception of the man, comme il faut (as it should be), which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture, we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory's Morte D'arthur. 'Thou wert the meekest man', says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. 'Thou were the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.' The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced the best knight in the world, 'he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten'...The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. In so doing, the Middle Ages fixed on the one hope of the world. It may or may not be possible to produce by the thousand men who combine the two sides of Launcelot's character. But if it is not possible, then all talk of any lasting happiness or dignity in human society is pure moonshine.

The word chivalry has meant at different times a good many different things, from heavy cavalry to giving a woman a seat in a train. But if we want to understand chivalry as an ideal distinct from other ideals, if we want to isolate that particular conception of the man, comme il faut (as it should be), which was the special contribution of the Middle Ages to our culture, we cannot do better than turn to the words addressed to the greatest of all the imaginary knights in Malory's Morte D'arthur. 'Thou wert the meekest man', says Sir Ector to the dead Launcelot. 'Thou were the meekest man that ever ate in hall among ladies; and thou were the sternest knight to thy mortal foe that ever put spear in the rest.' The important thing about this ideal is, of course, the double demand it makes on human nature. The knight is a man of blood and iron, a man familiar with the sight of smashed faces and the ragged stumps of lopped-off limbs; he is also a demure, almost a maidenlike, guest in hall, a gentle, modest, unobtrusive man. He is not a compromise or happy mean between ferocity and meekness; he is fierce to the nth and meek to the nth. When Launcelot heard himself pronounced the best knight in the world, 'he wept as he had been a child that had been beaten'...The medieval ideal brought together two things which have no natural tendency to gravitate towards one another. It brought them together for that very reason. It taught humility and forbearance to the great warrior because everyone knew by experience how much he usually needed that lesson. It demanded valour of the urbane and modest man because everyone knew that he was as likely as not to be a milksop. In so doing, the Middle Ages fixed on the one hope of the world. It may or may not be possible to produce by the thousand men who combine the two sides of Launcelot's character. But if it is not possible, then all talk of any lasting happiness or dignity in human society is pure moonshine.

Great, impactful companies are not focused on a three-to-five-year time horizon. When done right, they make investments in culture and community and brand and trust that have indefinite life to them. No investor will have an issue with an indefinite life; what is challenging is that the investments aren’t quick. They are persistent and require repeated doubling down. Trust and brand are not created in a year or two. They are created through repeated commitment to core values, a commitment that, if it is to be valuable and meaningful, is challenging. Often the most valuable and important investments in these things are made when performance is actually below target and the business is struggling. This is when real character is built, both with employees and with customers. The stories that come out of such investments persist over many years. And unfortunately, trust and brand can be damaged very quickly so constant, intentional focus from leadership is a must, regardless of how the business is performing.

O.M.G. Lucca, what are you feeding her? Everyday I look at you, and I swear those twinnes must double in size. Look at your bump in this dress, how are you managing to cart that around? Rather you than me chubby." ~Hazel

In his analysis of what was wrong, the author of this article identified in his final paragraph a profound ambivalence in the American soul. America, he noted, was deeply double-minded, even as the nation sought to restore some sense of moral integrity: “The longing for moral regeneration must constantly vie with an equally strong aspect of America’s national character, self-indulgence. It is an inner tension that may animate political life for years to come.

Jean Renoir, working on his first American picture, created beautiful, lush shots of the Georgia swamp, although much of the film was made in the studio. But Brennan remembered the cottonmouths and was grateful that he had a double in scenes with snakes, since one of the reptiles (they were not defanged) bit one of the trainers. Like other cast members, Brennan found Renoir “wonderful.” “Oh, what a gentleman,” he recalled. “Oh, I just loved the guy. He was so gentle and nice.” During one take, Walter turned to the director and said, “How was that, Gene?” Renoir said, “[I]t was good. I liked it. I have tears in my eyes.” Walter said, “Oh, I thought it was lousy.” A perplexed Renoir, whose understanding of English was imperfect, called for an interpreter. When he agreed to let Brennan do the scene again, he had to admit the retake was better.

I’m a rare fox-human, with the souls of witches inside me. Can you imagine what a certain mindset would like to do with me? I’ll give you a clue; it’s not to re-create a cherished Roald Dahl novel.” I could imagine. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. “And to make matters worse, there was a movie with a talking fucking raccoon in it. Did you know that Camelot has a cinema? That they import movies from Earth? Well, they fucking well do. For months all I heard was how maybe for the sequel they could have me be his stunt double, or that they should paint me brown and make me a star. I began to get angry with the rabid little fucker. And he’s not even real! I was angry at a fucking comic book character.” I didn’t really know what else to say. “Good film though.” Remy stared at me. “You’re sort of missing the point of my anger, here.” “No, I get it. You know, even for my life it’s a little weird that I’m talking to a fox about how unhappy he is that people compared him to a raccoon in a science fiction film about a bunch of comic book characters saving the galaxy.” “When you put it like that, I sound downright silly.” “Yeah, wording, that’s the issue here.” Remy chuckled for a moment,

Twists, turns and double crosses in literary theft quickly expand to threaten the globe in: THE SLUSH PILE BRIGADE. At its core, the book is a solid thriller. It has clearly defined stakes and goals for the main characters. Marquis has laid the groundwork as a thriller writer and hopefully his following novels build up a James Patterson-esque empire. A promising debut from an up-and-coming thriller writer." ----IndieReader - 4.5/5 Stars (****1/2)

We live in a more individualistic society. If you humbly believe that you are not individually strong enough to defeat your own weaknesses, then you know you must be dependent on redemptive assistance from outside. But if you proudly believe the truest answers can be found in the real you, the voice inside, then you are less likely to become engaged with others. Sure enough, there has been a steady decline in intimacy. Decades ago, people typically told pollsters that they had four or five close friends, people to whom they could tell everything. Now the common answer is two or three, and the number of people with no confidants has doubled. Thirty-five percent of older adults report being chronically lonely, up from 20 percent a decade ago.21 At the same time, social trust has declined. Surveys ask, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?” In the early 1960s, significant majorities said that people can generally be trusted. But in the 1990s the distrusters had a 20-percentage-point margin over the trusters, and those margins have increased in the years since.22 People have become less empathetic—or at least they display less empathy in how they describe themselves. A University of Michigan study found that today’s college students score 40 percent lower than their predecessors in the 1970s in their ability to understand what another person is feeling. The biggest drop came in the years after 2000.23 Public language has also become demoralized. Google ngrams measure word usage across media. Google scans the contents of books and publications going back decades. You can type in a word and see, over the years, which words have been used more frequently and which less frequently. Over the past few decades there has been a sharp rise in the usage of individualist words and phrases like “self” and “personalized,” “I come first” and “I can do it myself,” and a sharp decline in community words like “community,” “share,” “united,” and “common good.”24 The use of words having to do with economics and business has increased, while the language of morality and character building is in decline.25 Usage of words like “character,” “conscience,” and “virtue” all declined over the course of the twentieth century.26Usage of the word “bravery” has declined by 66 percent over the course of the twentieth century. “Gratitude” is down 49 percent. “Humbleness” is down 52 percent and “kindness” is down 56 percent.

Just last year, Mrs. Clinton claimed that as secretary of state she didn’t carry a work phone. It was too cumbersome and inconvenient for her to carry two phones. She didn’t have room for them. Then we learned she carried an iPhone and BlackBerry, neither government issued nor encrypted. Then we learned she carried an iPad and an iPad mini. But she claimed she didn’t do email. Then we learned she had email—on a private server. But then she claimed her email was for personal correspondence, yoga, and wedding planning. Then we learned her email contained government business as well—lots of it. Listen, nobody transmits classified material on the Internet! Nobody! You transmit classified material via a closed-circuit, in-house intranet or even physically via courier. You can’t even photocopy classified data except on a machine specially designed for hush-hush material, and even then you still require permission from whatever agency and issuer the document originated. So the only way for that material to be transmitted over an email is for her or someone in her office to dictate, Photoshop, or white-out the classified material in question, to remove any letterhead, or to duplicate the material by rewriting it in an email. Government email accounts are never allowed to accept emails from nongovernment email accounts. We’re supposed to delete them right away. Exceptions exist for communications with private contractors, but those exceptions are built into the system. I repeat: To duplicate classified material without permission or to send it over an unsecured channel is completely illegal. That’s why every government agency employs burn bags, safes, and special folders for anything marked Confidential, Secret, and Top Secret. People have lost their careers and gone to jail for far less. Yet Hillary Clinton transmitted classified material by the figurative ton. No one else can operate like that in government. But she takes her normal shortcuts and continues to lie about it. There is no greater example of double standards in leadership than First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Is it too inconvenient or cumbersome for her to follow the same rules that agents in the field have to follow? Maybe it would make morale too high? Clinton’s behavior harkens to the old motto: “The beatings will continue until morale improves.