Hyland Quotes

If darkness is really not darkness at all, but rather, the absence of light,  then my flaws are not really flaws at all,  but rather, the absence of you. ~ Christopher Poindexter

It is always sad when two people have been thinking the same thing at the same moment and neither can find a way to say it out loud.

When I am silent, I have thunder hidden inside.  ~ Rumi

When I am silent, I have thunder hidden inside.

Get off your high horse and get yourself grounded! Know what it is like to have your world turned upside down! Your becoming a good therapist is not about putting yourself apart from the people you work with; it is about coming to know intimately their pain, their humiliation, and their ability to rise above it.

We remember the best fiction as though experienced, and we finish the greatest works with access to the inner-lives of the mind in a way life refuses us.

She said she was breaking up with me because I didn't know how to express my emotions. The thing is, I didn't have that many. As far as I was concerned, it was pretty simple. I was in love with her and I liked our life and we laughed a lot and it felt so good to be in bed with her and have her touching me. I liked what we had.

Don't get your ambissions mixed up with your abilities

We can be serious and like pink.

I know I’m far from alone in this—adolescence is made for shrugging on different identities, and clothing is the easiest way to express those identities.

Moments hanging by a thread Tortured twisted memories Where angels fear to tread If I could put together the pieces Of the the puzzle in my mind I could finally become whole again And fill the void inside

I often remember in this false, distorted way, and the memories are often cloaked in the colour of the sun. Sometimes I feel nostalgia for things I knew I hated when they were happening, for days spent at the beach or the swimming pool with my sisters. When I pick my memories apart, I realise my mind has merely played back the objective ingredients, the clichéd apparatus of happiness, the sun, the sound of splashing water, ice-cream on parched lips and cold fizzy drink on a hot tongue, and laugher too. My memory often peddles on the falsehood of past happiness. I should know this.

The only fashion advice my father has ever given me is never wear anything you couldn't run from an assailant in. As pessimistic as that counsel may be, he has a point. So many of the hallmarks of women's fashion, from high heels to pencil skirts, in addition to being uncomfortable, slow us down and even endanger us.

The search for magic in life is not a search for truth. If anything, it's the opposite. You don't want to see behind the curtain. You don't want explanations. As profound as the truth may be, odds are it's going to break your heart. You learn how they pull a rabbit out of a hat and you'll never see it the same way again. The magic is gone forever.

I write that I will learn a language and take up the piano. Margaret can teach me. This might help her get back to what she misses and loves to do. I write a promise that I will do extremely well at school, sleep well and write for the school newspaper. I will swim in the mornings before school to get fit and develop legs like Bridget’s. I will fulfil my enormous potential, learn a new word every day, read a novel every week and become the world’s most impressive autodidact and polymath. I will go the university and live in student digs.

I like him and I wonder what I would be like if I had a different father.

have

The CIA’s talk of a peaceful solution was a smokescreen. “As is typical of such clandestine operations,” Hyland writes, “the policy discussion was cryptic.”53 Just as it was better not to mention any possible collusion with South Africa, so it was better to shroud IAFEATURE in a mist of peace. This was particularly true in light of the Hughes-Ryan amendment, passed by Congress in December 1974, which stipulated that the CIA had to report “in a timely fashion, a description and scope” of covert operations to eight congressional committees. And Congress, in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, was an unreliable partner. “It can be assumed,” the Davis task force warned, “that there would be strong Congressional opposition to any US involvement in support of one of the contending factions [in Angola].”54 Through the summer and the fall of 1975, the administration briefed the relevant congressional committees about IAFEATURE, but the briefings were less than candid. Representative Diggs, who chaired the Congressional Black Caucus and was a bitter foe of South Africa, would have strenuously objected had he known the true scope of the operation. “[We were told that] South Africa was not going to be any part of this. . . . So we were not going to ‘be embarrassed’ by South Africa,” Senator Biden noted in January 1976.

Hey, I know you’re beaten down. But get up. Get up until you can’t anymore. Then, when you go, you go knowing you gave it all.

Fashion and consumption can bring legitimate joy, and I don’t necessarily begrudge anyone their millennial pink bucket bags.

Another subculture that freely intermingles past and present: e-girls and e-boys, whose style combines aspects of Japanese kawaii culture, goth, skater, and punk, all remixed in classic bricolage tradition and heavily mediated by internet culture.

In The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, the artist writes: What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking.

The status signifiers of today may not be as obvious or as luxe as they were in the Gilded Age, but when social currency requires constant self-reinvention and measuring up, it takes effort to have the perfectly curated bookshelf, the photo-ready medicine cabinet, and the time to spend on self-actualization and self-improvement. For people in this privileged class, social media has become an opt-in surveillance state where how pretty and how good you are are constantly conflated. There have never been so many ways to express yourself—but there have also never been so many ways to be uncool and inadequate. Of course, keeping pace with this parallel self, who is always morally correct and always perfectly lit, becomes a form of toil in itself. And constantly striving to make the “right” consumer choices arguably distracts us from the unglamorous, real work of changing the world.

Remember the you-go-girl ads for Virginia Slims cigarettes? They feel light-years removed from the campaigns of today, and not just because they’re for a product we all know is carcinogenic. The template was simple: sepia photo of oppressed woman from the past—usually wearing some kind of bustle—overlaid with a full-color shot of the present-day, liberated babe. “First, you got the right to vote, and now you’ve got a cigarette all your own,” was one caption, in which suffrage and the “right” to buy a product are weirdly conflated. Of course, other than their modish thinness, they were basically the same as standard cigarettes. (“Cancer—but for GIRLS!”) Even the tagline—“You’ve come a long way, baby.”—fell somewhere between gruff admiration and infantilizing condescension.

The most rebellious move you can make these days might be getting the Establishment to cut you a check.

I think adolescents will always crave both standing out and asserting themselves while also needing to fit in somewhere. A subculture can function as a substitute family for teens who are getting ready to move away from their birth families, but years away from starting new ones of their own. That might explain why the “hipster” movement that began in the aughts and continues today extends into people in their twenties and thirties, as cultural factors like economic hardship continue to prolong youth and delay parenthood.

In 2017, the writer Venkatesh Rao was eating at a fast-casual restaurant when a phrase popped into his head to describe the chain’s atmosphere: “premium mediocre.” He defined the concept in a blog post: “Premium mediocre is the finest bottle of wine at Olive Garden. Premium mediocre is cupcakes and froyo. Premium mediocre is ‘truffle’ oil on anything (no actual truffles are harmed in the making of ‘truffle’ oil), and extra-leg-room seats in Economy.

James Laver, in Costume and Fashion: A Concise History, writes: “It is a curious comment on human aspiration that during the Peasants’ Revolt in Germany, one of the demands of the insurgents was that they should be allowed to wear red like their betters.

The French theorist Pierre Bourdieu’s landmark work Distinction made the point that not all currency is conspicuous in the way, say, owning a McMansion or a yacht is now. Something he called “cultural capital” can be a form of currency. For example, attending a prestigious university or becoming a subscriber to the symphony can give you cultural capital, even if you do not possess actual capital—you’re a broke grad student, say, or you spent your last paycheck on concert tickets.

Masstige, the blend of mass and prestige, is now cool. It’s been called the democratization of fashion, which is true in a sense—it’s great that the work of talented designers is able to reach a larger audience, and that customers are able to buy into that dream at affordable prices. Still, the overwhelming enthusiasm for masstige reminds me of the concept of “poptimism,” usually applied to music criticism. Once, only “authentic,” non-manufactured songs were considered worthy of critical discourse. Now, there’s an enthusiasm for top 40 hits, which is a welcome turn of events, but sometimes overshoots the mark and becomes a blanket endorsement of anything popular. More fashion, even if it’s more affordable and widely available, isn’t always an unqualified win for democracy.

There is also what author and academic Elizabeth Currid-Halkett recently identified, in her book The Sum of Small Things, as “inconspicuous consumption”: things like private education, health care, and childcare, which bolster the upper classes but are less “visible” than a Birkin. Wealthy people in the Gilded Age, when Veblen was writing about status anxiety, had squadrons of servants; now they have French-speaking nannies, concierge doctors, and prep schools.

In an experiment, those who wore fake branded sunglasses as opposed to the real McCoy were more likely to cheat on a test and also judged others’ behavior as more unethical. “A product’s lack of authenticity may cause its owners to feel less authentic themselves,” the study’s authors wrote, “despite their belief that the product will actually have positive benefits . . . these feelings then cause them to behave dishonestly and to view other people’s behavior as more dishonest as well. In short, we suspect that feeling like a fraud makes people more likely to commit fraud.

My wonderful PhD supervisor, Martin Hyland... instilled in me the idea of starting sentences with ‘there is a sense in which…’ because math isn’t about right and wrong, it’s not about absolute truth; it’s about different contexts in which different things can be true, and about different senses in which different things can be valid. Abstraction in mathematics is about making precise which sense we mean, so that instead of having divisive arguments... we can investigate more effectively what is causing certain outcomes to arise.

One of the most confounding things about the pink-tinted economy is the way it’s selling back existing things to us and making them “new,” painting them as essentials of self-actualization and empowerment. An elite women’s club isn’t new. Nor is makeup. Nor is a modest floral garment. Nor is pink. What we have here is a rebranding of the reactionary.

But now, subcultures have a monetary stake (if they’re lucky) in seeing themselves ascend to monoculture. No wonder they’re so eager to please.

And their appeal is predicated on telling us just how easily we can make that happen. Paltrow told the Financial Times that “the true tenets of wellness—meditation, eating whole foods, drinking a lot of water, sleeping well, thinking good thoughts, trying to be optimistic—are all free.

If you want to have a presence on Instagram at all, even as a garden-variety non-famous person, you’ve probably considered sprucing up your space, upping the ante on your vacations, and drinking more photogenic lattes, because nothing happens in a vacuum anymore.

Moschino once told GQ: “Funny clothes have to be extremely well made because that is where you find the chic. It’s easy to be funny with a T-shirt, but it’s more clever with a mink coat. After all, if caviar was cheaper it would taste much less interesting.

Shiv Roy’s wardrobe on Succession has become the prime pop-culture example of stealth wealth. Her clothes—well-tailored high-waisted trousers and fitted turtlenecks—are by high-end brands like Armani and Ralph Lauren, but not easily identifiable in terms of their labels. They don’t scream “luxury,” but they definitely whisper it.

My Flower A seed it was planted Inside my heart And as it started to grow I was filled with joy And overwhelmed By the beauty someday it would show I watered this seed With wishes and dreams And hoped for sun filled days I watched from afar As it started to bloom

Dreams If I could mould the world As if working with clay I’d soften the hurt take the pain away I’d paint the sky the brightest blue With raindrops making wishes come true The sun would shine so bright and strong To dry the tears and right the wrongs

In a press release, Abercrombie & Fitch offered Jersey Shore star Mike “The Situation” Sorrentino a “substantial” amount of money (later reported to be $10,000) not to wear their clothing on the show. Similar efforts were afoot with his castmates—the writer and fashion commentator Simon Doonan claimed in a New York Observer column that high-end brands were giving the reality stars their competitors’ luxury bags as a way to drive down their desirability.

In fact, the humor was extraordinary. The narrator, Thomas Hyland, was played absolutely deadpan by Lou Merrill. Over the sound of rainfall came his droll voice. “That’s the way it sounded when it rained, because the room was just below gutter level, and the rainwater rushed by the room’s only window, and many lodgers caught cold in this room. They were lucky. Many other lodgers wound up on dissecting tables. They were murdered, by Mr. Burke, who smothered, and by Mr. Hare, who held. So tonight, my report to you, If a Body Needs a Body, Just Call Burke and Hare.” Other stories had similar titles: John Hayes, His Head, and How They Were Parted; The Younger Brothers—Why Some of Them Grew No Older; and Good Evening, My Name Is Jack the Ripper.

Good manners should always be returned in kind, even in the direst of situations. They cost nothing and make the world a better place.