Novelty Act Quotes

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down, you dig, farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. Bubbly, thick, stagnant sound. A sound you could smell. This man worked for the carnival,you dig? And to start with it was like a novelty ventriloquist act. After a while, the ass started talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared... and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teethlike... little raspy incurving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it... but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street... shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags. Nobody loved it. And it wanted to be kissed, same as any other mouth. Finally, it talked all the time, day and night. You could hear him for blocks, screaming at it to shut up... beating at it with his fists... and sticking candles up it, but... nothing did any good, and the asshole said to him... "It is you who will shut up in the end, not me... "because we don't need you around here anymore. I can talk and eat and shit." After that, he began waking up in the morning with transparentjelly... like a tadpole's tail all over his mouth. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands... like burning gasoline jelly and grow there. So, finally, his mouth sealed over... and the whole head... would have amputated spontaneously except for the eyes, you dig? That's the one thing that the asshole couldn't do was see. It needed the eyes. Nerve connections were blocked... and infiltrated and atrophied. So, the brain couldn't give orders anymore. It was trapped inside the skull... sealed off. For a while, you could see... the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes. And then finally the brain must have died... because the eyes went out... and there was no more feeling in them than a crab's eye at the end of a stalk.

Some people think 1963's a long time ago; when a dead American in the jungle was an event, a grim thrilling novelty. It was spookwar then, adventure; not exactly soldiers, not even advisors yet, but Irregulars, working in remote places with little direct authority, acting out their fantasies with more freedom than most men ever know.

What is this thing called joy, and how is it possible that it can evoke such a wide range of feelings? How can the experience of joy span from those tears of joy at a birth to an irrepressible belly laugh at a joke to a serenely contented smile during meditation? Joy seems to blanket this entire emotional expanse. Paul Ekman, famed emotions researcher and longtime friend of the Dalai Lama, has written that joy is associated with feelings as varied as: pleasure (of the five senses) amusement (from a chuckle to a belly laugh) contentment (a calmer kind of satisfaction) excitement (in response to novelty or challenge) relief (following upon another emotion, such as fear, anxiety, and even pleasure) wonder (before something astonishing and admirable) ecstasy or bliss (transporting us outside ourselves) exultation (at having accomplished a difficult or daring task) radiant pride (when our children earn a special honor) unhealthy jubilation or schadenfreude (relishing in someone else’s suffering) elevation (from having witnessed an act of kindness, generosity, or compassion) gratitude (the appreciation of a selfless act of which one is the beneficiary)

The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers.

It is precisely resemblance that reconciles habit and novelty, balancing them out, fusing them at some indefinite point, acting as their horizon line.

What seemed to be happening was that the change itself wasn’t as important as the act of changing. People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty.

Perhaps the most irrational fashion act of all was the male habit for 150 years of wearing wigs. Samuel Pepys, as with so many things, was in the vanguard, noting with some apprehension the purchase of a wig in 1663 when wigs were not yet common. It was such a novelty that he feared people would laugh at him in church; he was greatly relieved, and a little proud, to find that they did not. He also worried, not unreasonably, that the hair of wigs might come from plague victims. Perhaps nothing says more about the power of fashion than that Pepys continued wearing wigs even while wondering if they might kill him.

It is most certainly not the function of the Holy See to introduce Church reforms. The first duty of the Pope is to act as primary bishop, to watch over the traditions of the Church—her dogmatic, moral and liturgical traditions.”17

If originality is a “sense of novelty and freshness” then, in the act of constructing ourselves, originality is not the goal. We construct a self-portrait, relying on existing objects – books, quotes from authors and artists, images, art – that we are more than happy to show off to others for them to use as masturbation material or for the material by which they align themselves. This is the new action painting – the curational archive. The referential self portrait. The portrait of any other artist could be readily used to explain yourself, just reblog it and caption it with “same.” The past consistently becomes the present, not through linear time, but through the constant reconstruction and relabeling of it.

People who have never canoed a wild river, or who have done so only with a guide in the stern, are apt to assume that novelty, plus healthful exercise, account for the value of the trip. I thought so too, until I met the two college boys on the Flambeau. Supper dishes washed, we sat on the bank watching a buck dunking for water plants on the far shore. Soon the buck raised his head, cocked his ears upstream, and then bounded for cover. Around the bend now came the cause of his alarm: two boys in a canoe. Spying us, they edged in to pass the time of day. ‘What time is it?’ was their first question. They explained that their watches had run down, and for the first time in their lives there was no clock, whistle, or radio to set watches by. For two days they had lived by ‘sun-time,’ and were getting a thrill out of it. No servant brought them meals: they got their meat out of the river, or went without. No traffic cop whistled them off the hidden rock in the next rapids. No friendly roof kept them dry when they misguessed whether or not to pitch the tent. No guide showed them which camping spots offered a nightlong breeze, and which a nightlong misery of mosquitoes; which firewood made clean coals, and which only smoke. Before our young adventurers pushed off downstream, we learned that both were slated for the Army upon the conclusion of their trip. Now the motif was clear. This trip was their first and last taste of freedom, an interlude between two regimentations: the campus and the barracks. The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers. These boys were ‘on their own’ in this particular sense. Perhaps every youth needs an occasional wilderness trip, in order to learn the meaning of this particular freedom.

The timing of even the smallest act of your life lived as mantra and ritual can alter everything. Therefore - life as ritual, art as mantra.

wasn’t as important as the act of changing. People were charmed by differentness, they liked the attention, they were intrigued by novelty. This has come to be called the Hawthorne Effect.

No one should have to . . . you shouldn’t have to . . . there are some things that are better left forgotten.” His words soothed me. Somehow he saw past the novelty of what I could do, and comprehended the anguish that could be associated with perfect recall—remembering every embarrassment, harsh word, traumatic experience. “You don’t always have to act so tough all the time. I’m here.

I heard him talk with relish. It was his nature to be communicative; he liked to open to a mind unacquainted with the world glimpses of its scenes and ways (I do not mean its corrupt scenes and wicked ways, but such as derived their interest from the great scale on which they were acted, the strange novelty by which they were characterised); and I had a keen delight in receiving the new ideas he offered, in imagining the new pictures he portrayed, and following him in thought through the new regions he disclosed, never startled or troubled by one noxious allusion.

Who are the telegenically dead? The telegenically dead are the dead, plain and simple. That we see them is the novelty, that we grieve them is human, and to be human, today, is a hostile act. To grieve is to acknowledge loss, to acknowledge loss is to affirm life, to affirm life is to contemplate how it was taken.

Still, there will be a connection with the long past--a reference to forgotten events and personages, and to manners, feelings, and opinions, almost or wholly obsolete --which, if adequately translated to the reader, would serve to illustrate how much of old material goes to make up the freshest novelty of human life. Hence, too, might be drawn a weighty lesson from the little-regarded truth, that the act of the passing generation is the germ which may and must produce good or evil fruit in a far-distant time; that, together with the seed of the merely temporary crop, which mortals term expediency, they inevitably sow the acorns of a more enduring growth, which may darkly overshadow their posterity.

The first inkling of this notion had come to him the Christmas before, at his daughter's place in Vermont. On Christmas Eve, as indifferent evening took hold in the blue squares of the windows, he sat alone in the crepuscular kitchen, imbued with a profound sense of the identity of winter and twilight, of twilight and time, of time and memory, of his childhood and that church which on this night waited to celebrate the second greatest of its feasts. For a moment or an hour as he sat, become one with the blue of the snow and the silence, a congruity of star, cradle, winter, sacrament, self, it was as though he listened to a voice that had long been trying to catch his attention, to tell him, Yes, this was the subject long withheld from him, which he now knew, and must eventually act on. He had managed, though, to avoid it. He only brought it out now to please his editor, at the same time aware that it wasn't what she had in mind at all. But he couldn't do better; he had really only the one subject, if subject was the word for it, this idea of a notion or a holy thing growing clear in the stream of time, being made manifest in unexpected ways to an assortment of people: the revelation itself wasn't important, it could be anything, almost. Beyond that he had only one interest, the seasons, which he could describe endlessly and with all the passion of a country-bred boy grown old in the city. He was beginning to doubt (he said) whether these were sufficient to make any more novels out of, though he knew that writers of genius had made great ones out of less. He supposed really (he didn't say) that he wasn't a novelist at all, but a failed poet, like a failed priest, one who had perceived that in fact he had no vocation, had renounced his vows, and yet had found nothing at all else in the world worth doing when measured by the calling he didn't have, and went on through life fatally attracted to whatever of the sacerdotal he could find or invent in whatever occupation he fell into, plumbing or psychiatry or tending bar. ("Novelty")

Conspiracy theories, after all, feed on historical amnesia. They depend on your belief that what is happening now has never happened before. They present repetition as novelty. When a moral panic dissipates, its traces are forgotten in a forceful act of collective amnesia. If you are going to make sense of the history, you have to stick with the sense of déjà vu; you have to run in circles if you’re going to get anywhere.

Did I ever tell you about the man who taught his asshole to talk? His whole abdomen would move up and down you dig farting out the words. It was unlike anything I ever heard. This ass talk had sort of a gut frequency. It hit you right down there like you gotta go. You know when the old colon gives you the elbow and it feels sorta cold inside, and you know all you have to do is turn loose? Well this talking hit you right down there, a bubbly, thick stagnant sound, a sound you could smell. This man worked for a carnival you dig, and to start with it was like a novelty ventriliquist act. Real funny, too, at first. He had a number he called “The Better ‘Ole” that was a scream, I tell you. I forget most of it but it was clever. Like, “Oh I say, are you still down there, old thing?” “Nah I had to go relieve myself.” After a while the ass start talking on its own. He would go in without anything prepared and his ass would ad-lib and toss the gags back at him every time. Then it developed sort of teeth-like little raspy in-curving hooks and started eating. He thought this was cute at first and built an act around it, but the asshole would eat its way through his pants and start talking on the street, shouting out it wanted equal rights. It would get drunk, too, and have crying jags nobody loved it and it wanted to be kissed same as any other mouth. Finally it talked all the time day and night, you could hear him for blocks screaming at it to shut up, and beating it with his fist, and sticking candles up it, but nothing did any good and the asshole said to him: “It’s you who will shut up in the end. Not me. Because we dont need you around here any more. I can talk and eat and shit.” After that he began waking up in the morning with a transparent jelly like a tadpole’s tail all over his mouth. This jelly was what the scientists call un-D.T., Undifferentiated Tissue, which can grow into any kind of flesh on the human body. He would tear it off his mouth and the pieces would stick to his hands like burning gasoline jelly and grow there, grow anywhere on him a glob of it fell. So finally his mouth sealed over, and the whole head would have have amputated spontaneous — (did you know there is a condition occurs in parts of Africa and only among Negroes where the little toe amputates spontaneously?) — except for the eyes you dig. Thats one thing the asshole couldn’t do was see. It needed the eyes. But nerve connections were blocked and infiltrated and atrophied so the brain couldn’t give orders any more. It was trapped in the skull, sealed off. For a while you could see the silent, helpless suffering of the brain behind the eyes, then finally the brain must have died, because the eyes went out, and there was no more feeling in them than a crab’s eyes on the end of a stalk.

Now the motif was clear. This trip was their first and last taste of freedom, an interlude between two regimentations: the campus and the barracks. The elemental simplicities of wilderness travel were thrills not only because of their novelty, but because they represented complete freedom to make mistakes. The wilderness gave them their first taste of those rewards and penalties for wise and foolish acts which every woodsman faces daily, but against which civilization has built a thousand buffers. These boys were ‘on their own’ in this particular sense.

The office divinely committed to Us of feeding the Lord’s flock has especially this duty assigned to it by Christ, namely, to guard with the greatest vigilance the deposit of the faith delivered to the saints, rejecting the profane novelties of words and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called. There has never been a time when this watchfulness of the supreme pastor was not necessary to the Catholic body; for, owing to the efforts of the enemy of the human race, there have never been lacking “men speaking perverse things” (Acts xx. 30), “vain talkers and seducers” (Tit. i. 10), “erring and driving into error” (2 Tim. iii. 13). Still it must be confessed that the number of the enemies of the cross of Christ has in these last days increased exceedingly, who are striving, by arts, entirely new and full of subtlety, to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, if they can, to overthrow utterly Christ’s kingdom itself. Wherefore We may no longer be silent, lest We should seem to fail in Our most sacred duty, and lest the kindness that, in the hope of wiser counsels, We have hitherto shown them, should be attributed to forgetfulness of Our office. GRAVITY OF THE SITUATION 2. That We make no delay in this matter is rendered necessary especially by the fact that the partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church’s open enemies; they lie hid, a thing to be deeply deplored and feared, in her very bosom and heart, and are the more mischievous, the less conspicuously they appear.

Situation awareness means possessing an explorer mentality A general never knows anything with certainty, never sees his enemy clearly, and never knows positively where he is. When armies are face to face, the least accident in the ground, the smallest wood, may conceal part of the enemy army. The most experienced eye cannot be sure whether it sees the whole of the enemy’s army or only three-fourths. It is by the mind’s eye, by the integration of all reasoning, by a kind of inspiration that the general sees, knows, and judges. ~Napoleon 5   In order to effectively gather the appropriate information as it’s unfolding we must possess the explorer mentality.  We must be able to recognize patterns of behavior. Then we must recognize that which is outside that normal pattern. Then, you take the initiative so we maintain control. Every call, every incident we respond to possesses novelty. Car stops, domestic violence calls, robberies, suspicious persons etc.  These individual types of incidents show similar patterns in many ways. For example, a car stopped normally pulls over to the side of the road when signaled to do so.  The officer when ready, approaches the operator, a conversation ensues, paperwork exchanges, and the pulled over car drives away. A domestic violence call has its own normal patterns; police arrive, separate involved parties, take statements and arrest aggressor and advise the victim of abuse prevention rights. We could go on like this for all the types of calls we handle as each type of incident on its own merits, does possess very similar patterns. Yet they always, and I mean always possess something different be it the location, the time of day, the person you are dealing with. Even if it’s the same person, location, time and day, the person you’re dealing who may now be in a different emotional state and his/her motives and intent may be very different. This breaks that normal expected pattern.  Hence, there is a need to always be open-minded, alert and aware, exploring for the signs and signals of positive or negative change in conditions. In his Small Wars journal article “Thinking and Acting like an Early Explorer” Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege (US Army Ret.) describes the explorer mentality:   While tactical and strategic thinking are fundamentally different, both kinds of thinking must take place in the explorer’s brain, but in separate compartments. To appreciate this, think of the metaphor of an early American explorer trying to cross a large expanse of unknown terrain long before the days of the modern conveniences. The explorer knows that somewhere to the west lies an ocean he wants to reach. He has only a sketch-map of a narrow corridor drawn by a previously unsuccessful explorer. He also knows that highly variable weather and frequent geologic activity can block mountain passes, flood rivers, and dry up desert water sources. He also knows that some native tribes are hostile to all strangers, some are friendly and others are fickle, but that warring and peace-making among them makes estimating their whereabouts and attitudes difficult.6

Modeling the evolution of modularity became significantly easier after a kind of genetic variation was discovered by quantitative trait locus (QTL) mapping in the lab of James Cheverud at Washington University called 'relationship QTL' or r-QTL for short. An r-QTL is a genetic locus that affects the correlations between two quantitative traits (i.e. their variational relationship, and therefore, 'relationship' loci). Surprisingly, a large fraction of these so-mapped loci are also neutral with respect to the character mean. This means one can select on these 'neutral' r-QTLs without simultaneously changing the character mean in a certain way. It was easy to show that differential directional selection on a character could easily lead a decrease in genetic correlation between characters. Of course, it is not guaranteed that each and every population has the right kind of r-QTL polymorphisms, nor is it yet clear what kind of genetic architecture allows for the existence of an r-QTL. Nevertheless, these findings make it plausible that differential directional selection can enhance the genetic/variational individuality of traits and, thus, may play a role in the origin of evolutionary novelties by selecting for variational individuality. It must be added, though, that there has been relatively little research in this area and that we will need to see more to determine whether we understand what is going on here, if anything. In particular, one difficulty is the mathematical modeling of gene interaction (epistasis), because the details of an epistasis model determine the outcome of the evolution by natural selection. One result shows that natural selection increases or decreases mutational variance, depending on whether the average epistatic effects are positive or negative. This means that the genetic architecture is more determined by the genetic architecture that we start with than by the nature of the selection forces that act upon it. In other words, the evolution of a genetic architecture could be arbitrary with respect to selection.

Underlying the doctrines which disregard the radical novelty of each moment of evolution there are many misunderstandings, many errors. But there is especially the idea that the possible is less than the real, and that, for this reason, the possibility of things precedes their existence. They would thus be capable of representation beforehand; they could be thought of before being realised. But it is the reverse that is true. If we leave aside the closed systems, subjected to purely mathematical laws, isolable because duration does not act upon them, if we consider the totality of concrete reality or simply the world of life, and still more that of consciousness, we find there is more and not less in the possibility of each of the successive states than in their reality. For the possible is only the real with the addition of an act of mind which throws its image back into the past, once it has been enacted. But that is what our intellectual habits prevent us from seeing.

The office divinely committed to Us of feeding the Lord’s flock has especially this duty assigned to it by Christ, namely, to guard with the greatest vigilance the deposit of the faith delivered to the saints, rejecting the profane novelties of words and oppositions of knowledge falsely so called. There has never been a time when this watchfulness of the supreme pastor was not necessary to the Catholic body; for, owing to the efforts of the enemy of the human race, there have never been lacking “men speaking perverse things” (Acts xx. 30), “vain talkers and seducers” (Tit. i. 10), “erring and driving into error” (2 Tim. iii. 13). Still it must be confessed that the number of the enemies of the cross of Christ has in these last days increased exceedingly, who are striving, by arts, entirely new and full of subtlety, to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, if they can, to overthrow utterly Christ’s kingdom itself. Wherefore We may no longer be silent, lest We should seem to fail in Our most sacred duty, and lest the kindness that, in the hope of wiser counsels, We have hitherto shown them, should be attributed to forgetfulness of Our office. GRAVITY OF THE SITUATION 2. That We make no delay in this matter is rendered necessary especially by the fact that the partisans of error are to be sought not only among the Church’s open enemies; they lie hid, a thing to be deeply deplored and feared, in her very bosom and heart, and are the more mischievous, the less conspicuously they appear. We allude, Venerable Brethren, to many who belong to the Catholic laity, nay, and this is far more lamentable, to the ranks of the priesthood itself, who, feigning a love for the Church, lacking the firm protection of philosophy and theology, nay more, thoroughly imbued with the poisonous doctrines taught by the enemies of the Church, and lost to all sense of modesty, vaunt themselves as reformers of the Church; and, forming more boldly into line of attack, assail all that is most sacred in the work of Christ, not sparing even the person of the Divine Redeemer, whom, with sacrilegious daring, they reduce to a simple, mere man.

That social revolution, it is true, was no novelty invented in 1848. Steam, electricity, and the self-acting mule were revolutionists of a rather more dangerous character than even citizens Barbés, Raspail and Blanqui." - Speech at anniversary of the People’s Paper, April 1856

I think what I really want is to treat life less like a war. Wouldn't we have less Imposter Syndrome and fewer actual imposters if we just lowered our standards a bit? Modern productivity dogma encourages us to act fast, and milk our exceptionalism for all it's worth. Under that kind of pressure, perhaps the truest rebellion is to embrace our ordinariness. In everyday life, if we could not only tolerate the discomfort, but wholeheartedly embrace our own lack of expertise, then we might have a far better chance of showing others the same grace. Then perhaps life might feel, at the very least, less agitating, at most, we might even find peace. How’s this? Let’s stoop below average at 50% of all we do. We’ll relish it, the commonness. Next time we have a question, let’s hold our for as long as we humanly can before googling the answer. It’ll be erotic, like edging before a climax. It’s quite nice, I am learning, just to wonder indefinitely. To never have certain answers. To sit down, be humble, and not even dare to knowThe hormonal rewards of constantly checking our phones fatigue the mind just as much as the stressors do. Studies of phone addiction have found the little hits of dopamine that keep users jonesing for notifications come with a tragic side effect. They actually inhibit the amount of dopamine we feel when exposed to real-life novelty. Said another way, phone addiction decreases our ability to enjoy new experiences in the physical world. When you’re hooked on novelty in electronic form, new foods and flowers lose their magic.

The other distinctive thing about them, and the reason I like to go to Hazlitt's, is that they cannot bear to admit that they don't know the location of something they feel they ought to know, like a hotel, which I think is rather sweet. to become a London cab driver you have to master something called The Knowledge--in effect, learn every street, hospital, hotel, police station, cricket ground, cemetery, and other notable landmarks in this amazingly vast and confusing city. It takes years and the cabbies are justifiably proud of their achievement. It would kill them to admit that there could exist in central London a hotel that they have never heard of. So what the cabbie does is probe. He drives in no particular direction for a block or two, then glances at you in the mirror and in an over casual voice says, “Hazlitt’s–that’s the one on Curzon Street, innit, guv? Opposite the Blue Lion?” But the instant he sees a knowing smile of demure forming on your lips, he hastily says, “No, hang on a minute, I’m thinking of Hazelbury. Yeah, Hazelbury. You want Hazlitt’s, right?” He’ll drive on a bit in a fairly random direction. “That’s this side of Shepherd’s Bush, innit?” he’ll suggest speculatively. When you tell him that it’s on Frith Street, he says, “Yeah, that’s the one. Course it is. I know it–modern place, lots of glass.” “Actually, it’s an eighteenth-century brick building.” “Course it is. I know it.” And he immediately executes a dramatic U-turn, causing a passing cyclist to steer into a lamppost (but that’s all right because he has on cycle clips and one of those geeky slip-stream helmets that all but invite you to knock him over). “Yeah you had me thinking of the Hazelbury,” the driver adds, chuckling as if to say it’s a lucky thing he sorted that one out for you, and then lunges down a little side street off the Strand called Running Sore Lane or Sphincter Passage, which, like so much else in London, you had never noticed was there before. Hazlitt’s is a nice hotel, but the thing I like about it is that it doesn’t act like a hotel. It’s been there for years, and the employees are friendly–always a novelty in a big-city hotel– but they do manage to give the slight impression that they haven’t been doing this for very long. Tell them that you have a reservation and want to check in and they get a kind of panicked look and begin a perplexed search through drawers for registration cards and room keys. It’s really quite charming. And the delightful girls who cleans the rooms–which, let me say, are always spotless and exceedingly comfortable–seldom seem to have what might be called a total command of English, so that when you ask them for a bar of soap or something you see that they are watching your mouth closely and then, pretty generally, they return after a bit with a hopeful look bearing a potted plant or a commode or something that is manifestly not soap. It’s a wonderful place. I wouldn’t go anywhere else.

Our incomplete knowledge of physical reality enriches our human experiences by maintaining its novelty, its unanticipated outcomes, its newness. It allows us each to live our lives as a great adventure. What sense of satisfaction would a scientist derive from inquiry if the laws of physics were all clearly revealed as part of the act of creation. What joy would there be in searching for buried treasure if you knew all along where you hid it? It’s the mystery that underwrites the joy of discovery.” —Bernard Haisch, The God Theory

Is this simply because the majority are hide-bound? I think not. They have a good reason for their conservatism. Novelty, simply as such, can have only an entertainment value. And they don’t go to church to be entertained. They go to use the service, or, if you prefer, to enact it. Every service is a structure of acts and words through which we receive a sacrament, or repent, or supplicate, or adore.

The Zionist chapter proper in the country’s history began in 1882, after the outbreak of large-scale pogroms in the Russian Empire (although the term was only invented a few years later). The first settlers called themselves Hovevei Tzion (Lovers of Zion), a network of groups which aspired to forge a Jewish national life in Palestine and, in a significant novelty, to use the reviving Hebrew language rather than Yiddish. In August that year a two-hundred-strong group from the Romanian town of Galatz landed at Jaffa, where they were locked up for weeks before enough cash could be raised to bribe the Turkish police to release them.6 Their goal was a plot of stony land that had been purchased south of Haifa. Laurence Oliphant, an eccentric British traveller and enthusiastic philo-Semite, described the scene shortly afterwards at Zamarin, a malaria-infested hamlet on the southern spur of Mount Carmel overlooking the Mediterranean. It is a remarkably vivid portrayal of two very different sorts of people who were warily making each other’s acquaintance as future neighbours – and enemies: It would be difficult to imagine anything more utterly incongruous than the spectacle thus presented – the stalwart fellahin [peasants], with their wild, shaggy, black beards, the brass hilts of their pistols projecting from their waistbands, their tasselled kufeihahs [keffiyeh headdresses] drawn tightly over their heads and girdled with coarse black cords, their loose, flowing abbas [cloaks], and sturdy bare legs and feet; and the ringleted, effeminate-looking Jews, in caftans reaching almost to their ankles, as oily as their red or sandy locks, or the expression of their countenances – the former inured to hard labour on the burning hillsides of Palestine, the latter fresh from the Ghetto of some Roumanian town, unaccustomed to any other description of exercise than that of their wits, but already quite convinced that they knew more about agriculture than the people of the country, full of suspicion of all advice tendered to them, and animated by a pleasing self-confidence which I fear the first practical experience will rudely belie. In strange contrast with these Roumanian Jews was the Arab Jew who acted as interpreter – a stout, handsome man, in Oriental garb, as unlike his European coreligionists as the fellahin themselves.

The Nazi genocide is conventionally thought to exceed all “normal” conceptions of justice and to estrange familiar categories such as “guilt”, “punishment”, and even “the human.” Yet, invocations of the genocide in the context of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict tend to reference the Holocaust as the bearer of shared norms of human rights and clear-cut moral distinctions. In scenarios of equation, not only is the past anachronistically rewritten from the vantage point of a very different present (a rewriting that characterizes many acts of memory), but as a result, the present loses its potential as a locus of novelty [.…] Regardless of the complexities of the Nazi genocide as a historical phenomenon, the images of the genocide that circulate in the present reduce it – as well as the contemporary cases to which it is analogized – to a stereotypical scenario of good and evil, innocence and absolute power. A discourse based on clear-cut visions of victims and perpetrators or of innocence and guilt, evacuates the political sphere of complexity and reduces it to a morality tale. Even in the case of Genocide, a seemingly exceptional situation of polarized innocence and guilt, the most thoughtful responses have been forced to reflect on uncomfortable questions of complicity and ambivalence in “the gray zone” first described by Primo Levy. P139 [….] Ultimately, the goal of a radical democratic politics of multidirectional memory today is not only to move beyond discourses of equation or hierarchy, but also to displace the reductive, absolutist understanding of the Holocaust as a code for “good and evil” from the center of global memory politics. This task is time- and place specific and demands a vision of reflective justice.

...Besides, it was the novelty of the act that they enjoyed so much, and that was worth something.

One outcome of chronic porn use is unanticipated sexual conditioning – which wasn’t likely in baby boomers using Playboy. A millennial may easily wire his sexual excitement to a screen, constant novelty, voyeurism or bizarre acts. Worst case, he eventually needs both porn’s content and delivery-at-a-click to achieve an erection or sustain arousal. Before I quit I had the utmost trouble getting off. I actually had to close my eyes and imagine a CONSTANT stream of porn to climax. I was more or less using my girlfriends’ bodies to help me jerk off. After a long streak without porn, I could climax easily, without thinking about it. It was a miracle. It was the best feeling ever.

Writers, especially when they act in a body and with one direction, have great influence on the public mind; the alliance, therefore, of these writers with the moneyed interest23 had no small effect in removing the popular odium and envy which attended that species of wealth. These writers, like the propagators of all novelties, pretended to a great zeal for the poor and the lower orders, whilst in their satires they rendered hateful, by every exaggeration, the faults of courts, of nobility, and of priesthood

Maturity sees that the past is not to be rejected, destroyed, or replaced, but rather that it is to be judged and corrected, that the work of judgment and correction is endless, and that it necessarily involves one's own past. The industrial economy has made a general principle of the youthful antipathy to the past, and the modern world abounds with heralds of "a better future" and with debunkers happy to point out that Yeast was "silly like us" or that Thomas Jefferson may have had a Negro slave as a mistress - and so we are disencumbered of the burden of great lives, set free to be as cynical or desperate as we please. Cultural forms, it is held, should change apace to keep up with technology. Sexual discipline should be replaced by the chemicals, devices, and procedures of "birth control," and poetry must hasten to accept the influence of typewriter or computer. It can be better argued that cultural forms ought to change by analogy with biological forms. I assume that they do change in that way, and by the same necessity to respond to changes of circumstance. It is necessary, nevertheless, to recognize a difference in kinds of cultural change: there is change by necessity, or adaptation; and there is contrived change, or novelty. The first is the work of species or communities or lineages of descent, occurring usually by slow increments over a long time. The second is the work of individual minds, and it happens, or is intended to happen, by fiat. Individual attempts to change cultural form - as to make a new kind of marriage or family or community - are nearly always shallow or foolish and are frequently totalitarian. The assumption that it can easily be otherwise comes from the faith in genius. To adopt a communal form with the idea of chain or discarding it according to individual judgment is hopeless, the despair and death of meaning. To keep the form is an act of faith in possibility, not of the form, but of the life that is given to it; the form is a question addressed to life and time, which only life and time can answer. Individual genius, then, goes astray when it proposes to do the work of community. We rightly follow its promptings, on the other hand, when it can point out correctly that we have gone astray - when forms have become rigid or empty, when we have forgot their use or their meaning. We then follow our genius or our geniuses back to reverence, to truth, or to nature. This alternation is one of the long rhythms. But the faith in genius and the rebellions of genius, at the times when thee are necessary, should lead to the renewal of forms, not to their destruction.

The simplest boundary separates fascism from classical tyranny. The exiled moderate socialist Gaetano Salvemini, having abandoned his chair as professor of history at Florence and moved to London and then to Harvard because he could not bear to teach without saying what he thought, pointed to the essential difference when he wondered why “Italians felt the need to get rid of their free institutions” at the very moment when they should be taking pride in them, and when they “should step forward toward a more advanced democracy.” Fascism, for Salvemini, meant setting aside democracy and due process in public life, to the acclamation of the street. It is a phenomenon of failed democracies, and its novelty was that, instead of simply clamping silence upon citizens as classical tyranny had done since earliest times, it found a technique to channel their passions into the construction of an obligatory domestic unity around projects of internal cleansing and external expansion. We should not use the term fascism for predemocratic dictatorships. However cruel, they lack the manipulated mass enthusiasm and demonic energy of fascism, along with the mission of “giving up free institutions” for the sake of national unity, purity, and force. Fascism is easily confused with military dictatorship, for both fascist leaders militarized their societies and placed wars of conquest at the very center of their aims. Guns and uniforms were a fetish with them. In the 1930s, fascist militias were all uniformed (as, indeed, were socialist militias in that colored-shirt era), and fascists have always wanted to turn society into an armed fraternity. Hitler, newly installed as chancellor of Germany, made the mistake of dressing in a civilian trenchcoat and hat when he went to Venice on June 14, 1934, for his first meeting with the more senior Mussolini, “resplendent with uniform and dagger.” Thereafter the Führer appeared in uniform on public occasions—sometimes a brown party jacket, later often an unadorned military tunic. But while all fascisms are always militaristic, military dictatorships are not always fascist. Most military dictators have acted simply as tyrants, without daring to unleash the popular excitement of fascism. Military dictatorships are far commoner than fascisms, for they have no necessary connection to a failed democracy and have existed since there have been warriors.

A-about the full-course offering... I was thinking, for the second dish, the, um, the fish salad..." "Don't you go giving me all your bright ideas too! Get back to washing dishes!" "Yeep! Y-yes, sir! I'm sorry, sir!" "No. I'd like to hear your idea." Stop acting like you're in charge, girly! "Um... I was wondering if we might let the customers decide how much dressing they want on it." "The dressing?! What does that matter?!" "Oh? And what gives you that idea?" "I couldn't help but notice it on the dirty dishes that come back. Some have a lot of dressing left on them. Others look like the customer dipped in their bread in the dressing but then left their veggies." Just washing the dishes... was enough to give her the idea for that improvement? "But, um, it would be hard to do anything about it, right? It would mean lots more work for the servers and the kitchen..." "No, not really. Using a Saucière to serve sauces and gravies has long been practiced in France. By presenting it as a traditional touch, it might make for an entertaining novelty for customers." SAUCIÈRE Also called a gravy boat or a sauce boat, it is a small pitcher for holding sauces. Diners can pour or ladle their preferred amount of sauce from it. "Enough! What do you two children know?! This is my kitchen! Customers come to eat my cooking! If you mess with my process any further, I'll kick you both out!" "Um, Head Chef? A customer is requesting more dressing for the second course...

Our incomplete knowledge of physical reality enriches our human experiences by maintaining its novelty, its unanticipated outcomes, its newness. It allows us each to live our lives as a great adventure. What sense of satisfaction would a scientist derive from inquiry if the laws of physics were all clearly revealed as part of the act of creation. What joy would there be in searching for buried treasure if you knew all along where you hid it? It’s the mystery that underwrites the joy of discovery.” —Bernard Haisch, The God Theory “If you were God, could you possibly dream up any more educational, contrasted, thrilling, beautiful, tantalizing world than Earth? If you think you could, do you imagine you would be outdoing Earth if you designed a world free of germs, diseases, poisons, pains, malice, explosives, and conflicts so its people could relax and enjoy it? Would you, in other words, try to make the world nice and safe—or would you let it be provocative, dangerous, and exciting?” —Guy Murchie, The Seven Mysteries of Life: An Exploration of Science and Philosophy “The origin of the universe is the exact opposite of random. Our lives are the exact opposite of pointless. It is not matter that creates an illusion of consciousness, but consciousness that creates an illusion of matter. —Bernard Haisch, The God Theory